Economic History Society Women’s Committee, 20th Annual Workshop
14th November, 2009, Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation
(WISE), Oriel Chambers, 27 High Street, Kingston upon Hull, HU1 1NE
Free Labour? Women and work in slave and post-slave societies
Abstracts (alphabetical)
Henrice Altink
‘“Because of my sex or any other reason for which I am not responsible”: the freedom
of labour in post-emancipation Jamaica’.
In 1838, some 700,000 slaves in the British Caribbean gained their freedom. Scholars
have argued that emancipation did not free slaves from the plantation. They have
succinctly demonstrated that in the 1840s and 1850s, planters did their utmost to
retain their labour force by, for instance, demanding high rents from the ex-slaves for
their huts and vegetable gardens, which they could only pay by working for their
former masters for wages, and that the ex-slaves adopted various strategies to become
free labourers. This paper tries to broaden the debate about the freedom of labour in
the post-emancipation British Caribbean first by shifting attention away from the
immediate post-emancipation period and male labourers to the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries and women workers, and second, by defining free labour not
as the absence of coercion but as the freedom to choose what work to do. It examines
the complex ways in which gender, race, and class shaped the employment
opportunities of African Jamaican women between the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865
and the labour riots of 1938 that set the island on the road to independence. The paper
is divided into three sections. The first examines the gender, racial and class biases of
the ideals of paid work held up to African Jamaican women by their government,
community leaders and their parents, family and friends. It illustrates that class shaped
the employment opportunities of the women not just as an ideology but also as a
status. The second section lists several other obstacles that African Jamaican women
encountered on the labour market and explores more generally the women’s
engagement with the ideals of paid work held up to them. It is particularly interested
in the strategies that the women adopted to counteract or diminish the factors that
limited their employment opportunities, including migration – both within and outside
of the island – unionisation, and the exploitation of their skin colour and other forms
of what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘symbolic capital’. The final section is a
conclusion which sums up the ways in which ‘sex and other factors’ for which
African Jamaican women were not responsible limited the freedom they had in
undertaking paid work and indicates how their less-than-free labour worked to uphold
male privilege as well as a class/colour hierarchy that placed white Jamaicans at the
top, lower-class black Jamaicans at the bottom, and middle-class brown Jamaicans in
the middle.
Nicholas Evans
‘Responses to the white slave trade in Britain, 1885-1939’
This paper will explore attempts to prevent the trafficking of female migrants to,
through, and from Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Using a comparative approach it will contrast the responses to the threat of white
slavery in London and the country at large by investigating links between criminality,
race and migration in the English speaking world. The lecture will illuminate how
contemporary fears of trafficking flourished following the abolition of Britain's
transatlantic slave trade and how concerns in modern Britain over the trafficking of
females from Eastern Europe replicate historic fears about the world's oldest
profession.
Claire Griffiths
‘Gender, labour and slavery in post abolition French Africa’
While traditional Western gender ideology transfigured every aspect of imperial
society, its legacy in the labour market has been particularly marked. This paper looks
at the way France constructed an administrative-legal complex in Africa post
abolition and how this complex impacted upon the labour force of every town and
village in the colonial territories. Under the indigenat legal system this engagement
was reinforced and created forms of debt bondage to the State which endured into the
1950s. The paper will make a preliminary comparison between the gendered forms of
enslavement experienced by Africans living under French rule post abolition and the
gendering of expatriate African slave labour in the plantation colonies prior to
abolition.
Andrea Nicholson
‘Can the law protect women from slavery and slavery-like practices?’
The social and cultural vulnerability of women makes them particularly susceptible to
slavery and slavery like practices, and has more recently been reflected in judicial
discourse. However, a lack of distinction and conflation of terminology means that
individualised practices, such as debt bondage and forced labour, are often labelled
generically as slavery but may not genuinely attain international standards in the light
of legal definition. Whilst this may be viewed as an exercise in semantics, it raises
serious questions as to the role and value of the law in international discourse on
woman and slavery, particularly in achieving the aims of justice and fair reparation,
and consequentially highlights a perceived ineffectiveness of the law to protect
women from such practices. This paper will seek to place women and labour in the
context of the relevant legal instruments and address the means by which the law may
still valuably contribute to such efforts.
Deborah Oxley
‘Women and Work in the Imperial Prison’.
Punishment of criminals through penal transportation was another of the great
systems of coercive migration practiced by Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Upon arrival in a colony, how ‘free’ was this convict labour? There were two takes
on this question, depending upon the position occupied in colonial society. Felons
would judge their freedom against the workers they left behind, and the slaves found
in many colonies. Convicts were not bought and sold, but their labour was allocated
by government, often to private individuals. Employers wanted ‘free labour’ that did
not cost them anything, but frequently found themselves paying wages. Both
perspectives point to the labour market for resolution of this conundrum of meaning,
with matters often hinging on the payment of a wage. This paper examines the
experience of convict women working in the ‘Imperial Prison’, as the colony of Van
Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, came to be known. It traces the development of
government policy on the use of convict labour, identifying the different dynamics
governing attitudes to female convicts. The paper then reports on an empirical study
of the operation of the convict labour market in the later period of Probation. It
explores the ways in which gender, ethnicity and human capital brought from Great
Britain influenced the working lives of convict women in Tasmania. The analysis is
based on wages and conditions recorded in 17,997 convict employment contracts,
nominally linked with shipping data and convict indents.
Gemma Romain
‘Petitioning, protest, and women’s labour in Grenada during the Apprenticeship
Period’.
This paper examines the economic and social lives of formerly enslaved women in the
island of Grenada during the apprenticeship period of 1834-1838. It explores the ways
in which women sought to engage in the political process in order to assert freedoms
and gain economic and social rights during the transition from slavery to freedom.
Specifically, I examine the experiences of Grenadian women who were domestic
labourers (non-praedials), and who protested against planters' decisions to label them
falsely as field labourers (praedials) in order to gain from them two further years of
unfree labour. I then consider the actions of planters and magistrates in response to
these protests and also reactions to the planters from both praedial and non-praedial
labourers and abolitionists in Britain. Finally, I contextualise these actions within the
wider socio-economic experience of apprenticed women during this transition period.
Suzanne Schwarz
‘Identity and encounter: the role of women in Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries’.
This paper focuses on how former slaves resettled in Sierra Leone adapted to a new
economic, cultural and social environment. Their interaction with European
administrators and indigenous groups sheds light on conflicting expectations of race
and gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
Simon D. Smith & Martin Forster
‘Surviving slavery: mortality at Mesopotamia, a Jamaican sugar estate, 1762-1832’
We use survival analysis to study the mortality experience of 1,111 slaves living on
the British West Indian sugar plantation of Mesopotamia for seven decades prior to
the Emancipation Act of 1833. Using three different concepts of analysis time and
employing non-parametric and semi-parametric models, our results suggest that
female slaves first observed under Joseph Foster Barham II’s period of ownership
(1790-1832) faced an increased hazard of death compared with his predecessor
Joseph Foster Barham I. We find no such relationship for males. We cite as a possible
explanation the employment regime operated by JFB II, which allocated increasing
numbers of females to gang labour in the cane fields. A G-estimation model used to
compensate for the ‘healthy worker effect’ estimates that continuous exposure to such
work reduced survival times by between 20 and 40 percent. Our findings are
compared with previous studies of Mesopotamia and related to the wider literature
investigating the roles of fertility and mortality in undermining the sustainability of
Caribbean slave populations.