Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 16801834 is one of the first specialised treatments of an Anglophone Caribbean port-town by a contemporary historian. Having adeptly mined the existing archival data and statistics on Bridgetown, Pedro Welch shares with readers these nuggets of information that contribute immensely to our understanding of the way slave societies functioned in the Caribbean. The book shows how life in the urban slave society departed significantly from that of the rural plantation. There is considerable evidence indicating that slaves and freed persons...