Lesson video

Hello, and welcome back to our Enquiry: Who lived in British America? As hopefully you know by now, I'm Miss Cussworth, and today we are moving on from North America, down to the Caribbean, and we're going to be looking at sugar barons.

So, you will remember, fingers crossed that our Enquiry is: Who lived in British America? And we are looking at different people who lived in the colonies that were controlled by Britain in America and their experiences, but we're also trynna' think about ways in which they were similar.

their experiences and the people were similar and the ways in which their experiences were different.

So you'll remember that we began this inquiry by looking at Native Americans in particular Pocahontas and the Powhatan people in Virginia.

And then we also looked at enslaved people in Virginia.

And we looked at how their experience changed maybe historians think they might have started off as being more like indentured servants, When they arrived in 1619.

And then over time their status got worse to the point when they were really just considered as enslaved people.

And we then looked at indentured servants, and people like Richard Frethorne who had travelled from England.

Often they were young, they were poor and they travelled to America for a better life and worked for maybe seven years, and were free, if they survived, were free at the end of that time.

And we also looked at colonists, planters, remember people like John Rolfe, and really it was the planters or the kind of colonists and then leaders that were the reason why indentured servants enslaved people with that remember they were growing tobacco and in order to grow tobacco in these big plantations they needed workers, hence why they brought over indentured servants and enslaved people.

And today we're going to be focusing on colonists, planters again, but not in North America this time.

So you remember that we looked at, mostly focused on on Jamestown in Virginia, but we also went through the experience of Puritans in Massachusetts.

And today we're going to be focusing on Barbados, which is an island in the Caribbean.

So let's just do a really quick recap about why people travelled to British or America.

So I would like you to pause the video and write down a few reasons you can remember about why people travel to British America.

Hopefully you've got some of those reasons written down.

So these are the ones we looked at last time: To make money, from growing things like tobacco.

For a better life.

We saw that with Richard Frethorne and hoping maybe he was going to have a better life than he did in London in Virginia, in Jamestown.

For more freedom, so we saw that with the Puritans, I mean, it's Hiram Hutchinson, and then also we looked at how Enslaved people really have no choice about travelling to British America.

So they were taken and transported there against their will.

And today we're going to be learning about sugar barons.

Now this man here, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, lots of the research that has been done on Barbados owes a really big debt to him, because you can see here in this picture he is the head of the University of the West Indies which is in Jamaica, but he's also an historian who's done a lot of research about Barbados, and his research has influenced people like the authors of these two books that I have on my bookshelf.

Now you've probably noticed that I have taken the title for today's lesson from this book by historian Matthew Parker.

Before we kind of move on, I would like you to do a little activity for me.

I would like you to write down any words that appear more than once in this picture.

So don't waste your time by writing down, 'and' 'cause you might see that there, and don't waste your time writing down words like 'and' or 'the' Okay? Make a list of any other kind of bigger words that appear more than once across these two book covers, pause the video and make that list now.

So hopefully you had 'sugar', you also hopefully spotted 'family', and 'empire'.

and we have been looking throughout these past few lessons at the British colonies which were part of the British Empire.

And for the next two lessons we're really going to be focusing on sugar.

And we're also going to be looking at family.

So today we're going to be focusing on sugar barons and their families.

And I want you to hold that idea of sugar in your mind, because it's going to be useful here.

So why do you think sugar barons or the people who became sugar barons.

And what I mean by that is they're kind of the leaders or the head, the owner of the sugar plantations, which were really important to the history of Barbados.

Why do you think they travelled there? Do you think it was to make money for a better life? For more freedom? Or because they had no choice? Well, really for these people who became the sugar barons, it was they travelled to Barbados to make money, they wanted to become wealthy.

And how do you think they made that money, these kind of head of the plantations? So I'd like you to use maybe what I've told you to give you a bit of a clue.

And I'd like you to pause the video and write down how do you think they made money.

So you probably said, hopefully they grew sugar or they created plantations in which they made other people grow sugar for them.

And that's really what we're going to be looking at today.

Now, last lesson we looked at planters in Virginia, and these sugar barons are really planters in Barbados.

And so I'd like you to pause this video.

Make a copy of this table into your exercise book, if you've got it, or onto a piece of paper.

And then you would also hopefully be able to remember some things about planters in Virginia from last lesson, people like John Rolfe.

So I'd also like you to fill in this box using anything you can remember from last lesson, so pause the video now, start to create this table and fill in this box as much as possible.

And then when you're done, unpause the video and we will continue.

So if you're seeing this hopefully you've got your table done, and hopefully you added things in like planters in Virginia, e.

g.

John Rolfe, grew crops like tobacco to sell back in England.

They owned, and especially in places like Virginia they tended to live on their plantations, and they often became rich.

Now with planters in Barbados that's what we're going to be looking at today that lots of these things are relevant to them but instead of growing tobacco, what did they grow? Right, sugar, good.

So just to give you a really quick little kind of bits of information about Barbados, you can see where it is here in the Caribbean.

It's a Caribbean island.

This whole area here is called the Caribbean, and it's native population were affected by the Spanish so you'll kind of hopefully know that the Spanish came to America.

Germany before the British and started to colonise parts of it, and they arrived in Barbados.

The native population was affected by them, so by the time the English arrived there weren't as big native population on the island.

It was colonised by Britain in 1627.

And it's about a third of the size of London so it's small.

It's a little bit bigger than the Isle of Wight, I think.

And so we're not talking about a big space like we've got in North America, we're talking about really quite a small island.

Yeah, it made Britain incredibly rich.

Islands in the Caribbean made Britain incredibly rich by growing what? By growing sugar.

And it's also been described by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles the historian I showed you in that picture earlier as the first black slave society.

And so, sugar was grown, primarily by black enslaved people, and it was those plantations were owned by British men who we're calling sugar barons.

So let's talk a little bit more now start to get some information to fill out your table, about some of those sugar barons.

And we're going to look first of all about a family called the Codringtons.

Now, you can see here, the plantation here in Barbados is an old map of Barbados Codringtons Bay, and they also have this plantation called concerts.

And the first Codrington travelled out from England, in a kind of similar way to John Rolfe travel to Barbados, and bought some land there, and eventually set up a plantation, and quite quickly they moved to growing sugar because they realised that they could sell it back in England for a big profit.

And at first they started out with indentured servants in the same way that planters did in Virginia.

But over time, they moved increasingly to using enslaved people on their plantations, partly because indentured servants wouldn't go because they realised how brutal and tough and horrible work it was.

And you can see here in slides people chopping down sugar cane.

Now some of you, some of my students have, like, eaten raw sugar cane, like sap it and taste how sweet it is.

And this is really really really hard back breaking work, you can see how tooled it is, you can see how brutal it is.

In fact this picture presents quite a rosy view.

But the reality is, this was really really hard work.

And it made people like the Codringtons really really wealthy, and you can see they use some of that money to set up a college in Barbados, but things after a while didn't go quite so well for the Codringtons.

And they moved to another island in the Caribbean, called Antigua and they set up more plantations there and became more and more wealthy by buying enslaved people getting them to work on the sugar plantations and sending that sugar back to England where it was bought by people and they made a big profit.

And with that profit, the Codringtons started to invest money into England.

Now this is the Codrington library in Oxford college called All souls, and the Codringtons used some of their money to buy things like books and libraries and invest put some of that money back into England.

And this college still exists, or this libraries, sorry, still exists today.

So, the first Codrington travelled from England to Barbados began to grow sugar using enslaved people grew very wealthy, moved them to another Caribbean island called Antigua and invested money in England.

Now why I'm particularly interested in the Codringtons as a family is partly because I have a family connection to Antigua.

So some of my family come from Antigua.

And I also have another connection to the Codringtons which is, this is just outside the bus stop that I used to come home from school.

You see at the bus home from school, and I have never realised until this year, that it has a connection to the Codringtons.

So this man is called Sir Edward Codrington and he got money from a plantation in Antigua and he used some of that money to do things like create Codrington mansions.

So, you can hopefully see here how the Codringtons sometimes lived in the Caribbean, but also would live in Britain, and they would invest their money in Britain.

And I'm really interested in this family because of partly I might have family connection to it.

Sometimes I wonder whether some of the Codringtons maybe own some of my ancestors which is quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but I use them as an example, thinking about who lived in British America.

What were their experiences? What did they do with their money? So let's now add some of that detail about the Codrington family to our table.

So pause the video.

Add in some detail.

You might want to go back and I will see you in one moment once you've got some information done.

Welcome back! If you are watching this hopefully you've got some notes down in your table so you might have put the Codringtons as an example of planters in Barbados.

They grew crops like sugar to sell back to Britain.

They owned and sometimes lived on plantations and maybe that's a little bit of a difference potentially to the planters in Virginia.

Planters in Barbados, in the Caribbean, note they.

Some of them didn't live on the plantations.

They got other people to kind of run, them they owned them but they had other people run them while they came and lived back in Britain.

They often became very rich, really wealthy.

They owned large numbers of slaves.

And some of those slaves, in fact, all of those slaves in fact were treated badly with different levels of violence, but a really high proportion of slaves on plantations in Barbados would die within three years I think it might have been about four in 10 on some of the plantations in some of the plantations it might have even been higher.

And they then invested that money back often into Britain.

So we're going to move on now, and we're going to talk about a different family, who are known as the Ashbys.

And I personally don't have any connection to this family.

But this woman, Andrea Stuart who's a historian, she does, in fact she has a very close family link to the Ashbys in that she is related to them.

George Ashby, who was living in the late 1630s is one of her ancestors.

So like great great great great great great great great.

and she did lots of research into her family history.

And she wrote a book about it, 'Sugar in the Blood' which we're going to be using for this lesson, and next lesson.

So one of her ancestors, George Ashby in the late 1630s travelled out to Barbados in the very early days of Barbados being a British colony.

And you can see here on this map is, this is where he originally had his land, and you can see up here, the Codrington's land, so they weren't that far away from each other.

And he arrived and he sought of grown different things, I think, including tobacco, but soon realised that to make money in Barbados, he should switch to sugar, and he began with white indentured servants so bringing people out, maybe people quite similar to Richard Frethorne out to work on his plantations, but over time, he then brought african slaves and having slaves people working on his plantation.

Now he was a little bit different to the Codringtons in that his plantation was smaller and he wasn't as wealthy as the Codringtons at the beginning.

So over time.

Obviously George Ashby had children and then those children had children and eventually we get to this man here, called Robert Cooper Ashby.

So, this is about 150 years later, after George Ashby travelled out from England to travel to Barbados, and about 150 years later, this is one of his descendants Robert Cooper Ashby.

Now Robert Cooper Ashby, he was effectively a sugar baron, and became even wealthier when he married this woman called Mary Burke, in 1794, and he moved to her plantation, her sugar plantation which is called Burkes which you can see it down here so it's a little bit away from the kind of original place that George Ashby had his land.

Now, one of the things I found really interesting about Robert Cooper Ashby was that he had one child who was called john with his wife, Mary Burke, but he also had many many many children with enslaved women on his plantation.

I think I should find out the exact number for you.

But it was I think, it may be around about 20 it was a lot of a lot of children.

Now this really surprised me because I wouldn't have thought that this necessarily would have happened, but it was actually relatively common, and it's in a way how Andrea Stuart is related to this guy, George Ashby.

Now Robert Cooper Ashby was living towards the end of the time of slavery and slavery was abolished in 19.

sorry not in 19, in 1833, and then it came into effect in 1834.

And as part of abolition of slavery and abolition means getting rid of as part of the abolition of slavery, the people who owned enslaved people, so sugar barons like Robert Cooper Ashby or like the codringtons, they got compensation.

So, the British government gave them money.

In return, in effect for them freeing the people who worked on their plantations.

And I managed to total up.

I think he owned around 257 slaves.

And it's from people at UCL who've created this thing called the legacies of British slave ownership and they've kind of created a database.

And I've worked out.

I think he owned about 257 slaves.

And what that meant was that Robert Cooper Ashby was paid almost I think around half a million pounds in today's money.

Now, the people who were enslaved while they've got their freedom, they didn't get any of that money.

So the compensation was paid to sugar barons like Robert Cooper Ashby instead of being paid to the enslaved people themselves.

So we've looked at the Codringtons and we've looked at the Ashby family and so what I would like you to do is to pause the video and add in a little bit more detail, using the story of the Ashby family to your table.

So welcome back, you might have put things along the lines of Codringtons and Ashbys, but added their names in.

Owned large number of slaves who they often had children with, and this was a relatively common thing.

You might have added in something to think about as part of abolition they were compensated for their loss of property.

So, it was the sugar barons, the planters in Barbados who got the money, rather than the enslaved people.

Okay, so we've come to our questions, and I've got the usual five.

Which Caribbean island did we learn about today? Question number one.

Question number two: What crop did planters grow in Barbados? So it wasn't tobacco at this time, what crop was it that made them, the planters wealthy? Number three: Did all of the Codrington family who grew wealthy from their plantations in the Carrib, Caribbean, sorry, did they live there the whole time? Or did they maybe move between the Caribbean and Britain? Who was Robert Cooper Ashby? What can you remember about him? And who did he have children with? So, as normal.

You're going to want to pause the video answer those questions, the best you can, in full sentences with as much detail as possible.

Remember you can use the reading sheets that's on the website, that will give you a bit more of the information that I've sort of talked through, or you could go back replay the slides and take you some of.

Or use your table, right? You've got lots of information on your table that might be able to help you answer these questions.

So I'm going to give you time to do that and I will see you in a few moments.

Once you've answered those questions.

Okay, welcome back! So hopefully you put Barbados, but hopefully you used a capital letter and put it in a full sentence.

Which Caribbean island did we learn about today? Today we learn about Barbados in the Caribbean island.

What crop the planters grow in Barbados? Sugar in Barbados, planters grew sugar and they kind of grew like a few other things but it was sugar that made them the money.

Did all of the Codrington family who grew wealthy from their plantations in the Caribbean live there? No.

So although some of the family lived on that plantation in Barbados, and they travelled between Barbados and England, and they lived sometimes in there or stayed state in their plantation in Antigua, they also lived in England or moved between the two.

And I think that's a slight difference to Virginia, where planters tended to be on their plantations more of the time than the families who grew wealthy in the Caribbean, Who was Robert Cooper Ashby? He was a sugar Baron, that would be a good answer.

Give yourself a tick if you put that.

Or you might have put a bit more information and said: Robert Cooper Ashby owned the Burkes plantation which he gained through his wealthy wife, Mary.

Although they only had one child together, he had multiple children with several of his enslaved women.

He received almost half a million pounds in today's money as part of the abolition of slavery from his ownership of over 250 slaves.

So just giving a bit more detail about Robert Cooper Ashby, this sugar baron.

Who did he have children with? An acceptable answer here would be: His wife and slaves.

A good answer would be: Robert Cooper Ashby had a son with his wife Mary Burke.

He also had multiple children with enslaved women on his plantation, some of whom were very young.

One of his children is the ancestor of historian, Andrea Stuart.

So good job for answering those questions.

Now, as usual, we've got an extension activity.

And this is a true or false.

So, you can read the.

You might have already read the information in the work pack but I would like you to read through that, it's about the link between New England and the Caribbean.

And I want you to write down whether these sentences are true or false.

So the first one is: The colonies in New England made a lot of money from throwing sugar.

Write down whether that is true or false, and do the same for the rest.

Now I'd like you to have a go at the extension activity.

But whether you do or not, make sure you do the 'End of lesson quiz' to check your understanding about today's lesson.

And I look forward to seeing you next time for our final lesson in this Enquiry when we're going to be focusing on the experience of enslaved people in Barbados.

See you soon.