Caribbean History From
Colonialism to Independence
AM217
David Lambert
Lecture: Racial Slavery
Tuesday 17th November,
11am-12pm
Racial Slavery
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
Enslaved Africans disembarked in
the Americas, 1501-1866
Destination
Number
British Caribbean
2,318,252
French Caribbean
1,120,216
Spanish Caribbean
805,424
Dutch Caribbean
444,728
Danish Caribbean
108,998
Caribbean sub-total 4,797,618
Brazil
4,864,374
Spanish Mainland
487,488
North America
388,747
The Americas - total 10,538,227
% of Caribbean
sub-total
% of total for the
Americas
48.32%
23.35%
16.79%
9.27%
2.27%
100.00%
22.00%
10.63%
7.64%
4.22%
1.03%
45.53%
46.16%
4.63%
3.69%
100.00%
Total of enslaved Africans taken to the Americas = 12,331,637
Enslaved Africans disembarked
in the Americas, 1501-1866
Spanish
Mainland
5%
Brazil
46%
North
America
4%
Caribbean
45%
Enslaved Africans disembarked
in the Caribbean, 1501-1866
Danish
Caribbean
2%
Dutch
Caribbean
9%
Spanish
Caribbean
17%
French
Caribbean
24%
British
Caribbean
48%
Enslaved Africans disembarked
in British Caribbean, 1501-1866
Montserrat/Nevis Trinidad/Tobago
2%
2%
British Guiana
St. Vincent
3%
2%
Dominica
5%
Grenada
6%
Other British
Caribbean
3%
Jamaica
44%
St. Kitts
6%
Antigua
6%
Barbados
21%
Enslaved Africans disembarked in
French Caribbean, 1501-1866
French Guiana
Guadeloupe 3%
7%
French Caribbean
unspecified
2%
Martinique
19%
Saint-Domingue
69%
Volume and direction of the transAtlantic slave trade
Volume and direction of the transAtlantic slave trade
Volume and direction of the transAtlantic slave trade
Slave imports, 1501-1866
450000
400000
350000
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
0
Barbados
Jamaica
Martinique
Saint-Domingue
Cuba
Puerto Rico
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)
Defining race
• A political and social construction, rather than an
biological fact.
• A marker of human difference based on physical
criteria (skin colour, nose shape, type of hair).
• Classifications based on physical criteria are
entangled with value judgements about social
status and moral worth.
• Closely associated with colonialism and
imperialism.
• The body is a key site in racial discourse.
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’ (2002), p. 155.
Another product of
the circum-Atlantic world
[R]acism in its present form is a specific
product of Atlantic history.
J. Chaplin, ‘Race’ (2002), p. 155.
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.
Negative connotations of blackness in
the European imagination
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.
African slaves as cheap labour
Race and slavery
• Blackness did have negative cultural associations in premodern Europe (the psycho-cultural argument).
• Nevertheless, demands for labour were colour blind
during the initial stages of the colonisation of the
Caribbean, e.g. white indentured labourers (the socioeconomic argument).
• Crucially, as more plantation labour was supplied by
enslaved Africans, then being a ‘slave’ and being ‘black’
became intertwined.
Race and slavery
The
practices
of slavery
Ideas
about
race
Practices of slavery and ideas of race
•The whip was the ultimate
emblem of slavery and its use
a sign of racial ideas about
black embodiment.
Race and slavery
• Blackness did have negative cultural associations in premodern Europe (the psycho-cultural argument).
• Nevertheless, demands for labour were colour blind
during the initial stages of the colonisation of the
Caribbean, e.g. white indentured labourers (the socioeconomic argument).
• Crucially, as more plantation labour was supplied by
enslaved Africans, then being a ‘slave’ and being ‘black’
became intertwined.
• In addition, the meaning of blackness changed during the
eighteenth century from the external manifestation of an
internal paganism to becoming itself a source of symbolic
degradation.
• Hence, religious notions of difference are joined by and
later replaced by truly racial ideas of ‘natural’ black
inferiority focused on the body.
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).
Barbados Slave Code (1661)
• Codified earlier less formal
provisions
• Established that enslaved people
were to be treated as chattel
property
• Denied them basic rights under
Common Law
• Granted slaveowners great
powers
• Served as the basis for the slave
codes adopted in other English
colonies: e.g. Jamaica (1664),
South Carolina (1696) and
Antigua (1702)
French Code Noir (1685)
• Slaves had to be baptized
• Specified quantities of food and
clothes to be given to slaves
• Enslaved husbands and wives
(and prepubescent children)
were not to be sold separately
• A slave who struck their master,
his wife, mistress or children
would be executed
• Masters could chain and beat
slaves but may not torture nor
mutilate them
• Masters who killed their slaves
would be punished
Punishment
Populations in the late
century
th
18
100%
90%
80%
70%
Freedpeople
60%
Slaves
50%
40%
Whites
30%
20%
10%
0%
Puerto Rico
Cuba
Martinique
St
Domingue
Jamaica
Barbados
The socio-racial structure of Jamaica
100%
90%
80%
70%
White
60%
50%
Freedpeople
40%
Enslaved
30%
20%
10%
0%
1750
1830
The socio-racial structure of a
Caribbean plantation society, c. 1830
Whites
Free people
of colour
Slaves
Free people of colour:
An ambiguous group
The free coloured population
• Inter-racial sex was a common feature of
Caribbean societies and most ‘mixed-race’ people
remained in slavery
• But, during the eighteenth century, a free non-white
population became increasingly significant
• This initially emerged due to the manumission of
enslaved people by their white owners:
– For favoured servants
– For their children
– For informing on conspirators
• In addition, as some slaves bought their freedom
and it was passed from mother to child, the free
coloured population began to increase naturally
The socio-racial structure of a
Caribbean plantation society, c. 1830
Whites
Free people
of colour
Slaves
Complex racial classifications in
early nineteenth century Jamaica
Free people of colour:
A troubling presence
There is…a third description of people of
whom I am more suspicious of evil than
either the whites or slaves: these are the
Black and Coloured people who are not
slaves, and yet whom I cannot bring myself
to call free.
Letter from the governor of Barbados,
6 June 1802
Free coloureds and the hospitality
sector
Free coloureds in the urban
Caribbean
Restrictions on free people of
colour
• There were limits to their freedom, no matter how
‘white’, across the Caribbean (e.g. they could not
vote, hold public office, serve on juries or give
evidence against whites)
• Many aspects of daily life were also segregated
• Resentment particular acute in French Caribbean
as restrictions contradicted the Code Noir
• Some free coloureds appealed against legal
disadvantages and won personal privileges (e.g.
Jamaica, 1733)
• As the wealth and size of the free coloured
population grew, new legislative restrictions were
introduced (e.g. Jamaica, 1761)
Troubling figures:
Poor whites
Seminar this week:
‘Everyday slavery’
3pm and 4pm
in H3.03 (as usual)