these economic factors made Barbados the most profitable colony in the region until the 1720s, when it was surpassed in exportation by Jamaica.100 Between 1707 and 1726, the board of trade and plantations listed 49,594 Africans brought into the colony.101 Destined for the fatal conditions associated with sugar cultivation, the majority were sold to planters across the island. Others were sold to neighboring colonies and a few remained to labor in town. Early Bridgetown was a central hub in this slave trade, and the Royal African Company of slave traders maintained an office on Tudor Street from 1671–1721.102 With no central market site for sales, a variety of urban spaces became flesh markets, further implicating this town in the violence of slavery. African captives were sold in several ways. A “vendue,” public auction, or “outcry” usually involved a financially distressed or liquidated estate. In the British Caribbean, captives also experienced sale through a “scramble,” wherein buyers raced around a holding yard or on a ship grabbing as many captives as they could afford within a designated timeframe marked with a bell.103 Other captives were sold individually within the ships by which they were transported.
From the late seventeenth century on, Bridgetown grew in density in people and buildings as well as in susceptibility to the elements, disease, and world affairs. Though disease, war, and natural disasters affected the entire population, slaves living in town acutely felt the brunt of incoming plagues, thinning provisions, and destruction of shelters. Since the late seventeenth century, Bridgetown had been known as “being by far the unhealthiest place on the island,” with a constant influx of diseased and transient sailors in addition to the African captives sickened by the Middle Passage.104 Epidemics killed hundreds of people in this society; in 1694 yellow fever killed 354 people in Bridgetown alone. Into the late eighteenth century governors wrote to England about the periodically high mortality of all the inhabitants.105 On 13 April 1776, for example, Governor Hay wrote the Lords of Trade and Plantations about “a Calamity … that has reigned in the Island for these three or four [Monthes], which is the Small Pox, attended with a putrid fever; Some Hundreds of People have been carried off by this disorder, particularly White Children and Negroes.”106 Living in a dense urban environment where the enslaved moved through town in ways not possible on plantations still left them exposed to the rapid spread of disease from a constant influx of people from abroad. Incoming ships brought decimating illness to the inhabitants of the town, and captive Africans remained the most predisposed to disease and death. In February 1782, slave trader Captain Coleman “of a Liverpool Guineaman” ship petitioned Governor James Cunninghame “for leave to land his Slaves in order to inoculate them for the small Pox, some few of them having caught the infection from the [West African] Shore.”107 In the late eighteenth century, Surveyor Crawford remarked to the St. Michael’s Parish Vestry that “In every populous Towns such as this it will be ever found impossible to [inforce] that law so effectually as to prevent the accumulation of dirt in different parts of the Town, and from that accumulation, together with the [pudles] formed in broken parts of the Streets, I am perfectly persuaded many diseases especially [epidemic] Sore Throats and Fevers originate.”108 Both white and black residents suffered from the unhealthy conditions of urban life and disease, but Richard Dunn points out that both groups’ survival rates differed resulting from the general maltreatment of the enslaved: “the blacks were overdisciplined and underfed, while their masters were underdisciplined and overfed.”109 The opulent lifestyles of the planter class existed in distinct contrast to the conditions in which enslaved people lived and worked.
In times of war these differences proved stark. The architecture of militia and military fortifications served as powerful symbols of the strength of colonial power and as crucial sites for controlling the enslaved throughout Bridgetown. Situated the farthest east of the Caribbean islands, Barbados benefited from its relative isolation in cases of hostility from rival and neighboring colonial powers. Still, occasional threats between and during war-time kept Barbados colonists in a state of readiness, particularly from their tense relationship with the French and Spanish.110 A militia established by the mid-seventeenth century helped prepare the island for foreign invasion. By 1680 about 5,588 men served in this unit, which also functioned as a defense against threats of slave rebellions in the same period.111 Bridgetown did not host the British Caribbean’s largest military fortifications until the late eighteenth century, but as early as 1650 Needham’s Point’s fortifications were built for the protection of Carlisle Bay.112 In 1705 Barbados officials commissioned St. Ann’s Fort in the area on the southeast edge of Bridgetown that would be occupied by the garrison military buildings in the late eighteenth century.113
Barbados colonists often recruited enslaved men in the building and defense of the colony when it served their interests. The enslaved, therefore, were particularly threatened at times of invasion. During a conversation in the Barbados Assembly in 1740 about raising money to build fortifications, a list of expenses exemplified the peril to which the enslaved were subject and the significant attention given to the building of forts, accumulation of ammunition, and arming of magazines. The list reads as follows:
The Orders that the Governor or Commander in Chief with the Consent of the Council may issue without an Address from the Assembly are:
1. Value of Negroes lost in the Publick Service
2. Value of Negroes set free for Gallantry [opposing] the Enemy.
3. Value of Negroes kill’d at the Time of Invasion or Appearance of the Enemy.
4. Gunners and Matrosses Sallarys
5. Master Gunner and Matrosses of Artillery
6. Captain and Men at the Magazine
7. Certificates from the Commissioners for repairing the Fortifications114
Noted for their bravery, enslaved men served as armed soldiers when it suited colonial interests, and some were freed for their “loyalty.”115 However, they had no choice in the matter of protecting and serving the public, and many lost their lives in the front lines of conflict.116 Enslaved men were also made to build and repair roads, public buildings, bridges, military fortifications, and other urban infrastructures that served to control their mobility.117 Slave owners benefited from payment from the public treasury for their slaves’ work, including a sum of twenty-five pounds if the slave died during this public labor. This financial reimbursement to slave owners for loss of their slaves in service revealed another level of enslaved objectification—their retained value as commodities in death and expendability, in physical harm from invasion, or the dangers of public works projects.
The enslaved population in Bridgetown also suffered acutely from interruption of trade during extended warfare. For example, without the provision grounds typical on plantations, urban slaves struggled for sustenance during the American Revolution. While anticipating a trade embargo from England due to the war with its North American colonies, Barbadian planters seemed to have prepared more provision grounds and “increased their imports to stock up Barbadian warehouses as much as possible.”118 However, Governor Hay proved overconfident when allowing the Royal Navy to provision Boston out of Barbados stocks. A year after the trade embargo of September 1775 supplies were depleted in Barbados to a dangerous degree.119 During a political conflict between Governor Hay, who continually denied the lack of supplies, and the Barbados Assembly, who sent their complaints directly to the king, the danger of food shortages continued. Historian Karl Watson remarks that “the urban white poor were the greatest sufferers” in such conditions because they could not plant food crops as their peers in the country.120 Despite the political disagreements between the governor and the assembly, with the governor denying the veracity of food scarcity claims, it was clear that the urban enslaved would also be susceptible to dwindling food supplies.121 In a letter from Governor Hay to the Lords of Trade and Plantations on 24 March 1776, he suggests that the Assembly’s complaint of the scarceness of Guinea Corn and Indian corn, the main staple for slaves,
