Foundations and Fissures in British and French Caribbean Political Culture

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues that slavery in the Greater Caribbean region played a crucial part in shaping the region’s institutions and political culture; it then explores that impact, before and more briefly after abolition, in the British and French Caribbean. Both British and French institutions and practices are described. Slavery is shown to have been associated with formal and informal limits on the political rights not just of slaves but also of free people of color and free blacks. There were nonetheless some opportunities that people of color and black people, free and enslaved, could exploit, notably petitioning and associating, even when other openings were restricted. They exploited these opportunities increasingly vigorously even before emancipation; new political avenues opened that were subsequently sometimes re-narrowed. Some talk about democracy, inflected by American, French, and British usages, can be found in the early black newspaper press.