Lecture, Session 4
Caribbean Peasantries
Caribbean Peasantries are part of a triadic rural system involving a dominant plantation controlling most of the arable--and all of the best--lands, a free-holding peasantry, and a rural proletariat, which is comprised of often-landless wage laborers. In this sense, Haiti makes up the most thorough-going peasantry in the Western hemisphere. For the past few decades, there has been intensified investment by foreign multinational corporations in agriculture, which has led to extreme pressure on peasantries, rural decline, and increased dependence upon imported food. In turn, there has been massive emigration (or international migration) to the U.S. and Canada, Europe, and other parts of the Caribbean.
Caribbean peasantries are unique in that they grew up in the crevices of their societies, during time periods when European control faltered. In other areas, they grew in spaces where European dominion did not reach (e.g., mountains where squatters and maroons lived, or in better lands in Spanish colonies, where colonists lost interest in agriculture, only to regain it in 19th century just as other colonial powers were losing interest in slavery and sugar). Such communities were established before slavery (i.e. before the entrance of big sugar capital), but also during slavery, and after slavery. Thus, peasant communities are also found in places where plantations failed (went bankrupt) or failed to reach.
This differs from North America. Here, no peasantry immediately developed. Conditions were inverse; it was a settler society, which was not conducive to formation of land-owning peasantries composed of ex-slaves or maroons. Planters outnumbered slaves, and there were relatively few places settled by whites. After the war of independence, the black populations could not take advantage of a lapse in white domination. Blacks continued to be denied opportunities to become economically independent. In particular, few owned land. The alternative--tenant farmers and sharecroppers--were trapped in cycles of debt.
Mintz' categories
The Haitian peasantry is identified by Mintz as a reconstituted peasantry. Here, individuals began in a social class other than peasantry (in slavery, indenture, or as deserters) and became peasants in resistance to an externally imposed regimen. The true peasantry develops out of a proto-peasantry, emerging within a specific context of plantation slavery. Some proto-peasants were maroons, people living on the edge of the plantation system. But more often the proto-peasantry developed within a slave-labor based plantation system and with its "blessings."
Plantation economy
The plantation economy was based on the production of one crop for export to Europe. Its existence aided in making products for the European working class: cotton for clothing (mainly from the US south) and proletarian drug foods (Caribbean: sugar, coffee, alcohol, tobacco). Such monocrop production of drug foods for export created a local problem for the colonies: the colonies could not feed themselves. Planters found it cheaper to let slaves grow their own food rather than import it. They granted slaves provision grounds to which they had formal rights. Slaves could pass on their claims to these grounds to their heirs, and in some cases, when gardens were converted for a plantation's use, the slaves were compensated. Plots were small and not comprised of the best lands. They were often located in different marginal spots of the society. This essential structure was strong, and it remains largely intact even today.
In these societies, slaves learned how to organize family labor, budget time (when given only limited access to their plots, mainly on Sundays), judge soil quality, select seeds, raise animals, sell, save and invest. All of this occurred while being subjected to the views that their capacities as individuals were too limited to enable them to survive as free persons. When revolution broke out in St. Domingue, rebel slaves in the South came to the negotiating table with a request for 3 days off (freedom) a week. Stupidly, the arrogant colonists rejected their request and persecuted them viciously.
Internal market system
Regional markets of the day anticipated the complex network of markets today. They were multi-tiered, and spanned from local to regional bulking markets, to large central markets. They functioned through division of labor between cultivators, middle-women and -men, or speculators, and retail saleswomen. The pivotal role of women was as traders. This was as crucial to their self-determination as independent farming was to men (though, we will speak more on this later). They traded with both slaves and free people. This gave slaves some measure of autonomy. The market, therefore, became an important social institution. It met a colony's needs for internal consumption but even exported to core. In the market, many items were sold:gums, arrowroot, castor oil, tumeric, hides, supplejacks, oil nuts, cows' horns, goatskins, and wood products. After independence, coffee became an important export from Haiti. Coffee exports would come to rival sugar, a competition that exists even today.
Self-emancipation
In this system, many slaves purchased freedom by “proto-peasant” means. In St. Domingue, there were 28,000 freemen at time of revolution, who combined owned up to 1/4 of land. Therefore, at the time, there were about 40,000 whites and 450,000 slaves. The aforementioned proto-peasant skills were crucial in the Haitian adaptation to freedom as a reconstituted peasantry in opposition to the plantation system.
Peasantry, according to Mintz
According to Mintz, peasantry should be seen as a mode of resistance to the plantation system and its connotations of slavery or coerced, underpaid wage labor, huge capital. Like aspects of culture, language, music and religion we will be discussing, peasant adaptation, which has to do with self-definition, autonomy. In this, freed slaves insisted on defining themselves economically. They wanted to own the means of production--including themselves! They wanted to be free to organize labor, capital expenditures, and tools as they saw fit. Their definition of freedom (not that of the colonizers) was a sort of political freedom. This is why Mintz has argued that the whole of Caribbean history could be summarized as a struggle over the meanings of freedom. Slaves were relentless, eagerly seizing opportunity to be free whenever possible. To them, freedom meant controlling their own labor. They didn’t accept the colonizers’ definitions of basic political freedom. That is why the apprenticeship system, despite the harsh discipline of the treadmills and prisons failed (as it did, within four years). The ex-slaves refused to internalize the new discipline required of plantation work. They demanded to control their own lives. Their key act, therefore, was establishing themselves as land-holding peasants. Later, the new government of independent Haiti attempted to revive the ruined economy by resuscitating the plantation system. The government of Jean-Jacques Dessalines attempted its own “apprenticeship system” to tie laborers to plantations, little better than slaves. To this, once again, people resisted through their peasantization.
Acquisition of Lands by peasants
Peasants aquired lands through squatting on areas abandoned by fleeing colonists. However, they also purchased land. After the revolution and expulsion of French in 1804, nearly the entire country was eminent domain. Grants and concessions were given to soldiers by Pétion. The state had to support a huge army. They were busy fighting both a civil war and also one against the French, who returned, headed by Napoleon’s brother, to try to retake the island. There was no other way to pay the soldiers but in land. The soldiers, in turn, sold off to masses of ex-slaves.
Because of this, even today, land in the Caribbean means much more than an "economic value." It epitomizes the desire for freedom. Land is a means of defining who you are, and thus it is tied to kinship. Lands are family lands, and are anchored in lineages and extended families; they are a value that is part of you and which you inherit. They are governed by strict rules of transmission and ownership that are in defiance of colonial order. They create a relationship of substance, like blood. In this, they are given, not something you contract. Peasant land is not alienable. You cannot just sell it. It is owned by descent group, not by individuals. All have to agree to its sale before alienating it.Customary laws of tenure and transmission are in conflict with official laws.
Customary Land Laws
Land laws are passed on through oral, not written, tradition. All heirs have equal rights regardless of age or sex or marital status. Children of common law unions inherit as do those from “marriage.” This is the opposite of the official colonial system, and it is a way of solidifying the peasentry's social and kinship systems and values. Unfortunately though, the official code (the only one recognized in the courts) was often used to rob peasants of their lands if they didn’t have a paper title. Nevertheless, 20th century Haitian and Jamaican laws respect the customary system, and can be characterized as a compromise between the two. Thus, land holds an economic and symbolic value. Every descendant has the right to put up a house there, to plant, to harvest fruit from the trees: mango, breadfruit, kenep, coconut. And, the land law system remains a vital symbolic resource for all descendants, no matter where they live.
The Haitian peasant perspective
The idea of purchasing one's own land, among peasants, is the most important Historical act. It is a symbol of the accomplishment of resistance to external control. One can see it expressed over and over again, in both rituals and cosmology, which tells us something about what people value. For them, history begins with "first owner of the estate." This person is considered mythic, heroic, almost deified. Africa is a storehouse of value, so it is not surprising that the "first owner" is often said to be African. There are tales and myths about him or her importance in defining who the descendants are today.
In Haiti, an estate is typically referred to as "the inheritance." Any descendant of the first owner can live in the yard and farm a garden on the estate. However, as descendants have rights, they also have obligations. Even if they choose not to reside there--and internal and out-migration are facts of life--they still have responsibilities to the land and to their ancestors who resided there, who link them to "the first owner" and through him or her, to the African ancestors.
