By Eleanor Shearer, The Guardian
Friday, December 12, 2025
Luxury tourism in the Caribbean sells a kind of timelessness. A paradise of sun, sea and sand. But to step off the cruise ship or away from the all-inclusive resort is to see a more complex picture: a history of colonialism and a future of climate devastation. New research from the Common Wealth thinktank maps how, over the 400 years since the first English ships arrived in Barbados, empire engineered a system of wealth extraction that shapes the tourism economies of today.
Sir Hilary Beckles, Barbadian historian and chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, describes Barbados as the birthplace of British slave society. Between 1640 and 1807, Britain transported about 387,000 enslaved west Africans to the island. Extraordinary violence, from whippings to amputations and executions, were a regular feature of their lives. On the Codrington Plantation in the mid-18th century, 43% of the enslaved died within three years of their arrival. Life expectancy at birth for an enslaved person on the island was 29 years old. This was the incalculable human cost of the transatlantic slave economy.
On the back of this suffering was built extraordinary wealth for European colonial powers… These geographies of production left a lasting mark on the Caribbean, long after the collapse of the sugar industry. Islands such as Barbados now have a “rebranded plantation economy built for leisure instead of sugar”, says Fiona Compton, a St Lucian artist, historian and founder of the Know Your Caribbean platform. She highlights how most of the region’s hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines and booking platforms aren’t owned locally. For every dollar spent in the Caribbean, 80 cents will end up overseas, thanks to large foreign firms repatriating their profits…
