Barbados was part of the original Virginia Charters. Ships bound for the American colonies would often first land at Barbados as it was one of the natural destinations for the trade winds that brought the ships from England to the Colonies. From here they would travel up the coast to their destination. The return trip to Europe required the the East bound winds above the tropic of cancer, the ships would sail farther North to catch these winds. It is all to common for us today to severely underestimate the importance of Barbados in the colonization of Virginia. Beginning before 1650 there was a mass exodus of the over 40,000 English settlers to Virginia and The Carolinas, but this island has a rich history prior to the routine of the Bristol ships.

The first inhabitants on Barbados were Amerindians, who first set foot there about 4,000 years ago. They were already gone when the first Europeans arrived in 1536. The first Europeans to find the island were the Portuguese, who named it 'Los Barbados', translated as the bearded ones, after the Bearded Fig trees (A Ficus) which grew on the beaches, they also left behind some wild pigs. The wild pigs bred successfully and provided meat for the first English settlers. The Portuguese had opted not to settle on the island.

The Olive Blossom, carrying the first English settlers arrived in 1625 with colonists and supplies for their new settlement. They took possession of the island in the name of King James. They landed on what is now known as Holetown, St. James Parish. The new arrivals did not stay but returned to England to make their report and arrangements were made for another group to settle the island. Arriving on February 17th, 1627, the eighty new settlers brought with them ten Negroes to be used as slaves. The first town was named Jamestown (later known as Holetown) and elected William Dean to be their govenor.

King Charles I gave the Earl of Carlisle permission to colonize the island and it was his appointed Governor, Henry Hawley, who in 1639 founded the House of Assembly. Within a few years, there were upwards of 40,000 white settlers, mostly small farmers, and equivalent in number to about one percent of the total population of England at this period. After the 'sugar revolution' of the 1650s most of the white population left for the mainland Colonies. For the rest of the colonial period sugar was king, and the island was dominated by a small group of whites who owned the estates, the 'plantocracy'.

The majority of the population today is descended from African slaves who were brought in to work on the plantations; but there is a substantial mixed-race population, and there has always been a small number of poor whites, particularly in the east part of the island. Many of these are descended from 100 prisoners transported in 1686 after the failed Monmouth rebellion and Judge Jeffrey's 'Bloody Assizes'.

Due to the failure of cotton and tobacco, the planters were forced to choose another crop. Thus in 1637 the planters imported sugar cane plants from Brazil, a move that was to shape the future of Barbados for the centuries ahead. The climate and geology of Barbados provided ideal growing conditions for sugar cane and the planters prospered accordingly. One acre of land produced 3 times as much sugar as cotton and so the value of land rocketed, thus making the big landowners very wealthy indeed.

The sugar economy that the British introduced survived the abolition of slavery in 1834, and for a time Barbados served as the administrative capital of the Windward Islands. Barbados became a separate colony of Britain in 1885 and an independent associated state of the Commonwealth in 1966. Today the population is 80% descendants of the African slaves.