Lecture, Session 3

Discussion of Mintz

The Caribbean as a Social-Cultural Area (continued)

Slave Trade

For nearly 400 years, the largest known forced migration of human beings was carried out between Africa and the New World.  From our last lecture, we know that this was conducted by core European countries, for their own economic benefits.  Plantation agriculture, as we have seen, was instrumental to the growth of capitalism.

Slave Trade existed legally between 1518 and 1860.  During the 16th century, about 75,000 slaves were brought to the Caribbean, and 50,000 to Brazil. The Portuguese were first to use slaves on sugar plantations in Brazil.  In the 1520's, sugar cane from Asia was carried by Islamic invaders to Europe.  It was a luxury food for nobility and also used in medicines.  Like other commodities that were produced by slave labor in the Americas to reproduce working class products, sugar cane began as a luxury item that was transformed into a necessity for the masses: sweetened tea and bread and jam.  It was also related to a decline in local production of complex carbohydrate grains and a huge increase in bread consumption–-another sign of declining nutrition. Sugar cultivation has long been associated with slavery, a pattern that remains true, even today, in areas including the US (where sugar cane workers--Caribbean citizens--work in Florida) and in the Dominican Republic (where Haitian semi-slaves work for meager wages). 

Sugar spread to the rest of the Caribbean throughout the 16th and 17th centuries as other European powers (Portugal, France, Britain) entered into conquest and colonization of the New World.  Tremendously profitable, and therefore dubbed the new "silver"--after Spain's prior source of wealth (at this point, in decline).  Sugar transformed the entire scene--both locally and globally.  A new class of petits blancs (poor whites) moved into marginal areas.  Barbados stands as a prominent example of the effect of sugar cane on economic structure.  In the early 1700s, Barbados had a relatively large white population.  The entrance of big sugar into Barbados at end of the century caused a wholesale exodus of small farmers toward North America.

By the end of the 18th century, St. Domingue was called the “Pearl of the Antilles.”  It was the source of two-thirds of French commercial interests.  Nearly four-fifths of Britain's financial support came from outside the island.  There began a conquest for control of the New World periphery.

Conquest and control of the New World periphery

Conquest and control of the New World hinged on control of labor supply.  Expansion was predicated on use of unfree labor.  This led to the enslavement of native populations and use of European indentured servants.   Indentured service--a contractual relationship of servitude--was common.  However, 8/10 of indentured servants died or left before service ended (as high a rate of mortality as in slavery).  In this system, legal discrimination was based on race. 

As a plantation society, the production of sugar cane expanded throughout the Caribbean.  The volume of Africans entering the region increased dramatically.  Estimates of those who came range from 1.4 million in the seventeenth century to 6 million in the 18th century and declining to 2 million in the 19th century.  The industry of sugar production began with the Portuguese.  However, by the early 17th century, the Dutch had taken over as primary commercial competitors.  The Dutch did not specialize in primary production, but rather in supplying the producers with capital, supplies and labor.

The use of slaves in North America took root more slowly.  The first slaves arrived in 1619 in Jamestown, VA, one hundred years after they had in the Caribbean.  The first groups tended to be treated more as indentured servants (almost 30% were free by 1660's).  Until the late 17th century, the British West Indies supplied most slaves to American colonies.  Later, slaves were transported directly from Africa.

Slave trade

Slave Trade was not new to Africa or to Europe, but with the advent of mass sugar cane production, it acquired a new order and magnitude.  At first, the slaving frontiers were the West Africa Coasts: Guinea (with gold mining) and the Niger Delta.  Later, the center of slave trade moved to the Central African coast, around Congo and Angola.  We may never know how many perished in slaving wars and in the hideous "coffles" (files of chained captives) along the bush path and in the holding areas of the West and Central African coasts, during the Middle Passage, or before being debarked in the Americas.  Philip Curtin, in The Atlantic Slave Trade, argues that the cost in human lives was many more times the numbers that landed in the Americas.  His survey of ships' records indicates that between 15% and 20% perished at sea. Curtin estimates that 9.5 million African captives were transported to the New World.  80% went to the Caribbean and Brazil.  English North America received 5% but became the site of 31% of the black population in the New World by the mid 20th century (from 400,000 to 4 million).
 

Settler vs. Exploitation Societies

Exploitation type societies were ad-hoc, divided and divisive.  The elite viewed themselves as transients, e.g., as French, not Martiniquan, re: The novel and film, La Rue Cases Nègres.  French and British colonies, also in Africa: Kenya, Rhodesia. Settler type societies were the Spanish Caribbean elite society.  They were more cohesive (less well off), long-term, with a unified commitment to social order and economy. There was common interest in rejecting domination of core and in increasing the role of periphery where the state controlled all commerce.

Exploitation type societies had a larger percentage of blacks than whites.  In St. Domingue there were 450,000 slaves, 40,000 whites, 30,000 affranchis in 1791.  There was a chronic shortage of military forces to control runaways and insurrections.  Settler type societies always had more whites--colonists and indentured servants who became small farmers--than slaves.  In Spanish Caribbean settler societies, though sugar cane began early there, the Spanish lost interest and the lands were settled by whites.  Resurgence of sugar cane production came late--in the late 19th century, resulting in disenfranchisement and enslavement of whites and, once slavery ended, importation of black labor from other islands. "This ever-heightened importation of enslaved Africans limited the creolization, or acculturation to New World culture, of the slave population, keeping alive African traditions and an active resistance to enslavement, and not simply to slavery" (Mintz, Introduction to Métraux, A Voodoo in Haiti).  This had important consequences for the emergence of Creole cultures.  There emerged an autonomous, mixed ethnic-race leadership class:  In St. Domingue, there were 30,000 freedmen to 40,000 whites.  The former owned one fourth of the land and one third of the slaves.  They were primarily small planters, focusing on coffee rather than on highly capitalized sugar.  Their interests often were the same as the colonists', against slaves and their descendants.  They became the local elite after independence.  Helps to explain why the masses remained impoverished.

Resistance and Revolution

There was one large-scale slave revolt in the Caribbean that succeeded.  It shook the entire colonial-capitalist apparatus and the racist structure of colonization.  The slaves of the French colony of St. Domingue, Haiti, revolted in 1791 and carried on a long struggle to win their freedom.  They persevered and triumphed.  Even the armed forces of Napoleon himself couldn’t vanquish them and force them back into slavery.  The colonized world would never accept that black slaves could seize freedom from the mother county and, furthermore, dare to rule themselves.  They would never forgive them either.  The negative imagery of Haiti that continues today in the myth of the country as a savage, primitive, Voodooland.  These fabrications, which have no factual basis, are a direct legacy of white colonizers’ rejections of the slaves’ aspirations to be full human beings.

Haiti was the second nation in this hemisphere to overthrow European colonial rule and become an independent nation-state.  The U.S. was of course, the first.  The two new countries should have had much in common, yet opposing ideologies of race and racial slavery undermined potential kinship between the new renegade polities.   For North American settlers, winning political and economic autonomy from Britain only compounded racial difference; citizenship presumed whiteness in the new United States.  By contrast, the revolution in St. Domingue (the name of the French colony) was a rejection of both racial discrimination (particularly against free persons of color) and chattel slavery, whose resolution ultimately necessitated political independence from France. The thirteen-year long struggle for freedom and citizenship for its African-descended majority was waged in St. Domingue at the same time that plantation slavery was expanding in the new American nation.  The thoroughly “free” Haiti that emerged threatened plantation agriculture and slavery in the United States, not to mention the estate of the slave-owning planter President, Thomas Jefferson (Plummer 1992:18).  The emergent United States welcomed the fleeing French colonists and even provided funds to resettle them (Laguerre 1998:33).  Many of the colonists arrived with their slaves.  The United States government refused to recognize Haiti for more than six decades, that is, until the emancipation of black slaves within their own national borders.

Maroon Communities

While the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the only large scale slave resistance, there were also important groups of maroons  (escaped slaves) who led raids of plantations, revolts and poisonings during slavery.   This was assisted, in part, by the favorable geography of the Caribbean; hills and barren areas allowed slaves to form colonies and withstand attacks by slaveholders. Tropical climates and thick foliage allowed greater access to food and shelter.  At first, the environment was inhospitable.  However, later, this can be seen as a testament to their ingenuity that they survived.

Maroon communities functioned as bases for resistance, the gravest threat to planters.  Maroons were important elsewhere, such as in Jamaica and Suriname. In Jamaica they won independence early and signed a treaty in 1739.  But terms of the treaty undermined their autonomy and pitted them against the slaves; they were bounty hunters who captured escaped slaves.  Suriname held the largest maroon population, which still survives today. After a half-century of brutal guerrilla warfare against the colonial and European troops, the six remaining communities signed peace treaties in the 1760's.

Emancipation

Emancipation of African slaves in the British West Indies occurred in 1834.  Post-emancipation, the colonial regime attempted to return the slaves to the plantations.  In fact, it was to a state little better than slavery; it was free in name only.  Recall Karl Marx’ pun on wage workers’ illusory freedom: they are free in that they own their own bodies and are not themselves the means of production.   But, they are also utterly free of the means of production.  They own nothing, control nothing but their bodies, whose use they sell piecemeal to the owners of the means of production.  The British called their experiment with freeing the slaves the “apprenticeship” system.  Workers were compelled to live and labor on the very plantations where they had been slaves.  The were punished by bouts in prison and on treadmills.  To fill the labor shortage, planters turned to importing immigrant indentured labor.  They shipped workers from other parts of their empires.  Half a million East Indians were taken to Guyana territories.  The Chinese were indentured in Cuba.  Almost a million Italians were taken to Brazil.  41,000 Portuguese Azorian workers were sent to Britain and Suriname (1830-18880's).  33,000 Japanese workers were taken by the Dutch to Dutch colonies after 1900.  They led these societies to become more multi-racial or "plural."

Compare to North America: Post-emancipation, most freed slaves were robbed of a chance to define themselves economically as people.  African-American people in U.S. are still struggling to achieve economic equality.  Newly freed Caribbean peoples realized that owning land was crucial to achieving autonomy.

In the Caribbean, slaves resisted at every opportunity.  Resistance took many forms, from open revolt to poisoning to fleeing, arson, theft, breaking tools, abusing farm animals, slowing the work pace, pretending to mistake instructions for various tasks, and, for women, using contraceptives and abortions to control their own bodies and deny slave owners their profitable offspring.  Resistance and revolt were not the only means of survival.  Above all, there was culture. The slaves drew sustenance and guidance from the rich and deep resources of distinctive Afro-Caribbean cultures–moral and religious systems, kinship,  music and language arts, which helped them to affirm their humanity and to deflect the potentially debilitating effects of chattel slavery and, once slavery ended, the dehumanization of plantation wage labor.  At the center of that resistance was the peasantry (rather than indentured servitude).  Becoming peasants and resisting plantation labor was the slaves’ most fundamental means of resisting the repressive plantation system.