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Caribbean Islands BARBADOS
COUNTRY PROFILE: Barbados
Official Name: Barbados
Term for Citizens: Barbadian(s)
Capital: Bridgetown
Political Status: Independent, 1966
Form of Government: Parliamentary democracy and
constitutional monarchy
GEOGRAPHY
Size: 430 sq. km.
Topography: Rolling hills and plains
Climate: Maritime tropical
POPULATION
Total estimated in 1987: 255,500
Annual growth rate (in percentage) in 1987: 0.6
Life expectancy at birth in 1983: 70
Adult literacy rate (in percentage) in 1983: 95
Language: English
Ethnic groups: Black (90 percent), mulatto (5 percent),
white (5 percent)
Religion: Anglican (31 percent); Church of God,
Methodist, or Roman Catholic (3 to 4 percent each); remainder other
or no religion
ECONOMY
Currency: Barbadian dollar (B$)
Exchange rate: B$2.00=US$1.00
Gross domestic product (GDP) in 1985: US$1.1 billion
Per capita GDP in 1985: US$4,405
Distribution of GDP (in percentage) in 1985
Other services and government 66.8
Manufacturing 10.5
Tourism 9.5
Agriculture 7.2
Other 6.0
NATIONAL SECURITY
Armed forces personnel: 500
Paramilitary personnel: 0
Police: 1,000
Barbados has acquired the nickname "Little England" because,
through the centuries, it has remained the most British of the
Caribbean islands. Since wind currents made it relatively difficult
to reach under sail, it was not conquered and reconquered like most
of its Caribbean neighbors. British control over Barbados lasted
from 1625 until independence in 1966. About fifty male settlers,
including some slaves captured en route, arrived in 1627 to settle
the island, which was uninhabited and had no food-bearing plants.
Twelve years later, in 1639, the House of Assembly was formed, the
only representative legislature in the Caribbean to remain in
existence for more than three centuries. Barbadians are proud of
their colonial heritage and used a statement on individual rights
and privileges from the 1652 Charter of Barbados as a basis for the
Constitution of 1966.
Following the introduction of sugar by a Dutchman in the early
1640s, the island was deforested, and the economy became dominated
by large plantations. As the plantation economy developed, the land
became consolidated in the hands of a decreasing number of white
familes, leading, between 1650 and 1680, to the emigration of some
30,000 landless Barbadians, who left the island for other Caribbean
islands or North America. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, slaves were imported from Africa by the thousands. In
1645 the black population was estimated at 5,680; by 1667 it was
over 40,000. As the slave trade continued, Barbados became the most
densely populated island in the Caribbean, a position that it still
held in the late 1980s (see The Impact of the Conquest; The
Colonial Period, ch. 1). Because labor was plentiful, few
indentured servants were brought to Barbados even after
emancipation in 1838.
During the eighteenth century, Barbados languished. The price
of sugar fell sharply as abundant supplies were produced more
cheaply in other islands. European wars and the American Revolution
interfered with trade, and the British embargo on shipment of
American goods to British colonies during the American Revolution
also hurt Barbados severely. In the early months of the embargo,
food and supplies fell so low that residents of Barbados would have
faced starvation had not George III ordered special food shipments
in 1778. Barbados also suffered several other calamities.
Hurricanes devastated the island in 1780 and 1831. The 1780
hurricane killed over 4,000 people and destroyed most of the
island's buildings and livestock; the 1831 hurricane ruined many
buildings, including seven of the eleven churches on the island. In
addition, a cholera epidemic killed over 20,000 people in 1854.
Throughout the nineteenth century, Barbados resisted change.
Although free blacks were granted the vote in 1831 and slavery was
commuted to an apprentice system in 1834, with emancipation
following four years later, the ex-slaves stayed on the island and
life remained essentially the same. As historian Ronald Tree has
put it, the hurricane of 1831 was "followed by a hundred years of
sleepy impoverishment, during which time the island was a source of
constant annoyance to the Colonial Office." Barbados successfully
resisted British efforts in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to abolish its House of Assembly and install crown colony
government (see Glossary). The British had found local assemblies
to be intractable and cumbersome to manage from London. Under the
system called crown colony government, which was installed in all
of the Commonwealth Caribbean islands except Barbados, the British
replaced these argumentative assemblies with a unicameral
legislature, the majority of whose members were appointed by the
governor, and in which the king theoretically represented the lower
classes (see Political Traditions, ch. 1). As a result of multiple
petitions, Barbados managed to retain its local House of Assembly,
which functioned in addition to the governor's Legislative Council.
Barbados was also successful in securing the repeal of the British
sugar tax.
For almost 300 years, Barbados remained in the hands of a
small, white, propertied minority who held the franchise. Reform
finally came after World War I, however, as a result of ideas
brought back by Clennell Wilsden Wickham of Barbados, Andrew Arthur
Cipriani of Trinidad, and others who had served in the British
forces abroad (see Precursors of Independence, ch. 1). Wickham
returned home in 1919 fired by enthusiasm to make Barbados a more
democratic place. His newspaper articles inspired Charles Duncan
O'Neale to organize the Democratic League, a political party that
espoused franchise reform, old-age pensions, compulsory education,
scholarships, and trade union organization. The Democratic League
succeeded in electing a few representatives to the House of
Assembly between 1924 and 1932, but it is chiefly remembered for
inspiring O'Neale's nephew, Errol Barrow, to found the Democratic
Labour Party (DLP).
During the 1920s and 1930s, Barbados was confronted with a
rapidly growing population, a rising cost of living, and a wage
scale that was fixed at the equivalent of US$0.30 a day.
Spontaneous rioting erupted throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean
in the late 1930s as the region felt the effects of the worldwide
depression. In Barbados, fourteen people were killed and forty-
seven wounded in protests in 1937.
The rioting spurred Grantley Adams to found the Barbados Labour
Party (BLP) in 1938. (The BLP was known briefly as the Barbados
Progressive League.) Adams, a lawyer who had won the Barbados
Scholarship to Oxford in 1918, became the most important figure in
preindependence politics. He quickly rose to prominence through his
testimony before the British Moyne Commission, which was charged
with investigating the causes of the regional disturbances in the
late 1930s (see Labor Organizations, ch. 1). Adams argued that the
main cause of the riots was economic distress. Elected to the House
of Assembly in 1940, Adams became president general of the Barbados
Workers Union (BWU) on its formation in 1941. Under Barbadian
governor Sir Grattan Bushe, the constitution was changed to effect
a semiministerial form of government, and the franchise was
progressively liberalized. During the 1942 House of Assembly
session, Adams led a fight for reforms that broadened the franchise
by reducing the cost of qualification, increased direct taxation,
established a workmen's compensation program, and protected union
leaders from liability in trade disputes.
Under the terms of the Bushe reforms, Adams became leader of
the government in 1946. Between 1946 and 1951, he presided over
uneasy coalitions in the House of Assembly as the BLP failed to win
a clear majority. In 1951, in the first election conducted under
universal adult suffrage with no property qualifications, the BLP
captured sixteen of the twenty-four seats. Although the BLP had
finally gained a majority in the House, Adams was unable to hold
the party together. The BLP and BWU, which had formerly acted in
unison, pulled apart in 1954 after Adams resigned as president of
the BWU, became premier (the preindependence title for prime
minister), under a new ministerial system of government, and
neglected to include the new BWU president, Frank Walcott, in his
cabinet. Meanwhile, a new member of the House, Barrow, emerged as
leader of a discontented BLP left wing, which felt that Adams was
too close to the governor and not close enough to labor. Barrow had
served in the Royal Air Force in World War II and subsequently
studied and passed the bar in London. After returning to Barbados
in 1950, he joined the BLP and was elected to the House in 1951. In
1954 Barrow left the BLP and the following year founded the DLP,
which he led for the next thirty-two years. In spite of Barrow's
defection, Adams led the BLP to victory in the 1956 election.
Plans for a British Caribbean federation had been drawn up in
London in 1953, and elections for a federative assembly were held
in 1958. The BLP also swept these elections, capturing almost all
of the seats allotted to Barbados; subsequently, Adams, who had
been knighted in 1952, was elected prime minister of the West
Indies Federation. He was the only individual ever to hold that
office because the federation dissolved in 1962, when Jamaica and
Trinidad and Tobago both opted for independence (see The West
Indies Federation, 1958-62, ch. 1).
Adams's devotion to the cause of federation cost the BLP
dearly. H.G. Cummins, who had become premier of Barbados when Adams
was elected prime minister of the West Indies Federation, was
unable to hold the party together. By the late 1950s, unemployment,
always a persistent problem in Barbados, exceeded 20 percent. While
Adams struggled with increasing problems in the federation, Barrow
supported the sugar workers in their campaign for higher wages and
in turn won their support for the DLP; as a result, the DLP won the
1961 elections by a large majority. Barrow became premier and
continued to lead the government until 1971. Between 1961 and 1966,
the DLP government replaced the governor's Legislative Council with
a Senate appointed by the governor, increased workers' benefits,
instituted a program of industrialization, and expanded free
education. Barrow also explored the possibility of joining another
federation of the so-called Little Eight islands (Antigua and
Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Christopher
[hereafter, St. Kitts]-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent
and the Grenadines); this too came to naught, however, and the DLP
espoused full independence with the concurrence of the opposition
parties. The DLP won the election of November 2, 1966, capturing
fourteen of the twenty-four House seats. On November 30, 1966,
Barbados gained independence, and Barrow became its first prime
minister.
Data as of November 1987
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