Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, shared a platform with Esther Phillips, the island’s poet laureate, at the London School of Economics earlier this month. It was an evening of emotionally charged history as well as politics. Ms Phillips read from her poems about slavery; Ms Mottley spoke about the challenges facing the Caribbean and colonialism’s myriad legacies.
For two centuries, Barbados was at the centre of the hugely profitable British sugar trade along with Jamaica and other islands. Built on the backs of enslaved men, women and children, and continued under the exploitative conditions of indentured labour for decades afterwards, the plantation system cast deep shadows from which the islands have struggled to escape. People in the Caribbean, says the historian Matthew Smith, are always thinking about this history in relation to the way they are now.
