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Conclusion Overseers were labor enforcers of the circum-Atlantic world of work described in this book, men empowered by their employers to exercise power over the laboring poor, using legal power and violence to enforce labor discipline. In England the word ‘‘overseer’’ had long been applied to those with authority and governing power over others, and in the early modern era the increasing ranks of vagrants and of under- and unemployed people were subject to parish overseers of the poor, an office that would be re-created in the American colonies, on the Gold Coast, and on Barbados, as well as elsewhere in England’s far-flung colonies. The word developed a new meaning when it was applied to the white men who governed groups of enslaved African laborers in strikingly different fashion in the New World, and eventually it would be applied to those who supervised British convicts sent to Australia.1 The word ‘‘overseer’’ epitomizes the fluid connections between the people and cultures of the British Isles and West Africa, and their transport and transformation on the island of Barbados. Under intense demographic pressure, and facing significant economic, political, and religious changes, English society in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been forced to confront a significantly increased population, which traditional forms of rural labor could not accommodate. New institutions, several involving involuntary, bound labor, were developed in response. Although legal and cultural restraints on employers’ activities remained, bound labor increased and English authorities believed that their nation was overpopulated by the idle poor, many of them vagrants and criminals who could and should be forced to work. The colonization of Barbados occurred in this context. But with English authorities overwhelmed by the political and economic strife of the midseventeenth century, the planter elite who rapidly assumed power on the island were able to fashion labor and agriculture as they saw fit. The Barbadian planter elite enjoyed a degree of political, administrative, and judicial 244 Conclusion power over the island’s inhabitants that would have been the envy of Stuart monarchs. Living beyond the pale of English law and custom, planters were able to take certain ideas and beliefs from England, and work unfree Britons —vagrants, convicts, and prisoners of war—far more harshly than would have been possible in Britain. Plantations growing tobacco, cotton, and indigo and worked by bound British laborers generated sufficient income for their owners to begin to buy enslaved African laborers.2 English trade with West Africa grew rapidly from the mid-sixteenth century onward. Concentrated on the Gold Coast, the company that organized trade was intended to be manned and operated by Britons, from the governor and senior officers down to laboring artisans, manual workers, soldiers, and sailors. This soon proved impractical, and West African laborers came to dominate the ‘‘British’’ workforce. Britons on the Gold Coast proved adept at utilizing free and enslaved African labor on local terms, accommodating radically different forms and practices of labor. This continued throughout the eighteenth century, as a creolized labor force became dominant at Cape Coast Castle, Anomabu, and the other British trading posts. The adaptability of Britons, as seen in their employment of local labor on the West Coast of Africa, took a very different form on Barbados. Free of customary restraints on the actions of employers and those who owned or controlled labor, whether British or West African, a small and cohesive group of elite Barbadian planters held all of the cards. These planters dominated the Governor’s Council and the Assembly, as well as the magistracy, giving them control of the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government on the island. Unified and remarkably potent, the planter elite were freed from the shackles of British and African custom and convention when it came to procuring, organizing, and disciplining their workforce, and they transformed English agricultural labor and enslaved African labor into an entirely new entity, creating a new gang labor system to service remarkably innovative integrated plantations. At first this new power was expressed in the use of white servants in ways that violated the norms of service and apprenticeship in husbandry, and which horrified many who saw or experienced it. Some of the terminology of English labor and service survived in Barbados, yet bound labor very quickly came to mean something very different on the island’s plantations. Bound labor defined Barbadian agriculture from the start. Whereas in England servants in husbandry...

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