Thrift, Morality, and Migration in the Barbados Savings Bank

Abstract

There has been little historiographical attention to working-class banking in the Caribbean. This article adds to the scholarship by considering the founding and use of the Barbados Savings Bank by working-class Black Barbadians. Colonial administrators hoped the bank would teach formerly enslaved Barbadians how to properly transition into the free wage labor force and sought to encourage household arrangements dependent on a male breadwinner who would use the bank for long-term savings. Using the new depositor ledgers of the Barbados Savings Bank, I argue that everyday Barbadians instead used this financial institution as a family repository of targeted savings for the purpose of emigration, defying colonial desires of a dependent workforce organized in patriarchal single-income households.