Linstead Market before Linstead? Eighteenth-century Yabbas and the Internal Market System of Jamaica

Abstract

Introduction The role of Linstead market in the internal economy of post-emancipation Jamaica has been the subject of numerous popular and academic discussions. Indeed there is ample documentary evidence that points to its existence at least as early as the 1 840s. Any arguments regarding its existence in the eighteenth century at this point is speculation based on models of economic necessity, our understanding of the organization of enslaved labour revolts, and demographic probabilities. At the time the area in which Linstead Market would be based was called Sixteen-Mile-Walk and was home to numerous plantations. The difficulty in trying to ascertain the organization of such markets in the eighteenth century is that they were inevitably poorly documented with only fragmentary accounts. In this paper I attempt to antedate the Linstead Market using multiple sources of evidence including, published accounts, unpublished ethnography and archaeology. Specifically, analysis of production and distribution of yabba, a local Jamaican ceramic, suggests an eighteenth-century establishment of Linstead Market, thus tying this space to one of the significant slave rebellions of eighteenth-century Jamaica. Markets and Unrest By the mid-eighteenth century, the internal market system figured centrally in Jamaican economic and social lives. The social importance of the combination of street markets, itinerant sellers, and small-scale trade is one of the reasons why such institutions have figured so prominently in the historiography of the African Diaspora. As many have noted the internal economy was a locus of independent acquisition, marketing, and production among the enslaved (Hall, N., 1977; Hall, D., 1980, 1985, 1994; Bush, 1981; Simmonds, 1987, 2004; Tomich, 1995; Boa, 1993; see the volume edited by Gaspar and Hine, 1996; Hall 1999). This economy also presaged a Caribbean peasantry rooted in the houseyard and market (Hall, 1959; Mintz, [1974] 1992; Craton, 1982; Trouillot, 1988). In the eighteenth century, few other institutions were as explicitly impacted by the rural and urban freed and enslaved. Everybody in Jamaica was dependent on the internal economy, some to a greater extent than others. The independent production by enslaved labourers on provision grounds and the exchange of those goods were activities that found constructed spaces on the margins of the planters' figurative and material control (Pulsipher, 1986, 1990, 1991, 1994; McKee, 1999; Pulsipher and Goodwin, 1999). Consequently, the informal markets as a meeting place of goods and ideas of the enslaved can be viewed as a locus of interaction where the enslaved could transgress the social and geographic boundaries imposed by the plantation. It is in these markets that we see a struggle over the valuation of local goods, to prevent engrossing the price of staples, but also enumerating the perpetrators of market disorder as Indian, Mulatto, or Negroe.1 Planters attempted to circumscribe market participation through a series of legislative mechanisms (see Mintz and Hall, 1991; Simmonds, 1987, 2004; Hauser, 2008). Planters were worried about two things, theft and association. The legal code monitored these two threats through a system of tickets and surveillance (Hauser, 2008, 56). As Barry Higman has noted in his analysis of documents associated with the artifacts recovered from Montpelier estate, that community emerged out of a shared sense of locality, kinship, language, values and reciprocity. More importantly, the people living at Montpelier were not confined geographically to the boundaries of the estate, rather their social landscape extended beyond the estate grounds through direct and indirect means (Higman, 1998, 297-305). By way of example, he cites the Baptist War, the 1831/32 slave rebellion which consumed the western parishes of Jamaica. He highlights that for the individuals responsible for its conception and execution, the markets provided one locus for planning in which information could be passed and the uprising organized (Higman, 1998,262-263). …