The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America

Abstract

O z N April i, i68o, Sir Jonathan Atkins, governor of Barbados, sent a box full of statistical data about his island to the Plantation Office at Whitehall. This mass of data, filed away among the Colonial Office papers, constitutes the most comprehensive surviving census of any English colony in the seventeenth century.' Indeed, it is a richer store of information than any North American census before the I770's. The Barbados census of i68o was ignored at the time by the Lords of Trade, and it has been ignored ever since by historians of Barbados.2 Nearly a century ago, John Camden Hotten discovered Atkins's data in the Public Record Office and published large sections of it, though for some curious reason he omitted half the parish lists.8 Hotten's interest was genealogical, but the prime value of the Barbados census is economic and social. The detailed lists Governor Atkins sent home demonstrate that there was an elaborately developed social hier-