The Economics of Transition to the Black Labor System in Barbados, 1630-1680

System in Barbados, I630-I680 In recent years there has been an expansion of academic interest in the nature of the transition from white indentured servitude to black slavery as the dominant labor base of the English New World colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Studies by Galenson, Menard, Gray and Wood, Gemery and Hogendorn, and Bean and Thomas have explained in detail this change in the labor systems of the Chesapeake area, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland. In this literature, references are made to the West Indian colonies by way of comparison, but no specific studies have yet been presented for these colonies. Only Bean and Thomas attempted to be comprehensive in their comparison and showed the importance of the West Indian experience, but their analysis did not go far enough in correcting the lopsided nature of the historiography.1 All of these studies have noted that Englishmen in the West Indian colonies, particularly in Barbados during the late I64os and