Dark History From The Caribbean Plantations
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What sparked the 1675 Barbados slave uprising and who was Anna?
to start exploring the past. 1675, Barbados. Whispers of revolution bubble in the thick tropical air. For three years, enslaved Bajans working on the sugar plantations have been secretly plotting to overthrow and slaughter their English colonizers. And now the time has come to revolt. But at the 11th hour, they're halted in their tracks because eavesdropping in the garden is Anna, a young enslaved woman. What Anna does next triggers a wave of barbaric retaliation, executions, torture, and a brutal crackdown that has unimaginable and lasting consequences across the island. From the edge of the stormy Caribbean, this is After Dark.
After Dark Thank you.
Hello and welcome to After Dark, I'm Maddie.
And I'm Anthony.
And today we're talking about the story of a failed uprising by enslaved people on the colony of Barbados in 1675. It's a story that we wanted to cover for many reasons, not least because the blueprint of colonial violence here became used in English plantations in other colonies like Jamaica and the American South.
Our guest today is Dr. Misha Ewan from the University of Sussex. Misha, of course, is a regular here on After Dark, and we've had her on in the past to talk about the lost colony of Roanoke and the incredible story, which holds such a good place in my heart, actually, of Edward Francis, an enslaved man living in the Tower of London who actually poisoned his enslavers. That's not why he holds a place in my heart, but it was just such a great history. Misha, welcome back to After Dark.
Thank you. So nice to have you here. Misha, how did you first come across this history? What does this mean to you? I
have been researching the history of Barbados for almost about seven years now. My focus is on women who were enslavers in the 17th century, so particularly the role of white women in the development of the colony, And so I read a lot about Barbados. I also teach on Barbados. And this episode is one that I teach with my students to get us thinking about how the system of slavery had really crystallized by the 1670s and the ways in which enslaved people sought to resist their enslavement as well. And it's also a useful story because we do just have this one pamphlet It is a good teaching lesson for students, I guess, about how we can read between the lines with these colonial documents to try and tease out the lives of enslaved people.
What's really interesting, I think, about this particular case is, A, I didn't know about it. Same,
yes. Because I was
saying to Misha before we started recording, when I saw that we were doing an uprising history in Barbados, I went, oh, we're doing 1816, and we know that a little bit better. And then I was like, 1675?
Okay,
that's interesting. But also because it's so full of what we might expect in terms of its contradictions within the community of enslaved people... And within that dynamic that we might be expecting from a straightforward narrative. And I think it says something about the complexities of this system, even by 1675. But one of the people I want to start with first is a young woman called Anna. Tell us what we know about, very little, but tell us what we do know about Anna.
Yeah. So all we know about Anna, who is, I guess, in some ways, the woman at the centre of this story. She's one of only two named enslaved people in this pamphlet. So she is living on the plantation of Giles Hall. And this morning, I actually had a little look at a 1675 map of Barbados, and I think Hall was living in the parish of Christchurch. So this is one of the most affluent parishes in Barbados at this time. It's known as being quite fertile. There are lots of large sugar plantations there. Anna, in all likelihood, is labouring on one of these plantations Women are often involved in the first gang. These are the enslaved people who are often planting the sugar cane, doing actually the hardest manual labor.
What we know about women in Barbados is that they are often trafficked to the island in their teens, early 20s, and There are all different kinds of laws that have developed by the 1670s around women's reproduction, what might happen to them if they have children, for example.
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