Barbados was a Caribbean plantation colony whose prosperity rested on a starkly unequal order: a small planter elite held political power and secure claims over land and enslaved people, while most inhabitants were denied education, economic opportunity, and the ability to benefit from their work. Sugar production made the island exceptionally wealthy, but its institutions protected the owners, not the broad population. The resulting contrast makes Barbados a central example of growth under extractive institutions—and of the limits of wealth built on exclusion.

A plantation economy within Atlantic expansion

By 1627, Barbados had been occupied as part of the expanding European presence in the Atlantic. This colonization formed part of a larger transformation that also included the establishment of English colonies in North America and the growth of European trading companies. In the Caribbean, plantation systems took shape after the near-total collapse of Indigenous populations; Europeans imported enslaved Africans and organized production around coerced labor.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Barbados belonged to a group of Caribbean economies—including Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica—where a small planter class controlled political power and owned the assets, including the people forced to work on plantations. Enslaved workers labored under conditions that kept many close to subsistence; malnutrition and exhaustion took many lives. The island’s place in Atlantic commerce was therefore not simply that of a successful producer: its commercial output depended on an institutional order that concentrated ownership and denied most people rights.

Property rights for the few

An English government census in 1680 counted approximately 60,000 people in Barbados, of whom almost 39,000 were enslaved Africans. They were treated as the property of the remaining third of the population and were owned largely by the 175 biggest sugar planters, who also held most of the island’s land. Property rights and contracts were enforced effectively for this elite. A planter could sell enslaved people to another planter and expect a court to uphold the transaction.

The composition of the island’s authorities helps explain whose interests its legal order served. Of forty judges and justices of the peace, twenty-nine were large planters; all eight of the most senior military officials were planters as well. Courts and contracts could thus protect ownership and commercial exchange without extending meaningful economic inclusion to the enslaved majority. In this account, secure property rights alone do not make an economy inclusive: the question is whose property is recognized and who has access to opportunity.

Almost two-thirds of the population had no access to education or economic opportunities, and no ability or incentive to use their talents and skills. The planter elite’s security was compatible with the majority’s exclusion. Barbados consequently demonstrates the difference between an economy in which rights are well defined for powerful owners and one in which a broad cross-section of society can participate.

Sugar, wealth, and extractive growth

Despite the severe exploitation of most of its population, Barbados and other Caribbean plantation islands ranked among the richest places in the world. Their wealth came from producing sugar for world markets. The economic mechanism was direct: elites could allocate land and labor to a productive export activity they controlled, and the commodity’s value abroad generated substantial income for the islands and their owners.

This was growth without broad-based participation. The production system did not give enslaved people secure rights or incentives to invest in their own economic futures; instead, it directed their labor toward an activity from which the planter class captured the gains. The island’s example therefore complicates any simple equation of economic growth with inclusive institutions. Extractive institutions could generate wealth when those in power controlled productive assets and could sell their output, even while imposing enormous costs on the majority.

The limits of that model became visible when the economy needed to move toward new activities. Sugar-based growth stagnated when such a shift threatened both the income and the political power of the planter elite. An arrangement capable of directing resources into a profitable export was less capable of accommodating change that might unsettle the owners’ position. The same concentration that supported sugar production thus constrained the transition beyond it.

A comparative example in the book’s argument

Barbados also serves as a counterexample to the idea that strong property rights, by themselves, guarantee inclusive economic institutions. The 1680 census depicts rights and legal enforcement functioning for the planter elite, while nearly 39,000 enslaved people remained outside the opportunities those institutions secured. The arrangement was not simply an absence of rules; it was a system of rules and enforcement that distributed protection unequally.

The island is repeatedly paired with Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica to show that plantation-based extraction could produce high incomes where export production was valuable. It also provides a contrast with economies in which growth depended on wider participation, investment, and innovation. Barbados’s wealth was real, but its institutional basis made the distribution of rights and gains profoundly unequal, and left the society vulnerable when continued prosperity required economic change rather than the preservation of the existing sugar order.