As demands for reparatory justice become more emphatic across the Caribbean, Barbados included, thoughts about Empire and the exceedingly brutal period of West Indian history inevitably rush to mind.
And that happens, even at a time when Christians everywhere celebrate one of their brightest and most important festivals, Christmas, which heralds the birth of Jesus and its promise of peace on earth, love, forgiveness and goodwill towards men and women.
Turn back the hands of the clock to the era when sugar was king in Barbados and the rest of the Empire and slavery was the engine that drove its profitability in the 1780s. Back then the Christmas season wasn’t a respite from hell for the Blacks on the plantations but the opulence enjoyed by the English barons and their agents in Barbados and the movers and shakers of Empire in London spurred the men of the cloth to preach with fervour from the pulpit about the “First Noel” and plantation owners to focus on the wealth they were accumulating and about life in the islands as heaven on earth.
It was a time when, according to Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, the Caribbean’s pre-eminent historian and expert on reparations who is set to take over the helm of the University of the West Indies next year, the “slave economy” was at its “height” and Barbados was a key jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
Indeed, Barbados was considered just as valuable, perhaps even more so, than Boston in Massachusetts, Bombay in India or Cape Town, all because of sugar and slaves, with the Anglican Church, its clergy and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church’s missionary arm, being key slave owners.
“As clergymen (of the Church of England” and commercialists,” wrote Sir Hilary, “they preached the gospel to Whites and administered the whips to Blacks.”
The importance of Barbados to the wealth of the Empire has just been captured in a new book, Ten Cities That Made An Empire. Written by Tristan Hunt, a Labour Party member of the British House of Commons, the large volume has attracted rave reviews from literary critics.
“A book about ideas,” states the Spectator in London. “Absorbing,” adds Gearold O. Tuathaigh in the Irish Times in Dublin. Ben Wilson, a critic in the London Telegraph, calls it “compelling tours of ten cities.”
In it, Hunt lists Bridgetown as a city that helped to make the Empire what it was then until its eventual demise in the latter half of the 20th century and has influenced life and the outlook of its citizens, decades after the Barbados became independent in 1966.
Ten Cities That Made An Empire should
be read alongside Britain’s Black Debt, Reparations For Caribbean Slavery And Native Genocide, Sir Hilary’s latest work which should be in any book collection about the Caribbean.
Indeed, both can make interesting Christmas gifts to be read anytime of the year, not simply by students at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus or the Barbados Community College who wish to come to grips with where we came from as a British colony and where we may be heading.
The ten cities the author singled out were Boston, Bridgetown, Mumbai, Cape Town, Dublin, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Melbourne, New Delhi
and Liverpool.
About Barbados and its legacy of Empire, Hunt sketches a picture of a place with the indelible stamp of imperial England complete with its passion for rum, cricket and a plantation life soaked with the blood of slaves transported from Africa.
When Ben Wilson, a critic for the Telegraph newspaper of London reviewed the book, he concluded that the “plantation lifestyle” in Barbados “trumps the blood-drenched history of slavery on the island.” In the end, Bridgetown emerges as “modern city, (where) the colonial memory continues to reverberate.”
Bridgetown’s foundation was slavery and sugar, elements which were so ingrained in the country’s urban fabric that more than four decades after Barbados became a sovereign state the passion for them remains.
That may explain why the island-nation to this day holds a special attraction for the British. “The legacy of Empire is all too apparent, and is indeed, exploited for tourists,” Wilson asserted in the Telegraph.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, placed its colonial heritage on hold as it sought to make money. Melbourne seems to come somewhere in between with the preservation of its architecture while taking on the look and reality of a modern metropolis.
Like Barbados which thrived on sugar, Boston was linked to the Empire through trade but in whale oil, timber and cod while importing sugar, tea and other commodities.
When he came to Dublin in this familiar tale of Empire, “the Palladian designs, the iconography and the rhetoric show that Georgian Dublin was much more a robust expression of imperial affinity than Irish nationalism.” In the end the Irish City was “transformed from a problem to a partner in imperialism.”
