Historical Summary

An understanding of the regions archives must root itself in the historiography of the region if one is to critically analyse the abundance and or scarcity of particular archives in one part of the region as opposed to another.  Then within such a frame work begin to delineate the particular nuances of one island's history versus another.  In this, one can note that the lack of records for marriages of enslaved people on Barbados is due perhaps the particular fear of the planter class to having such a legal status conferred on the enslaved, where as  in Jamaica, the abundance of records is best explained by,  the presence of anti-abolitions sects like the Baptists and Moravians  that encouraged marriage amongst enslaved people, coupled with  the Church of England marring enslaved people that were mainly from the elite artisan class within the wider enslaved population.

The occurrence of such records in the region is due to one thing - greed.  Iberian and Northern European expansion to the " New World" carried with it genocide, land change and re-population.  Carried out over a period of some 500 years the presentation will examine the second period of transition characterised by the change in economic development away from 'plunder' to settled economic exploitation.  Those enemies of Spain gradually realised that economic wealth could be developed not through letters of marque and the non-dependable capture of a Spanish Fleet laden with gold and other items, but through the growth of cash crops to a willing European market.  A market whose appetite for the 'exotic', was tantalised through Saharan and eastern trade, was now whetted for the "goodies" of the West Indies.  With this want for new goods, economic agriculture was began which was to reach its heyday in the development of Economic Botanical gardens - being the Research & Development labs if the day.  The experiment to realise the potential cash profit of grown primary products exported back to the metropole had begun.  The legacy of such a change was to take many guises and is best summed up with the creation of the plantation economy.  

This economy brought with it the creation of society that according to Sio 'used  colour as its barometer'. Its decisions and responses were as much guided by this principle as it was by the accumulation of wealth.  It is in trying to understand this society with its stereotypes and contradictions that records can help to illuminate the past and fill in the gaps for though the last 40 years of West Indian History has been Caribbeanised still more research remains to be done. Such research is enabled by the ability to access and analysed extant documents that have been preserved for that expressed purpose.