Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence AM217 Lecture 6: Racial slavery One of the most important ‘inputs’ to the Caribbean plantation system was, of course, labour, particularly unfree labour. In this lecture we will consider the slave trade and the systems of slavery it supplied, as well as the broad social patterns it created. We will also look at those social groups, including so-called free people of colour, who did not seem to fit in with the dominant racial patterns of freedom and unfreedom. Please note: in this lecture we will discuss an infamous example of racist discourse from the late eighteenth century (the final quotation in this handout). The language is highly objectionable, especially when we read it today, but we need to tackle this stuff directly. I apologise for any offence caused. Lecture structure 1. The ‘Middle Passage’ – the other side of the ‘sugar revolution’ 2. Race and slavery 3. Race in Caribbean plantation societies i. Pseudo-scientific racial discourse ii. Socio-racial structures iii. Free people of colour: An ambiguity Number enslaved Africans disembarked in the Americas, 1501-1866 Destination British Caribbean French Caribbean Spanish Caribbean Dutch Caribbean Danish Caribbean Caribbean total Brazil Spanish Mainland North America Americas total % of Caribbean % of total for the sub-total Americas 2,318,252 48.32% 22.00% 1,120,216 23.35% 10.63% 805,424 16.79% 7.64% 444,728 9.27% 4.22% 108,998 2.27% 1.03% 4,797,618 100.00% 45.53% 4,864,374 46.16% 487,448 4.63% 388,747 3.69% 10,538,187 100.00% Number Total of enslaved Africans taken to the Americas = 12,331,637 Source: ‘The Trans-altantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed 3/11/15) 1 Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence AM217 ‘Volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade from all African to all American regions’, ‘The Trans-altantic Slave Trade Database’, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/intro-maps.faces (accessed 13/11/12) High plantation death rates Deaths exceeded births on the West Indian plantations from the sixteenth century on, and the slave trade supplied the deficit. The migration of the slaves was not, therefore, a one-time event. The plantations needed a continuous supply of a new labour, if only to remain the same size. P. Curtin, The rise and fall of the plantation complex (1990) Race and the body [T]he definitive and insidious feature of racism [is]…its grounding in the human body and in lineage, which thus defines it as inescapable, a non-negotiable attribute that predicts socio-political power or lack of power. This idea has a relatively recent history…It was not until the eighteenth century that race took on a consistently judgmental connotation, indicating differences among peoples meant to describe superiority and inferiority and implying an inheritance of status that was inescapable. J. Chaplin, ‘Race’ in Armitage and Braddick, eds, The British Atlantic world (2002), p. 155. 2 Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence AM217 The psycho-cultural argument In the writings of several of the church fathers of western Christendom…the colour black began to acquire negative connotations, as the colour of sin and darkness…The symbolism of light and darkness was probably derived from astrology, alchemy, Gnosticism and forms of Manichaeism; in itself it had nothing to do with skin colour, but in the course of time it did acquire that connotation. Black became the colour of the devil and demons. Jan Pieterse, White on black (1992), p. 24. The socio-economic argument Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically an economic phenomenon. Slavery was not born of racism: rather racism was the consequence of slavery. Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan…Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor…The features of the man…his ‘subhuman’ characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: the colonies needed labor… Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (1944), pp 7, 19, 20. Pseudo-scientific racial discourse The Negro’s faculties of smell are truly bestial, nor less their commerce with the other sexes; in these acts they are libidinous and shameless as monkeys, or baboons. The equally hot temperament of their women has given probability to the charge of their admitting these animals frequently to their embrace. An example of this intercourse once happened, I think, in England…Ludicrous as it may seem I do not think that an orang-utan husband would be any dishonour to an Hottentot female [a woman from southern Africa]. [The orang-utan] has in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negro race than the latter bear to white men. Edward Long, The history of Jamaica (1774), volume 2, pp 364, 383. 3