|
Caribbean Islands The Post-Emancipation Societies
The second great watershed in Caribbean history resulted from
the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century. In the British
Caribbean this came between 1834, when a law was passed by the
British Parliament to abolish slavery throughout the empire, and
1838, when the apprenticeship system collapsed prematurely. The
apprenticeship system was designed to ease the transition from
slavery to freedom by forcing the ex-slaves to remain on their
plantations for a period of six years. Its main purpose was to
prevent the immediate large-scale abandonment of estates by the
workers, although, with cruel irony, it was the masters and not the
slaves who were awarded compensation for the loss of their
"property." The system proved too cumbersome to administer and was
prematurely terminated in 1838. Barbados and Antigua abolished
slavery without an apprenticeship system in 1834.
Abolition of slavery was difficult for the colonies, which had
to adjust to having a majority of new citizens who could not be
denied the civil rights already grudgingly extended to the few.
Extending those civil rights, then as now, was neither easily nor
gracefully achieved because the political systems had existed for
centuries as the narrow instruments of the small, white, landed
elite, largely absentee, whose members were threatened by the
removal of their special trade preferences. Above all, there were
economic difficulties. Sugar prices were falling, and West Indian
producers were facing severe competition not only from other
producers in the British empire--such as India, South Africa, and
Australia--and nonimperial cane sugar producers--such as Cuba and
Brazil--but also from beet sugar producers in Europe and the United
States. Falling prices coincided with rising labor costs,
complicated by the urgent need to regard the ex-slaves as wage
laborers able and willing to bargain for their pay.
To mitigate labor difficulties, the local assemblies were
encouraged to import nominally free laborers from India, China, and
Africa under contracts of indenture. Apart from the condition that
they had a legally defined term of service and were guaranteed a
set wage, these Asian indentured laborers were treated like the
African slaves they partially replaced in the fields and factories.
Between 1838 and 1917, nearly half a million East Indians (from
British India) came to work on the British West Indian sugar
plantations, the majority going to the new sugar producers with
fertile lands. Trinidad imported 145,000; Jamaica, 21,500; Grenada,
2,570; St. Vincent, 1,820; and St. Lucia, 1,550. Between 1853 and
1879, British Guiana imported more than 14,000 Chinese workers,
with a few going to some of the other colonies. Between 1841 and
1867, about 32,000 indentured Africans arrived in the British West
Indies, with the greater number going to Jamaica and British
Guiana. With important British politicians such as Prime Minister
William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) owning sugar estates in British
Guiana, that colony, directly administered by the crown, assumed
great importance in the Caribbean.
Indentured labor did not resolve the problems of the
plantations and the local governments in the Caribbean during the
nineteenth century, but it enabled the sugar plantations to weather
the difficulties of the transition from slave labor. The new
immigrants further pluralized the culture, the economy, and the
societies. The East Indians introduced rice and boosted the local
production of cacao (the bean from which cocoa is derived) and
ground provisions (tubers, fruits, and vegetables). Although some
East Indians eventually converted to Christianity and intermarried
with other ethnic groups, the majority remained faithful to their
original Hindu and Muslim beliefs, adding temples and mosques to
the religious architecture of the territories. The Chinese moved
into local commerce, and, by the beginning of the twentieth
century, the corner Chinese grocery store and the Chinese
restaurant had become commonplace in all the colonies.
Emancipation of the slaves provided the catalyst for the rise
of an energetic, dynamic peasantry throughout the Caribbean. A
large proportion of the ex-slaves settled in free villages, often
forming cooperatives to buy bankrupt or abandoned sugar estates.
Where they lacked the capital, they simply squatted on vacant lands
and continued the cultivation of many of the food crops that the
planters and the colonial government had exported during the days
of slavery.
The villages, although largely independent, provided a
potential labor pool that could be attracted to the plantations.
The growth of these free villages immediately after the
emancipation of the slaves was astonishing. In Jamaica, black
freeholders increased from 2,014 in 1838 to more than 7,800 in 1840
and more than 50,000 in 1859. In Barbados, where land was scarcer
and prices higher, freeholders of less than 2 hectares each
increased from 1,110 in 1844 to 3,537 in 1859. In St. Vincent,
about 8,209 persons built their own homes and bought and brought
under cultivation over 5,000 hectares between 1838 and 1857. In
Antigua, 67 free villages with 5,187 houses and 15,644 inhabitants
were established between 1833 and 1858. The free villages produced
new crops such as coconuts, rice, bananas, arrowroot, honey, and
beeswax, as well as the familiar plantation crops of sugarcane,
tobacco, coffee, cacao, citrus limes, and ground provisions.
Data as of November 1987
|
