{"id":27830,"date":"2013-01-25T03:55:28","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T03:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27830"},"modified":"2016-07-11T00:22:50","modified_gmt":"2016-07-11T00:22:50","slug":"the-original-slave-colony-barbados-and-andrea-stuart%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98sugar-in-the-blood%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27830","title":{"rendered":"The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart\u2019s \u2018Sugar in the Blood\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart\u2019s \u2018Sugar in the Blood\u2019<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Daily Beast<\/a>
\n2013-01-24<\/p>\n

Eric Herschthal<\/a>
\n<\/strong>Columbia University<\/em><\/p>\n

Barbados<\/a> provided the blueprint for all future British slave settlements in the American South. <\/em>Andrea Stuart<\/em><\/a> talks to Eric Herschthal about how her family was entwined in the island\u2019s tormented history.<\/em><\/p>\n

On the face of it, what happened in the tiny island of Barbados<\/a> 400 years ago seems irrelevant to Americans today. Even now, the island matters to Americans for perhaps one reason: the weather\u2014it\u2019s a popular tourist getaway. But in her exceptional new book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family\u2019s Story of Slavery and Empire<\/a><\/em>, Andrea Stuart<\/a> insists Barbados, with its long history of slavery, matters more than we know.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to take slavery out of its niche,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a black story, it\u2019s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all.\u201d Slavery and its legacy\u2014race\u2014still shape our world. But more specifically, the creation of Barbados, the British empire\u2019s earliest, most profitable settlement in the New World, provided the blueprint for all its future slave colonies: South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, you name it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The island\u2019s first settlers, like Stuart\u2019s white ancestor George Ashby, arrived in the early-1600s. Spain was raking in huge profits with their New World colonies, mainly by extracting gold and silver. The British wanted to catch up, but when they arrived in the Caribbean, no precious metals were found. Within a few decades, however, they discovered they could make money by cultivating another precious commodity: sugar, or as it was called by many at the time, \u201cwhite gold.\u201d<\/p>\n

That demanded workers, and the British quickly found a cheap labor source: African slaves. By century\u2019s end, 80 percent of Barbados\u2019s 85,000 inhabitants were Africans, giving rise to a rigid racial hierarchy: a small elite of whites on top; the masses of black workers on bottom; and, somewhere in between, a small caste of illegitimate mixed-race children, born to masters and their preyed-upon female slaves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given how small the island was, many of the whites who couldn\u2019t establish a large plantation moved on to other British colonies. Many went to places that would become part of the United States. They replicated the Barbadian plantation model, growing mainly rice and tobacco, and had an outsized impact on early America. In colonies like South Carolina, six of the governors were Barbadians between 1670 and 1730. Other Barbadian \u00e9migr\u00e9s, like George Ashby\u2019s Quaker brother, helped settle Pennsylvania. Barbados was so important to the British colonial system that even George Washington<\/a>, who only left North America once in his life, made that stop on the island, to help his sick brother recover from an illness…<\/p>\n

…The \u201csmall people\u201d she chose to focus on are her own descendants: George Ashby; his descendants like the wealthy plantation owner Robert Cooper; and several of Cooper\u2019s slave concubines and their black children. Stuart\u2019s mixed racial heritage helped her paint such a ruthlessly honest portrait of slavery, where she can both admire and revile slave-owners like Cooper\u2014even wonder whether some of the slaves he slept with may have loved him.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that most blacks have mixed blood,\u201d<\/strong> she said. \u201cWhen I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There\u2019s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart\u2019s \u2018Sugar in the Blood\u2019 The Daily Beast 2013-01-24 Eric Herschthal Columbia University Barbados provided the blueprint for all future British slave settlements in the American South. Andrea Stuart talks to Eric Herschthal about how her family was entwined in the island\u2019s tormented history. On the face of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,21,459,8,6940],"tags":[13472,13473,13385,10400,13384],"class_list":["post-27830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-latincarib","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","tag-andrea-stuart","tag-barbados","tag-daily-beast","tag-eric-herschthal","tag-the-daily-beast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48200,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27830\/revisions\/48200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}