Ronnie Yearwood: America at 250

America at 250: "The American Declaration of Independence, the Barbados Slave Code and Decolonial Constitutionalism" 

The story of the 1776 Declaration of Independence can be read as an account of the continuity of imperialism, rearticulated within a racialized legal order, rather than as an imperial rupture. This order was underpinned by the 1661 Barbados Slave Code, a foundational law that was actively exported from Barbados to the Caribbean and American colonies, which emerged as new centers of global capital and production driven by slavery and the plantation complex. By chronicling the active exportation of the slave constitution from Barbados to mainland America in South Carolina, this essay shows that by 1776, the Barbados Slave Code had already contributed to the development of the racialized Atlantic legal order. A (re)interpretation of the Declaration within the “British world” of Atlantic slavery, specifically focusing on Barbados as “seed crystal” for slave constitutionalism in the Americas, asks us to consider the Declaration’s now mythical claim of universal equality in this context. 

Dr. Ronnie Yearwood is a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies (UWI Cave Hill). He is also the convenor of the Caribbean Public Law and Policy Research Group (CPLP Research Group) at UWI Cavehill.  

This paper forms part of my broader research project on decolonial constitutionalism, and is scheduled for publication in the Journal of British Studies (JBS) in 2026, as a contribution to FORUM 1776: Views from the British World. The JBS notes that, "Timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles  complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.