Slave Society in the City

This is one of the first specialised treatments of an Anglophone Caribbean port-town by a contemporary historian. Having adeptly mined the existing archival data and statistics on Bridgetown, Pedro Welch shares with the reader these nuggets of information that contribute immensely to our understanding of the way slave societies functioned in the Caribbean. This book shows how life in the urban slave society departed significantly from that of the rural plantation. There is considerable evidence indicating that slaves and freed persons found and utilised 'room to manoeuvre options' in that urban context, which allowed some of them to amass small fortunes and landholdings, act relatively freely and independently and occasionally be acknowledged almost as the equal of their white counterparts. Several areas of urban social formation are analysed in the study. Demographic, trade and free coloured communities receive detailed treatment. Publication of this work is timely, coinciding as it does with the 375th anniversary of the founding of Bridgetown, Barbados