The Carolina-Barbados Connection That Shaped South Carolina

2020-10-12

(Pontificalibus [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons)It is hard to imagine what South Carolina would be today if not for the then-British colony of Barbados. From the settlement of this West Indian island in 1627 to the time of Carolina's settlement in 1670, Barbados changed from an uninhabited island to a Colony where land owners created small plantations using indentured laborers in the quest to find the most profitable cash crop and then to a mostly-clear-cut land that was planted with sugar cane, almost to...

(Pontificalibus [CC BY-SA 3.0] via Wikimedia Commons)

It is hard to imagine what South Carolina would be today if not for the then-British colony of Barbados. From the settlement of this West Indian island in 1627 to the time of Carolina's settlement in 1670, Barbados changed from an uninhabited island to a Colony where land owners created small plantations using indentured laborers in the quest to find the most profitable cash crop and then to a mostly-clear-cut land that was planted with sugar cane, almost to the ocean's edge.

Sugar, with the introduction of enslaved African laborers, made landowners wealthy, wrecked the island's ecology, and created an economic system that would be copied in Carolina. Another thing shared by émigrés to both colonies: the desire to get rich.

Walter Edgar talks with Dr. Russell Fielding, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies in the HTC Honors College at Coastal Carolina University, about the history of the Carolina-Barbados connection, and it's lasting influences on both places.

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