John Brathwaite Esq.

Slave-owner in Barbados, active in London as agent for the colony and dying in London in 1800.

1. In a List of inhabitants of St Peter, Barbados, 1780, Brathwaite was listed as owning 265 enslaved. Almost certainly the same man as the John Brathwaite who was among the signatories of the 1783 Address to George III by the planters of the West India islands residing in Great Britain and the merchants trading to those islands, and in turn the same man as the John Brathwaite of Barbados residing in St Marylebone whose will was proved in 1800.

2. Will of John Brathwaite of St Marylebone proved 13/10/1800. In the will he left all his estates in the parishes of St Peter, St James and St Andrew called Rock Hall and Four Hills to his great-nephew John Brathwaite Skeete, son of John Brathwaite's nephew John Skeete and grandson of John Brathwaite's sister Elizabeth Skeete. He left his estates in St Philip called Three Houses and Thicketts [sic] in trust for his nephew Miles Brathwaite for life and then to Miles' son, also John.

3. John Brathwaite (or Braithwaite) was the agent for Barbados, 1792-1800 and attended a meeting of the Slave trade sub-committee of the Committee of West India Planters and Merchants in London, 1792.

1. Barbados Department of Archives, RB9/3/6; London Gazette 12422 11/03/1783 p. 2.

2. PROB 11/1348/158.

3. Lillian Penson, The Colonial Agents of the British West Indies (London, 1924), p. 251; Ian J. Barrett, Cultures of Pro-Slavery: the Political Defence of the Slave Trade in Britain c. 1787 to 1807 (unpub. PhD, King’s College London, 2009), Appendix 1.