In 1625 English sailors landed on the island of Barbados. They found an uninhabited island and claimed it for Britain. The place where the sailors landed is the town of Holetown today. The first settlers from England arrived two years later in 1627. They established a local House of Assembly which largely ruled the British colony. The main industry was sugar. The island became divided into huge estates called plantation. Slaves were imported from Africa to work the sugar fields until slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1834. The economy remained heavily dependent on sugar, rum, and molasses production through most of the 20th century. The gradual introduction of social and political reforms in the 1940s and 1950s led to complete independence from the UK in 1966. In the 1990s, tourism and manufacturing surpassed the sugar industry in economic importance.
The Geography of Barbados
Total Size: 431 square km
Size Comparison: 2.5 times the size of Washington, DC
