Jamaica: Post Emancipation Period Analysis Essay

Jamaica’s location explains India’s formative influences upon it. Its particular geographic situation is also the reason for European interest in it because it provided the desired way station on the maritime route from Europe to America. Slave labor in the West Indies was employed mainly in the production of sugar¹. The colonial system which was established or consolidated by the English Navigation Act of 1660 was based on the principle that dependencies must contribute to the cost of their defense, partly by employing only British ships and seamen, and partly by confining their commerce to British ports².

The latter method could be applied only with obvious limitations to most of the North American colonies, which, with a European population and a temperate climate, were capable of being rivals as well as customers; and it was only in the West Indies that the parent State could venture to go the whole length of its double monopoly, engrossing commodities which it did not herself produce and exchanging for them the products of her own furnaces and looms. Slavery, recruited from Africa and devoted exclusively to the cultivation of tropical plants, was lauded by the British plantation trade because it enriched the British Empire³.

In Jamaica, the planter had not only to send all his sugar to Great Britain but, in consequence of a prohibitory duty on refined sugar, had to send it raw; and this was a great hardship, because the buildings and apparatus required for the making of raw sugar would, with a trifling addition, have sufficed for the process of refining; and sugar, when shipped raw, had to be drained on the voyage at a loss which was estimated at one-seventh or one-eighth of the cargo. It has often been remarked that cultivation by slaves is wasteful, because, owing to their lack of intelligence, and interest and the difficulty of teaching them anything new, it must dispense with a rotation of crops, and consequently exhausts the soil⁴. The smaller British islands having reached this stage, their planters had no new land to exploit. In Jamaica, the best, or at least the most accessible, lands were fully occupied.

There were 30,000 Europeans in the colony and about 24,000 free people of color⁵; but the slave population had increased to nearly half a million; and all these three classes, but especially the last, had reason to welcome the French Revolution with its gospel of the Rights of Man. First, the planters rose against the Royalist Government; then the colored people, when the Assembly at Paris had decreed their admission to full citizenship, rose against the whites; and finally the negroes, called in by one or other of the two parties, overwhelmed both. In less than two months, 2000 Europeans had been massacred; hundreds of plantations had been laid waste; and the world’s supply of sugar was suddenly reduced by over a million hundredweights⁶. Under such conditions it may be supposed that the planters promoted to the utmost the natural increase of their slaves and availed themselves as little as possible of African recruits, but breeding could not be attractive where estates so frequently changed hands, and those who adopted this policy found it very difficult to carry out⁷. Of the negroes imported two-thirds were always males; and the women, being mostly prostitutes, were little disposed to the rear or indeed–if they could prevent it–to have children.

Jamaica did not establish a separate registrarship, leaving its Secretary to act in that capacity for 350,000 slaves; and, though the office was created in all the other colonies, some of them did not provide for the transmission of duplicates⁸. This defect was remedied by Parliament in 1819 when an Act was passed appointing a registrar in London and invalidating the sale or mortgage in this country of any slave who had not been entered in his books. No attempt was made to improve the colonial registers, but the British prohibition of the slave trade was so severe and so vigilantly enforced that it is questionable whether any further security was required⁹. Slavery was not abolished, or rather did not cease to be legal, in British India till 1843, and was not made criminal till 1863; but it was a social rather than an industrial institution, it was prohibited to Europeans, and had long been discouraged by the Company¹⁰.

The Act which abolished slavery did not emancipate the slaves, but this is only another way of saying that what Parliament took away with one hand partially restored with the other. As a social institution slavery disappeared under what the preamble calls “a general manumission”; but it came back as a system of industry, the negroes, though they had acquired “all rights and privileges of freedom,”¹¹ having to work as slaves for so many hours a week, and for this purpose is so much the property of their masters that they could be seized and advertised as runaways and were liable to be bought and sold. In the Crown colonies, which were all of the unexhausted types, the planters were more pleased with the compensation scheme than they cared to admit. Indeed their satisfaction was marred only by a fear that it might be altered in compliance with representations that were being made by the non-resident proprietors of Barbados and Jamaica¹².

The slaves of the Crown colonies, having recently obtained from their sovereign so great a boon as the Order in Council of 1831, had reason to be disappointed; and one can sympathies with their complaint that they needed no apprenticeship to a business which they already knew perfectly, and that, if the King meant only to emancipate them at the end of six years, he would have done better to say nothing about it meanwhile and then to set them free at once. The apprentice was entitled to purchase his discharge at a valuation; but a principal objection to the Jamaica Act was that it placed the right of appraisement in one Special Magistrate and two ordinary magistrates, the only disinterested arbiter being thus liable to be outvoted¹³. Sligo complained that the residue of an apprenticeship was often rated as if it had been the life-service of a slave, and that sums were exacted higher than for many years had been paid for manumission. He also declared that in many cases disabled men and women, some with one leg or one arm, were forced to work in the field, and that compensation was claimed even for the loss of time in child-birth¹⁴.

In sum, many freed Africans and people of color reacted negatively to the new system of labor. It was not the system of labor but its diversity that caused so much trouble in Jamaica where the conditions were unfavorable but uniform, there was little discontent. Thus they continued to import food; and their laborers, having no allotments to cultivate, were required to work seven and a half hours every week-day. The Governor had to content himself with minimizing the hardships which he could not remove. Unable to secure Saturday for the negroes, he sought to increase as much as possible their daily amount of leisure; and this he accomplished by procuring the general adoption of task-work on a scale so reasonable that with ordinary diligence they could obtain their release at about three in the afternoon. Most of them were ready enough to work longer for wages.

References

Alleyne, Mervyn C. Roots of Jamaican Culture. London: Pluto, 1988.

Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975.

Bigelow, J. Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony, University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Beckles, Hilary McD. The Development of West Indies Cricket. 2 vols. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999.

Craton, Michael, and James Walvin. A Jamaican Plantation: A History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970. London: W.H. Allen, 1970.

Hart, R. Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labour and Economic Developments in Jamaica, 1938-1945. Canoe Press, 1999.

HigmanB.W., Aarons, G.A., Karlis, K., Reitz, E.J. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912. University of the West Indies Press, 1998.

Hall, Douglas. Free Jamaica 1838–1865: An Economic History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.

Shepherd, Verene. Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845–1950. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994.

Footnotes

1. Alleyne, Mervyn C. Roots of Jamaican Culture. (London: Pluto, 1988); 3..
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Shepherd, Verene. Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845–1950. Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1994): 23.
4. Hall, Douglas. Free Jamaica 1838–1865: An Economic History. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 34.
5. ibid., 36
6. HigmanB.W., Aarons, G.A., Karlis, K., Reitz, E.J. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912. (University of the West Indies Press, 1998), 45.
7. Hart, R. Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labour and Economic Developments in Jamaica, 1938-1945. (Canoe Press, 1999), 45
8. Craton, Michael, and James Walvin. A Jamaican Plantation: A History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970. (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), 37.
9. Beckles, Hilary McD. The Development of West Indies Cricket. (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 13.
10. Bigelow, J. Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony, (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 66.
11. Ibid., 76
12. Anstey, Roger. The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1975), 191
13. Ibid., 192.
14. Bigelow, J. Jamaica in 1850: Or, the Effects of Sixteen Years of Freedom on a Slave Colony, University of Illinois Press, 2006.