Barbados’s 1816 rebellion was crushed with vastly disproportionate state violence.

Evidence

The rebellion broke out with shocking suddenness on Easter Sunday night, 14 April 1816, at a time when the slaves were free from work and had ample opportunities for organization under cover of the permitted festivities. Cane-field and cane-trash houses were fired as beacons in the south-eastern parishes, particularly St. Philip, one of the driest areas, with the highest ratio of slaves to whites. Up to seventy estates were affected… . Only 2 whites were killed in the fighting but probably about 100 slaves, with a further 144 executed, 170 deported, and innumerable floggings. Roaming slaves were shot on sight and Negro houses burned… . Captives were commonly tortured… . Convicted rebels were publicly executed in different parts of the island and their bodies—sometimes just their heads—in many cases exposed on their home estates. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 791

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ritual-sacrifice article’s account of how states use spectacular public violence against the marginalized.

Related

• The 1816 Barbados slave rebellion cost hundreds of slave lives (similarity 0.94)
• The 1831 Jamaican rebellion’s suppression killed or exiled over 600 slaves (similarity 0.79)
• Only about twenty of fifty thousand Jamaican rebels committed atrocities against whites. (similarity 0.79)
• Slave rebels rarely committed atrocities that whites routinely inflicted on them. (similarity 0.79)