Race, Migration, and Community: Telling Caribbean Histories

Abstract

Race, Migration, and Community: Telling Caribbean Histories Juanita De Barros (bio) and Laurie Jacklin (bio) FEW PLACES in the world have been as touched by migration as the Caribbean. Throughout its history, waves of involuntary and voluntary migrants have remade the area. But the Caribbean has also sent vast numbers of people to other parts of the world, to Europe, Africa, Asia, and all over the Americas, including Canada, where Caribbean-Canadians currently constitute one of Canada’s largest identifiable non-European populations.1 These Caribbean population movements are diverse. For some, the move to a new country was permanent whereas for others, the stay was more transitory. Caribbean people have profoundly shaped the places to which they have moved. In Canada, numerous generations of diverse populations in the African-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean diasporas have influenced the country’s social, cultural, and political life, especially in the large urban and surrounding areas of Toronto and Montréal. Originally inhabited by Indigenous Peoples, the collection of islands and mainland territories hugging the Caribbean Sea became home to people from Europe, Africa, and Asia. Europeans and Africans began arriving from the late fifteenth century. Some of these early Europeans travelled to the region voluntarily, while others—notably, the White indentured workers imported to clear the land and perform other kinds of labour—did not. With the establishment of large-scale plantation agriculture from the early seventeenth century, European and Euro-Americans brought enslaved Africans to work on the sugar estates. Slavers packed more than 4.7 million Africans on ships destined for the Caribbean between 1600 and 1850.2 The long road to the end of enslavement in the Caribbean began in the [End Page 227] late eighteenth century with the revolution in St. Domingue (renamed Haiti by the triumphant revolutionaries in 1804) and culminated with emancipation in Cuba in 1886. After the end of slavery, the Caribbean was both the target and the source of new waves of migration. Throughout the post-emancipation period, more than half a million people came to the Caribbean from West Africa, China, Europe, and especially South Asia, the largest source of post-slavery migrants. The forces sending these people to the Caribbean varied; poverty and political crises resulting from European colonialism in South Asia propelled much of this movement. Most migrants arrived in the Caribbean under labour contracts that tied them to individual plantations. In the eyes of British officials, Caribbean planters, and the colonial governments they dominated, this new system of indentureship was vital to ensure the survival of plantation agriculture, and especially the sugar industry.3 All three parties hoped that these new workers would be more biddable and less expensive than the former enslaved people who insisted on using their new freedom to exert control over their working lives, both on and off the plantations.4 Under the new government-sponsored systems of indentureship, the new arrivals were to labour for a set number of years; after their contracts expired, they were to return to their home countries, ideally with money that could improve their lives.5 In reality, most post-indenture Indians remained in the Caribbean, their presence profoundly influencing the island and mainland societies that were their new homes. This was especially true for colonies like Trinidad and Guyana, the destination of most South Asian migrants in the British Caribbean. As well as being the destination for newcomers from around the globe, the Caribbean was a source of migrants. From the mid-nineteenth century, Caribbean people moved throughout the region and into the circum-Caribbean mainland territories. In doing so, they were taking advantage of the new freedom of movement that came with the end of enslavement. As the Caribbean historian Bonham Richardson has noted, migration represented one of the chief adaptations to freedom.6 Liberated from the bonds of enslavement, they looked for work and for opportunities to determine their own working lives.7 In migrating, many were [End Page 228] responding to inequities that persisted during the post-emancipation era and notably the efforts of former owners to curtail former enslaved peoples’ ability to control their lives.8 Those from small islands such as Barbados, for example...