The Legacy of Sugar: How the Sugar Industry Shaped Barbados’ Culture
By the mid-17th century, Barbados had become a leader in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its economy and society fundamentally reorganized around the production of a single crop: sugar. Walk through the Barbados Museum & Historical Society or the grounds of a former plantation, and you will see them: large, cast-iron kettles, often repurposed as planters or garden ornaments. These pots, once arranged in a series called a “train” and heated by blazing fires, were the industrial heart of the sugar boiling house. They are also silent witnesses to the brutal, often lethal, labor of enslaved Africans who stirred the