fall in sugar prices put an end to the boom period and brought the realization that while sugar was the rich man’s opportunity it was the poor man’s ruin.  By 1666 emigration to other colonies had halved the white population; but the slave trade had increased the negroes to forty thousand, most of whom were employed on the eight hundred sugar estates.[4] For the rest of the century Barbados held her place as the leading producer of British sugar and the most esteemed of the British colonies; but as the decades passed the fertility of her limited fields became depleted, and her importance gradually fell secondary to that of the growing Jamaica.

[Footnote 2:  Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, series 4, vol. 6, p. 536.]

[Footnote 3:  G.L.  Beer, Origins of the British Colonial System (New York, 1908), P. 413.]

[Footnote 4:  G.L.  Beer, The Old Colonial System, part I, vol. 2, pp. 9, 10.]

The Barbadian estates were generally much smaller than those of Jamaica came to be.  The planters nevertheless not only controlled their community wholly in their interest but long maintained a unique “planters’ committee” at London to make representations to the English government on behalf of their class.  They pleaded for the colony’s freedom of trade, for example, with no more vigor than they insisted that England should not interfere with the Barbadian law to prohibit Quakers from admitting negroes to their meetings.  An item significant of their attitude upon race relations is the following from the journal of the Crown’s committee of trade and plantations, Oct. 8, 1680:  “The gentlemen of Barbados attend, ... who declare that the conversion of their slaves to Christianity would not only destroy their property but endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others, and hence of less value for labour or sale.  The disproportion of blacks to white being great, the whites have no greater security than the diversity of the negroes’ languages, which would be destroyed by conversion in that it would be necessary to teach them all English.  The negroes are a sort of people so averse to learning that they will rather hang themselves or run away than submit to it.”  The Lords of Trade were enough impressed by this argument to resolve that the question be left to the Barbadian government.[5]

[Footnote 5:  Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1677-1680, p. 611.]

As illustrating the plantation regime in the island in the period of its full industrial development, elaborate instructions are extant which were issued about 1690 to Richard Harwood, manager or overseer of the Drax Hall and Hope plantations belonging to the Codrington family.  These included directions for planting, fertilizing and cultivating the cane, for the operation of the wind-driven sugar mill, the boiling and curing houses and the distillery, and