JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 130.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-* Mr. Dunn is a member of the Department of History, University of Pennsylvania. Research for this article was supported by grants from the University of Pennsylvania and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Richard Ford's New Map of the Island of Barbadoes is reproduced, almost exactly full-size, from the copy in the Blathwayt Atlas, by the kind permission of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University. I The Barbados census of i68o is filed in Colonial Office Group, Class i, Piece 44, I42-379, Public Record Office. Hereafter cited as C. 0. I/44 (microfilm I038:6-7, University of Pennsylvania Library). It is described inadequately in W. Noel Sainsbury and J. W. Fortescue, eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, i677-I68o (London, i896), #I336. Hereafter cited as Cal. S. P. Col. 2Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625-,685 (Oxford, I926), 239, mentioned the census but made no use of it. 3 John Camden Rotten, ed., The Original Lists of Persons of Quality . . . and Others Who Went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, s6oo-I7oo (London, i874), 347-508. Hotten printed the list of householders in Bridgetown; 5 of the ii parish lists of landholders (St. Michael, St. George, St. Andrew, Christchurch, and St. James); 5 of the ii parish baptismal and burial registers (St. Michael, St. George, Christchurch, St. James, and St. John); and the list of persons ticketed to leave Barbados in i679. But he omitted the lists of landholders in 6 parishes (St. ); the militia rolls for the 8 regiments on the island; and the lists of judges, councilors, and assemblymen. This content downloaded from 130.
