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)
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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.
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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.
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