Barbados

Barbados developed the earliest successful sugar industry and slave society in the English Caribbean. Its 2014 submission to UNESCO dates the sugar and rum economy from 1643 and states that the sugar process condemned the enslaved Africans who raised the crop to lifelong physical and psychological abuse. All the plantations in the proposed heritage landscape used enslaved labour, and the Newton enslaved burial ground is among its sites.

Richard Ligon, on the island from 1647 to 1650, described the still-houses where sugar skimmings were distilled into "kill-devil", and enslaved Africans working the boiling house day and night. The UNESCO text calls the drink "killdevil" or "rumbuillion", "today known as rum". Settlers from Barbados later took plantation slavery to Carolina and Suriname.

In November 2024 Barbados rum still had no geographical indication. A proposal backed by Foursquare, St Nicholas Abbey and Mount Gay would require ageing in Barbados with local water, pot and column stills only and no added sugar; West Indies Rum Distillery, which ages some of its Barbadian rum in France, disagreed.