Small Islands, Large Questions

Society, Culture and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean

Karen Fog Olwig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135211059
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on the post-emancipation period in the Caribbean and how local societies dealt with the new socio-economic conditions. Scholars from Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, England, Denmark and The Netherlands link this era with the contemporary Caribbean.

Part I

Introduction and Historiography

Introduction: Emancipation and Its Consequences

KAREN FOG OLWIG

The post-emancipation era was a formative time for the Caribbean societies of today. Yet it remains little examined: the social sciences have concentrated mainly on present-day societies, whereas historical research has largely been devoted to slavery. The long post-emancipation period, when local societies adjusted to the social and economic conditions of a free labour force and the emancipated attempted to create a new life of their own, has not been subject to similarly extensive and rigorous research.

Small Islands, Large Questions seeks to remedy this gap in Caribbean research.¹ Our particular focus is on the English-speaking Leeward Islands, whose small size makes them especially well suited to case studies of the economic, social, and cultural processes which link the pre-emancipation and the contemporary Caribbean. The regional variation displayed by the individual islands, furthermore, makes them a good starting point for comparative analysis. The authors in this volume, who represent a wide range of disciplines, notably history, geography, and anthropology, have all carried out extensive research in the Caribbean. They share a common interest in discussing their work in a broader regional context and from an interdisciplinary point of view.

Post-emancipation historiography, as Barry Higman suggests, has tended to highlight the transformation of the slave population into a free labour force and to focus narrowly on the social and economic ramifications this change had for the sugar plantations. The freed slaves have thus been largely reduced to the status of workers, and their widespread attempts to acquire land on which to settle have been examined mainly as a threat to the existing plantation systems. The chapters in this book transcend these issues in order to examine the emergence of patterns of life significant for the development of contemporary Caribbean societies.

It is difficult to see how the abolition of slavery gave West Indians of African descent true emancipation, if we take as our point of departure the definition of the verb ‘to emancipate’: ‘to free from restraint, control, or the power of another; esp. to free from bondage’ (Webster 1965). As the writers in this volume amply document, the institution of slavery was largely replaced by subjugation that was indirect yet almost as coercive. Access to land was limited throughout the Caribbean, even in islands with considerable uncultivated land, as Riva Berleant-Schiller shows in her chapter on Montserrat. Strict new labour laws on post-emancipation St. Croix in the Danish West Indies, as detailed by George Tyson, drove the emancipated labourers off the plantations and led to the importation of contract workers from abroad. The cultural barriers that commonly restricted social and economic mobility are analysed in Susan Lowes’s chapter on Antigua and mine on Nevis.

It is easier to grasp the realities of emancipation, however, if the primary etymological definition of ‘to emancipate’ is used: ‘to release from paternal care and responsibility and make sui juris’ (ibid.). With emancipation the former slaves were made legal persons who had to fend for themselves. This book instances numerous examples of the removal of the privileges slaves had previously had under the care of their owners. Tyson and Berleant-Schiller illustrate how emancipation abrogated the customary right to cultivate provision grounds on estate land, removed access to free food and medical care, and curtailed rudimentary support for education.

In summary, the emancipated were expected to have legal capacity as independent citizens while the informal customary rights which they had formerly received now had to be paid for by deductions in wages. Simultaneously they were placed under severe restraint and control by the plantocracy, leaving them with a narrow social and economic base from which to exercise the legal rights of free citizens. The social and economic problems experienced by the freed were exacerbated where contract labourers were imported to replace the native labour force. This was the case on St. Croix, as George Tyson shows, where labourers from the British West Indies were used on the sugar plantations. The presence of a large foreign labour force played an important role in the uprising that broke out there in 1868. Similar forms of violent resistance against the planter regimes occurred in many other West Indian societies at this time; Gad Heuman reviews some of these riots and disturbances in the post-emancipation Caribbean. He concludes that the contradictory expectations of freedom held by the ruling class and by the emancipated were largely responsible for the violence.

The emancipated sought to define a new life for themselves during a period of social turmoil and economic decline characterized by periodic outbreaks of unrest. They did not start from a tabula rasa. As Jean Besson notes, the Caribbean peasantries that emerged after abolition built on agricultural traditions developed among slaves since the early days of colonization. To understand how ex-slaves sought to carve out lives of their own, we must look at the strategies for freedom they had adopted during slavery.

Paradoxically, one of the most important avenues toward freedom was exploitation of the ‘paternal care and responsibility’ owners had extended to their slaves. Many slave ‘privileges’ – cultivating marginal land on the plantations, selling surplus produce at markets, time off from work to produce subsistence crops and care for children – had been cost-free means of fulfilling owners’ legal obligations to their slaves. For the slaves, however, these means became ‘interstices’ in the plantation system (Mintz 1985), which allowed a modicum of emancipation – that is, release ‘from restraint, control, or the power of another’. But ex-slaves’ attempts to appropriate such crevices as places where they might establish their own communities were resisted by the planters, who feared that such settlements would expand to engulf the whole plantation system. The nature of the struggle for cultural autonomy and social recognition in the face of restraints and controls imposed by the plantation regimes is an important theme in this book.

The special case of the former free coloured is discussed by Lowes in her article on the non-white elite of Antigua. Their position as privileged intermediaries between the mass of black slaves and the white upper class became untenable after emancipation. Planters, fearing the growing numbers and wealth of the former free coloured, erected economic, political, and social barriers against them. Unwilling to make common cause with the lower classes, the non-white elite finally opted to emigrate, thus imposing voluntary exile upon themselves.

While the plantocracies successfully resisted the threat to their hegemony which they saw emanating from local non-white elites, they were unable to withstand the multitude of strategies devised by the emancipated slaves to establish niches with some measure of cultural autonomy. Most important were the various means by which the emancipated gained access to land as small farmers. As Berleant-Schiller documents for Montserrat, access to land included ‘slavery-like’ tenancy-at-will agreements where rights to housing and provision grounds were granted in return for labour, métayer arrangements where a portion of the crop was exchanged for use of the land, squatting on uncultivated land, and ownership of land acquired through purchase. All these arrangements led to the establishment of a peasantry which in the long run managed to wrest control from the plantocracy. As on most islands, peasant farming did not provide a sufficient economic basis for the growing population, and migration therefore also became an important alternative for the lower classes.

Behind these various patterns of land use and land holdings in late nineteenth century Caribbean societies lay a common desire to establish spheres of autonomy based on kinship and community. Besson focuses on the development of the institution of family land, shared by generations of kinfolk. Since plots were often too small to sustain the large kin networks having rights in them, family land served not primarily as the physical loci of these kin-based communities but as symbolic loci of cultural roots and a sense of belonging, even in absentia for far-flung migrants.

In the post-emancipation era, the freed were forced to establish lives of their own by drawing on resources controlled by different segments of the population. Most of the land continued to be owned by the planters; education, and hence access to civil service posts, was in the hands of the church; the more informal social and economic relations of everyday life were embedded in the African-Caribbean communities. The cultural implications of this are discussed in my chapter on Nevis, which delineates three co-existing ‘cultural traditions’ identified with distinct cultural values and social practices. These cultural traditions were associated with the different segments of the population that controlled the different social and economic resources on the island. Most persons therefore had to deal with several contradictory cultural traditions in various contexts of their lives, leading to cultural patterns of considerable complexity. Such complexity is particularly apparent in cultural institutions, where elements of the various traditions are brought together and reinterpreted.

Frustrated expectations resulting from an emancipation which codified individual independence and responsibility but imposed an array of restraints led to emigration. Elizabeth Thomas-Hope sees in migration a continuation of old patterns of marronage. During slavery, marronage had been the illegal running away from the plantations with no possibility of return. An important result of emancipation, therefore, was the legalization of marronage, so that both movement away and movement back were possible. Migration became central in the Caribbean not as a way of escaping from and abandoning the island of birth with all its restraints and contradictions, but as a means of acquiring the capital needed to realize hopes and aspirations connected with life there.

Most of the themes discussed in this book are relevant throughout the post-emancipation Caribbean. The struggle for improved working conditions, land, and education has been central to popular concerns. However, smallness and marginality make the Leeward Islands particularly poignant cases of the difficulty of exercising newly won freedom in a period of economic decline and increasing external control, as David Lowenthal makes clear in the concluding chapter. The emancipated, of necessity, deployed multiple economic strategies. They developed extensive kin networks and migrated to distant destinations. They also, however, established a tradition of small farming on the islands and formed descent groups rooted in family land which provided the basis for a strong attachment to place.

The post-emancipation era was characterized by a number of different, even contradictory, developments involving the freed in social and economic relations with a local as well as a global dimension. The ability to absorb the contradictions of freedom may well be one of the most important legacies of emancipation for modern Caribbean societies.

REFERENCES

Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. ‘From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean’. In Caribbean Contours, S. W. Mintz and Sally Price (eds.), 127–53. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary. 1965. Springfield, Mass.: G. C. Merriam.

NOTE

1. Small Islands, Large Questions began as a workshop, organized by Poul Olsen of the Danish National Archives and myself. The seminar, held in Magleås, near Copenhagen, in August 1992, offered an opportunity for scholars from the Caribbean, North America, and Europe to spend three days discussing the post-emancipation era in the Caribbean, with special focus on the Leeward Islands. A generous grant from the Carlsberg Foundation made the seminar and book possible. I would like to thank David Lowenthal, Mary Alice Lowenthal, and Kenneth Olwig for their comments and editorial assistance.

Small Islands, Large Questions: Post-Emancipation Historiography of the Leeward Islands

B. W. HIGMAN

SMALL ISLANDS

The Leewards constitute a true archipelago, a sea studded with islands. Unlike most other parts of the Caribbean, a person on the shore of one island can often see one or more other islands across the water, and from the islands’ moderate summits a larger number come into view. This picture of the world carries the possibility of distinctly different readings: one emphasizes the unity derived from the encompassing sea, another the fragmentation resulting from the separateness of the land masses. These contradictory yet co-existent archipelagic principles have continuing significance for issues of territoriality and sovereignty (Maula 1981:12–13). They also provide metaphors and models for Caribbean history at large (Brathwaite 1974:64), in the same way that the archipelago has sometimes been seen as an allegory for a fragmented Earth (Rand 1981:34–48).

Equally important in defining the primary characteristics of the Leewards is the relative smallness of the islands. In the Leeward zone, defined here to comprise all the islands stretching from Vieques to Montserrat,¹ the largest unit is Antigua (280 km²), ‘a small place’ for its own people (Kincaid 1988) and smaller than the smallest of the Windward group, Tobago (295 km²). Smallness in itself has played a vital role in determining the character of economic and social development for the islands and has done much to ensure a stronger persistence of the colonial relationship than elsewhere in the Caribbean (Royle 1992; Clarke 1971).

The smallness of the islands and their archipelagic pattern are defining characteristics and determining variables in the history of the Leewards, yet they fail to impose homogeneity on the region. Variations in resources resulting from differences in topography, soils, and climate have created a wide range of land-use patterns and settlement types. In other parts of the Caribbean such diversity tends to occur within the bounds of a particular island, but in the Leewards a single settlement pattern often encompasses an entire island. Thus the potential for separate identity, based on geographical insularity, has been strongly supported by unique systems of land use, perceptions of environmental difference, and concepts of community. These sources of variation in historical experience overlap differences in political relationships, particularly in imperial terms (Goveia 1965:52–53; D. Hall 1971:1; Lewis 1972:ix–x). It may be argued that these differences matter less than the variables associated with local physical factors, but the consequences of imperial fragmentation are certainly important for the development of the historiography of the region.

In the broader Caribbean context, the Leewards may be seen as a laboratory within a laboratory, a sample of small-scale experiments in social engineering consequent on the ending of slavery. Contemporaries and later historians attached particular importance to the outcome of emancipation in the Leewards for a variety of reasons, but most obviously because of the presence of Antigua within the region. For the metropolitan powers, from whence came the majority of the historiographers, Antigua (which skipped the apprenticeship and m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Part I Introduction and Historiography
• Part II Society and Culture
• Part III Migration and Resistance
• Part IV Postscript
• Notes on Contributors
• Index