Tourism as Coloniality: Legal Infrastructures of Exploitation in Barbados

This article explores the relationship between tourism development and the colonial legal inheritance of Barbados. While tourism is routinely framed as the island’s post-independence success story, the statutory regime that governs it tells a more complicated tale. Drawing on a critical legal-historical approach, the paper traces how legislation—from the Hotel Aids Act of 1956 to the Tourism Development Act of 2002 and the long-standing Land Acquisition Act—preserves the priorities and hierarchies of the plantation economy. These laws extend advantages to foreign investors, facilitate land dispossession and entrench patterns of dependency that echo earlier forms of colonial rule. By situating these statutes within broader debates on the “coloniality of law”, the analysis shows how political independence left intact a legal imagination more attuned to property, order and external capital than to equity or community empowerment. The article concludes by outlining elements of a decolonial legal strategy that centres collective rights, environmental stewardship and democratic participation in the design of future tourism policy.