In this eye-witness history of Barbados, Ligon gives perhaps the earliest account of attempts at sugar manufacture. His description of a plantation indicates the size and complexity of the estates acquired in Barbados by subtle and greedy' planters, even in the early days of the industry.

Ligon's True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados is the most significant book-length English text written about the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. [It] allows one to see the contested process behind the making of the Caribbean sugar/African slavery complex. Kupperman is one of the leading scholars of the early modern Atlantic world. . . . I cannot think of any scholar better prepared to write an Introduction that places Ligon, his text, and Barbados in an Atlantic historical context. The Introduction is quite thorough, readable, and accurate; the notes [are] exemplary! --Susan Parrish, University of Michigan

Lists persons with Scottish surnames listed in a variety of surviving records for Barbados, including church records.

Traces the rise and fall of Caribbean sugar dynasties, discussing the Britain's dependence on colony wealth, the role of slavery in sugar plantation culture, and the North American colonial opposition to sugar policy in London.

As Barbados celebrates 350 years of established parliamentary government, this concise and authoritative history makes a timely appearance, covering the period from the first human settlement by the Amerindians to the present day. Social, political, and economic themes run throughout the book, including detailed aspects of early English colonization, the emergence and eventual abolition of the slave trade, and the development and growth of the sugar industry. Professor Beckles emphasizes the struggles for social equality, civil rights, and material betterment, detailing their continuous flow through the island's history since 1627.

Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko (1688) is one of the most widely studied works of seventeenth-century literature, because of its powerful representation of slavery and complex portrayal of ways in which differing races and cultures - European, Black African, and Native American - observe and misinterpret each other. This edition presents a new edition of Oroonoko, with unprecedentedly full and informative commentary, along with complete texts of three major British seventeenth-century works concerned with race and colonialism: Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), Behn's Abdelazer (1676), and Thomas Southerne's tragedy Oroonoko (1696). It combines these with a rich anthology of European discussions of slavery, racial difference, and colonial conquest from the mid-sixteenth century to the time of Behn's death. Many are taken from important works that have not hitherto been easily available, and the collection offers an unrivaled resource for studying the culture that produced Britain's first major fictions of slavery.

Book describes the brutal Black slave society and plantation system of Barbados and explains how this slave chattel model was perfected by the British and exported to Jamaica and South Carolina for profit. There is special emphasis on the role of the concept of white supremacy in shaping social structure and economic relations that allowed slavery to continue. The book concludes with information on how slavery was finally outlawed in Barbados, in spite of white resistance.

Larry Gragg challenges the prevailing view of the seventeenth-century English planters of Barbados as architects of a social disaster. Most historians have described them as profligate and immoral, as grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches inthe cultivation of sugar. Yet, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, sugar planters transplanted many familiar governmental and legal institutions, eagerly started families, abided traditional views about the social order, and resistedcompromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as 'being Englishmentransplanted'.

Although the colonies in the West Indies were as important to the expanding British empire as those in North America, writings from the British West Indies have been conspicuously absent from anthologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature. In this first literary anthology dedicated to the region, Thomas W. Krise gathers important but little-known descriptions, poems, narratives, satires, and essays written in and about this culturally rich and politically tempestuous region. Caribbeana offers invaluable period commentaries on slavery, colonialism, gender relations, African and European history, natural history, agriculture, and medicine. Highlights include several of the earliest protests against slavery; a superb ode by the Cambridge-educated Afro-Jamaican poet Francis Williams; James Grainger's extended georgic poem, The Sugar Cane; Frances Seymour's poignant tale of the Englishman Inkle who sells his Indian savior-lover Yarico into slavery; and several descriptions of the West Indies during the early years of settlement.