History KS3 / KS4: The Barbados Slave Code

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'These are Britain's forgotten slave owners.'

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'This is the Atlantic coast of Barbados. In 1627, a group of 50 or so British settlers arrived on the island. Within a few decades, these settlers had turned a small uninhabited island into one of the most profitable places on Earth.'

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'The most dynamic, and ruthless of them had managed to get their hands on the best land and had started experimenting with a new crop. It was a giant form of grass, known as sugar cane. Just 20 years later, 40% of the agricultural land was covered in sugar cane. It was a back-breaking, labour-intensive job to produce the sugar and the people who had to do it were Africans, brought over in ships as slaves. And as the demand for sugar grew, so too did the demand for slaves from Africa.'

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'The Barbados National Archive, keeps a record of how Britain's first slave owners built a new kind of society.'

HILARY BECKLES: Barbados--

HILARY BECKLES: --became the world's first slave society. This is a unique historical development. A slave society is quite different from a society with slaves. All the societies in the hemisphere had enslaved peoples, but Barbados was the first to be built and sustained completely upon the enslavement of Africans

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'The slave system was ruthlessly enforced right from the start. One document found here dates from 1661. It's known as the Barbados Slave Code. Authored by the island's most powerful slave owners, it gives a rare insight into their way of thinking.'

DAVID OLUSOGA: Part of that process of transforming people from human beings and into things is to justify it, and on the very first page of the Barbados Slave Code, it describes Africans as people who are 'heathenish' and 'brutish' an 'uncertain and dangerous kind of people'. This is early racism.

HILARY BECKLES: The English arrive in the Caribbean already with a fully-formed racist and racial view about other people especially African peoples.

DAVID OLUSOGA: Looking at the slave code, the issue of violence comes up very quickly, it says here that "if any negro shall offer any violence to any Christian" any white, "as by striking or such like, that negro shall, on his first offence be whipped, on his second offence be severely whipped and have his nose slit and be burned with a hot iron on some part of his face."

HILARY BECKLES: The English realise that the only way this system can be maintained is through extreme violence. It is not a system that can survive in any other way. So this island is unique, not only for its tourism beauty and all the contemporary, positive features' but this is where the greatest experiment in human terror, in the modern era, was first put in place, in Barbados.

DAVID OLUSOGA: 'The British planters spread the slave code to other colonised islands in the Caribbean and, like Barbados, more slave-driven societies based on violence and terror would emerge.'