Barbados’s unbroken colonial rule and lack of indentured labor preserved a rigid color hierarchy

Evidence

In Barbados, Creole society has deviated little from its original colonial construction. It retains much of the European-African roots in its color-class hierarchical social formation. This persistence can be explained by the territorial history of uninterrupted British colonial rule. There was no importation of labor for postslavery indentureship that laid the groundwork for challenges to Creole formulations in countries like Guyana and Trinidad. A certain idiosyncrasy has emerged in the historical reproduction of Creole society in the country. Creolization was fashioned much more from cultural syncretization. Practices of cohabitation between Europeans and Africans have been significantly less than in the other territories. This is reflected in the relatively small number of persons classified as mixed. At 2.6 percent, these “coloreds” constitute an even smaller proportion of the population than Creole whites. The latter stands at around 3.3 percent. Thus, the color-class continuum is much less smooth and much more abrupt in Barbados. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3271

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The color-class hierarchy and its historical reproduction connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s broader theme of how social structures persist as infrastructure — here the British colonial color continuum as a durable social formation.
• QUESTION: Why exactly did Barbados lack post-slavery indentureship when Guyana and Trinidad imported labor? Worth chasing the territorial labor history.