Where Bajan Identity Began — In the Soil Beneath the Plantation

 

By the eighteenth century, Barbados was home to bustling Saturday markets where enslaved and free Black vendors bought, sold, bargained, saved, and reinvested. Contemporary travellers repeatedly remarked on the scale and efficiency of these markets, astonished by their profitability and discipline. They were not chaotic spaces of survival; they were systems of enterprise.

Barbados’s dense plantation layout and early sugar dominance made these markets unusually efficient. Short distances allowed goods, information, and money to circulate rapidly. What emerged was not merely a coping mechanism but a working economic model — one that would be replicated across the Caribbean as plantation systems spread outward from Barbados.

This is where the Bajan reputation for thrift, enterprise, and market savvy was forged. Not as myth, but as necessity. Not as resistance alone, but as strategy with confidence, independence of thought, and a deep understanding of value. They seeded the entrepreneurial instincts that later carried Barbadians across the Caribbean, Britain, and North America — small island people navigating global systems with sharp minds and steady hands.

Barbados did not just export sugar and plantation practices. It exported ways of surviving, trading, and thinking economically under constraint. In that sense, the island was not simply part of Caribbean history — it was one of its blueprints.