The Original Slave Colony: Barbados and Andrea Stuart’s ‘Sugar in the Blood’ - The Daily Beast: On the face of it, what happened in the tiny island of Barbados 400 years ago seems irrelevant to Americans today. Even now, the island matters to Americans for perhaps one reason: the weather—it’s a popular tourist getaway. But in her exceptional new book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire, Andrea Stuart insists Barbados, with its long history of slavery, matters more than we know.
“I wanted to take slavery out of its niche,” she said. “It’s not a black story, it’s not a white story. I want to remind people that this story belongs to us all.” Slavery and its legacy—race—still shape our world. But more specifically, the creation of Barbados, the British empire’s earliest, most profitable settlement in the New World, provided the blueprint for all its future slave colonies: South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, you name it.
