Provision Grounds, Fruit, and Labour Conflicts in Jamaica, 1830s–1850s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the scholarly literature on the rent controversy and labour shortages in Jamaica and the moral panic over idleness that attended the ‘Quashee’ stereotype, which proliferated among planters during apprenticeship (1834–1838) and persisted into the 1850s. While critics have previously understood the ‘Quashee’ stereotype popularized by Thomas Carlyle as antithetical to the sentimental discourse of a happy, industrious peasantry espoused by missionaries and abolitionists, this article traces some of their continuities through a lens of food studies. Using close readings of texts that engaged with provision grounds and discourses of idleness, natural bounty, and agricultural improvement from the 1830s to the late 1850s, it recontextualizes the ‘Quashee’ problem in the local and commercial interests in fruit that preceded the rise of the banana industry in the 1870s. The charges of idleness and insolence affixed to the provision grounds and fruit cultivation among the Jamaican peasantry were ostensibly resolved by the transition to large-scale exports, namely bananas. However, the patterns of mixed cultivation that emerged in slave provisioning systems and continued after emancipation laid the groundwork for the growth of peasant freeholds in the 1830s–1850s.