By the mid-1630s, the takeoff of Virginia as a tobacco-growing colony and the relatively poor quality of the Barbados crop combined to foreclose early dreams of tobacco-driven wealth on the island. The pressure from Virginia on Barbados’s tobacco earnings, however, coincided with a strong upward movement in the price fetched by sugar, propelled in part by continued instability in Brazil, where the rivalry between Holland and Portugal over control of the South Atlantic raged on. The confluence of these two factors set the stage for sugar’s historic takeoff on Barbados.
