Dan Snow's History Hit - Barbados: The World's Newest Republic

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

November 30 2021, Bridgetown, fifty-five years since Barbados’ 1966 Independence, the Royal Standard flag representing the Queen was lowered and Dame Sandra Mason was sworn in as the president of Barbados. The handover ceremony marked the birth of the world’s newest republic.The most easterly of the Caribbean Islands, Barbados was inhabited by its indigenous peoples prior to the European colonisation of the Americas in the 16th century. Under the command of Captain John Powell, the first English ship arrived in Barbados in May 1625 and its men took possession of the island in the name of King James I. During this period, Barbados became an English and later British colony that served as a plantation economy, dependent on the labour of enslaved Africans on the island's sugar plantations.Dan is joined by Guy Hewitt, who served as the High Commissioner of Barbados in London from 2014 to 2018. They discuss the detailed history of Barbados, the significance of the Slave Trade until its formal abolition in 1834, the impact of the Commonwealth, subsequent Barbadian-British relations, and why now sees the end to the 396-year-reign of the British Monarchy over the Island country.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. On the 29th of November 2021, at a few seconds past midnight,

Barbados became a republic, removing Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. The Queen's standard was lowered for the final time. Prince Charles, heir to the throne of the UK, attended the event and spoke of the appalling atrocity of slavery and how it forever stains our history. Interesting stuff. It was an event rich in symbolism, as these things are. It was held in National Heroes Square in Bridgetown, once known as Trafalgar Square. And it remains to be seen whether Barbados will be the last of the Commonwealth countries to declare themselves Republic over the next few years. In this podcast, I'm going to talk about the history of Barbados and how we got to this point. So history right at the present day. I've got the perfect person to do it. We've got Guy Hewitt, High Commissioner of Barbados in London from 2014

to 2018. He knows both Barbados and the UK better than most. If you would like to watch a program about the history of Barbados, trust me, I'm happy to make that program. I just need you to subscribe to History Hit TV. It's our digital history channel. If you subscribe, you will contribute to sending me to Barbados and I will post regular reports of how it's all going. Make lots of wonderful TV shows. It's going to be perfect. You know what? It's a win-win. Win for you, win for me. It costs less than the price of a pint of beer every month, that subscription. If you subscribe today, you'll get two weeks totally free. Head over to historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, folks, here's Guy Hewitt. Enjoy. Guy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Delighted to join you, Dan, and to be here with your listeners. Now, what's the mood in Barbados? Is this something that everyone's very engaged in? I think it has been a big event. Barbados becoming a republic is a significant event in and of itself. However I don't think it has taken hold or taken root in the average Barbadian in the way that it should have. If we think about a republic by definition being a government by the people, I don't think people have been able to participate in this journey to the extent that they should have for it to be as meaningful as it could have been. In part because of COVID restrictions and the way in which the government

implemented it. I think it has been more a top-down than a bottom-up, which is really what republic should be. Can we go back and talk about the history? Barbados is at the southern end of the Leeward Islands, if you like. It's kind of the southeast out. Barbados is the most easterly of all of the Caribbean islands. It's, as we say, where the sun rises first in the Caribbean. It is a place, especially for people from the United Kingdom, it's the only Caribbean country where the UK remains our primary source market for tourism, one that has been for many years the favoured country in the Caribbean for visitors from the UK. many years the favoured country in the Caribbean for visitors from the UK. So we have had, in our modern history, we have still had those very close links between Barbados and the UK.

And talk to me about when the Europeans arrived in Barbados. That most easterly of the Caribbean Islands obviously made it very easy for the Spanish to sail to from the Canary Islands, the vagaries of wind and current. You arrive at Barbados almost whether you like it or not when you cross the Atlantic. What was there when the Europeans arrived? Who and what was there when Europeans arrived? Well, initially the Caribbean Barbados would have been occupied by Amerindians who are native inhabitants and they would have lived in small communities of Barbados. Because it is the most easterly and it is out of the island chain, we don't have

a clear line of sight from Barbados to any other Caribbean island. From all other Caribbean islands there is close proximity and visibility to their neighbors and so people tended to move around the Windward and Leawood Islands across the island chain a lot more readily, but Barbados was not like that. Because while you can move easy from Barbados going west to the other Caribbean islands, getting back east is a challenge. So we would have had a small indigenous Amerindian community, but largely they were decimated through colonization and really diseases early on and replaced, therefore, with a migration, with colonialism of European settlers, enslaved Africans, and after that, Asian indentured servants. Where does the word Barbados come from? It comes from Los Barbados meaning the bearded fig trees which apparently were populated on the island initially but there are not that many of them left now on the island unfortunately.

So in the 17th century predictably the Spanish and Portuguese fighted out for now on the island, unfortunately. So in the 17th century, predictably the Spanish and Portuguese fighted out for control of the island. In the 17th century, the Brits arrive, and it was one of the longest constituent parts as a result of the English and then British empires. Yes, Barbados has had a significant history. As you pointed out, we were one of the earliest English settlements in the New World, but what came about there was there was a young Englishman by the name of James Drax, who arrived in Barbados in the 1620s as a teenager, and he came to make his fortune with the support of the Sephardic Jews who had been expelled out of Brazil and out of South America because of conflicts. He, with their support, developed the integrated sugar industry. And that is significant. And I say to people, it was akin to Silicon Valley in California, because what Drax was able to do in terms of a production process was to make sugar viable and economical and highly profitable. white gold and made a small fortune, well not a small, a large fortune for the English crown

and that integrated sugar plantation model was exported from Barbados to other Caribbean islands to the US, to Australia, to India and served as the model for production of sugar across the Commonwealth. But as we understand that the advent of sugar and the viability that it had for colonisers, it also was an atrocity for especially the enslaved Africans who were brought over to work the sugar plantation. So the upside for colonisers, wonderful. For those who were kidnapped and enslaved, barbaric and highly inhumane. And what was the ratio of white European settlers to enslaved Africans during, say, the 17th century?

There would have been possibly, and I don't have the exact number, if I remember correctly, it was probably around 50 to 1. If I remember correctly, it was probably around 50 to 1. Barbados had one of, at that time, because of sugar, one of the densest populations in the Western Hemisphere. If you can imagine, and to make the comparison in the 17th century, there were just over 200,000 inhabitants in North America. Barbados, the island, had 60,000. And so it gives you a sense of what the size and the concentration of the population was. And because of that population size, Barbados actually went on to settle colonies in the United States and North America. The Carolinas were settled by Barbadians and it was that Barbadian capital know-how plantation expertise that moved over

to the Carolinas and developed that as a new colony. The Carolinas is often referred to as a colony of a colony simply because Barbadians went over there to find new opportunities to make fortunes. What brought slavery to an end in Barbados? There were significant uprisings of the enslaved people in Barbados. Yes, I mean, there was a push and a pull factor. Around the turn of the 19th century, you had a major slave rebellion in Barbados in 1816, led by one of our now national heroes, Basa. And it was a fight for people against oppression, a fight for people for their freedom, a fight by people who recognised that they were endowed with the same humanity from God and deserved the same treatment. At that time,

as we know, slaves were not considered human, they were considered property. A lot of rights that an individual holds now, they did not have, but they fought for it. At that time as well, with the Industrial Revolution taking place in the UK and in Europe, there was an appreciation for or a desire for more labour and as a consequence you saw the movement of persons who were previously enslaved to becoming manumitted, made free and then becoming workers. But again we need to appreciate the barbarity of it, the level of exploitation, and the reality that when slavery ended, while the slave owners were compensated for their loss of property, those who were enslaved were never compensated, and hence the call from some

quarters for reparations to be paid. And so what was the state of the Barbadian economy in 1834 when suddenly these people were freed? A lot of the previously enslaved, there was this process of apprenticeship. And for those in the UK, they have a notion of an apprentice as somebody who's attached to somebody to learn a skill and get paid a wage until they become fully competent in themselves. During the process of emancipation, people were required to do this apprenticeship period, which meant really they were giving their labour away for free. They were not compensated for. It was seen to be, or I guess a negotiation between the state and the owners, for them to continue to have access to labour virtually free for a period of time. And so people who came out of slavery found themselves in much the same conditions that they would have experienced during slavery. What happened in

Barbados, as I mentioned, because we had such a densely populated country, the former enslaved could not find land that they could go and work, that they could develop for themselves. So they were very much bound to the plantations and bound to any available land that they could eke out a living on. And one of the interesting modern features of Barbados is that along the west coast that is highly sought after properties on the beachfront. A lot of those were previously owned by working class Barbadians because the land was not seen as viable at that time. Prior to a tourism industry, it had no consequence and so it was given to people, the former slaves, to live on and they found themselves fortuitously owning these beachfront properties that with

tourism took on a whole different commercial value. But many of them found themselves still tied to plantations and having to eke out existences that was not very different to what they found when they were enslaved. And as a consequence of this, we find that at the turn of the 20th century, there are riots across the Caribbean by workers against what is a very difficult social and economic system. They rebel because when there is a commission to look into the status and the welfare of workers in the Caribbean, they find that their conditions between the period of emancipation in the 1830s until the 1920s, 1930s, not much had changed for them economically, nothing had changed for them socially,

nothing had changed for them politically. They really were not an empowered people. had changed for them politically. They really were not an empowered people. They had not come of age and there was then the attempt to try to truly bring about some level of a decent, well, to try to bring to them the opportunity for people to earn a decent wage and find a role in Barbados where they could move forward for themselves, for their children and make a life for themselves. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about Barbados becoming a republic.

More after this. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Following the Second World War and the huge role for the people of Barbados in the Imperial Armed Forces, many Barbadians, or new to the UK today, they were very much part of the Windrush generation and the links of Anglo-Barbalian families now, we all know people from that diaspora. Well, yes. I mean, one of the profound aspects of Caribbean West Indians coming out of enslavement is that in less than 100 years after they have been freed, they are willing to fight and die for king and country, which is that freed Barbadians and other West Indians in the First World War joined the West Indian Regiment. They went off, they fought, and they were ill-treated, and they were discriminated against because of race. But again, they went off and fought again in the Second World War, including Ero Baro, who

joined the RAF rather than going off to university and became the first prime minister of Barbados. off the university and became the first prime minister of Barbados. Following the second world war, there was, because of serious labour shortages in the UK, a call to Barbadians and other West Indians to migrate to Britain to help with the labour shortages, to help rebuild post-war Britain. And many Barbadians and other West Indians responded to that call. And really what was approximately a quarter of the Barbadian population migrated to Britain after the war and made a significant contribution in terms of what is now a modern global Britain. As a result were people in Barbados kind of happy for a while to have the Queen remain as nominal head of state? Yes I mean what I would say is is that Barbados in the Caribbean is a colonial creation as I mentioned earlier as our indigenous

people died off because they're small island states, everyone who was on island was really a product of colonialism. So that the average Barbadian, whether black or white, in other Caribbean islands, a greater proportion of Asians, they would have only known the monarchy, known the monarchy, the UK, as their historical and contemporary reality. So in the post-war era, the migration to Britain was seen for many people as a going home, going to their mother country. And there was a high regard for the king then and then her majesty after and Barbadians and I think other Commonwealth Caribbean citizens holding a high regard for what has been the institutions of British society. Now it was a shock to their system for many when they reached the UK not only with struggling with the weather but with the coldness of the society, with those

messages that were conveyed of no Irish, no blacks, no dogs, and that racism that they never anticipated, especially after willingly supporting empire, supporting joining the war efforts. They never expected to be discriminated as they were when they came to the UK. There's lots of people listening to us around the world who might be thinking the Queen was still kind of making day-to-day decisions about Barbados. What does it mean practically over the last few decades that Barbados has been an independent country, but has had nominally the Queen of the United Kingdom as the head of state? Now to explain to people when Barbados became independent in 1966 but there is a little known fact that Barbados had previously declared

independent century before and so that our constitution our 66th Constitution, references a 1651 Declaration of Independence. During the English Civil War, Barbados had declared its independence from Cromwellian England and recognised Charles II as its sovereign. Now, I make that point to say that coming out of that Declaration of Independence, there was a settlement following that in 1652. And as a consequence, between England and Barbados, there was an agreement that no laws would be imposed on the island or its residents that would first not be ratified by the local legislature in Barbados. not be ratified by the local legislature in Barbados. So as a consequence, Barbados has the second oldest national legislature only to Westminster in London. Now I make that point

because it signifies the level of autonomy that Barbados had historically, so that by the time we get to independence, Barbados was always a self-governing colony. And as a consequence, we were, I would say, very prepared and ready to become an independent island, an independent nation in 1966. What we also recognize as small island developing states, it was useful, I think, New Zealand, and particularly Canada, which in our post-independence era became Barbados' largest trading partner. A lot of development assistance, a lot of strategic support that Barbados received, it received from Canada, and that I think in part was because we recognised there was a common history that dated back to British colonisation. What's led to this removal of the Queen, the becoming of a republic at the moment? Why now? I would say, personally, that becoming a

republic is a coming of age. I use the analogy to when our children grow up and they get their own places and they give us back their keys. We don't see it as them abandoning our hope, it's about they have moved on. And Barbados becoming a republic is a signal that it is able and willing to stand alone and apart in the world and say, we are truly independent, we are truly sovereign, we have our own head of state who is a local Barbadian citizen. Now, that is a very powerful political and I think psychological statement for a country to make. But for me, the challenge has been trying to bring it about at this time. Because of COVID-19, the kind of access to people for discussion, for discourse, to be part of this journey towards republic didn't take place. It was really a top-down approach of a government and a cabinet making this decision rather than

it being the culmination of our aspirations as a people. And I'll make that related point that in 1998 when our Constitutional Commission recommended that Barbados move towards a parliamentary republic, it recommended also that there be a referendum on that decision. And the point of a referendum is not just to have the people vote and affirm the decision, but it is the process of debate, the process of discussion, the process of discernment that is part of a referendum that I think they recognized was important for Barbados and Barbadians to be part of if they were going to own this and if Republic was going to have the meaning that it should have for the average Barbadian. I think if you ask people today how different do they feel or is Barbados from two days ago when we were part of monarchy, I think apart from the ceremonial and celebratory

aspects, I don't think the average Barbadian can say this was profound in the way that becoming independent 55 years ago in 1966 was for us as a country and a people. Do you think this is the beginning of an inevitable domino effect that we will see the rest of the Commonwealth countries slowly or perhaps quickly peel away and make the same decision that you guys have made? I suspect that Barbados having opened this door, other countries will give it active consideration. No one likes to be first. It has been, I think, probably over 30 years since a country went from monarchy to becoming a republic within the Commonwealth, and I suspect countries in the Caribbean and possibly even the larger realms will give it active consideration.

However, I'm also aware that Her Majesty is held still in Barbados, across the Caribbean, and globally in very high regard. She has been an icon of the 20th century and, I dare say, into the 21st. And so I suspect where there is going to be consideration, if there is reluctance, there is maybe that reluctance out of a concern that it might be seen to be a slight against her. I don't think that Barbados's journey to Republic is anything personal, anything against the Queen. I think it is, as I said, really about a coming of age, but one which I would have liked if Covid had not been present to have allowed the average Barbadian to be much more engaged in and feel a lot more part of this journey.

Yeah, for sure. I hear what you're saying there, man. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and good luck to the world's newest republic. Thank you, Dan. And again, every blessing to you all and in the United Kingdom. And we remain united

as members of the Commonwealth of Nations. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews

to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon

who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.