The transition from slavery to free wage Labour in the Caribbean, 1780–1890: A survey with particular reference to recent scholarship

Abstract

The study of the transition from slavery to wage labour and related transformations throughout the Caribbean sphere is greatly more complicated but potentially more rewarding than examining the single (if not simple) process at either end of the spectrum of plantation America in the United States and Brazil. More than a hundred years separates the first concentrated onslaughts of the secular and religious opponents of British slavery in the Caribbean in the early 1780s from the freeing of the last slaves in Cuba in 1886. Apart from including the immediate and indirect effects of the slave revolution in Haiti between 1791 and 1804, such a study should look at the sequential termination of slave trading between 1805 and 1860, and the subsequent revision and ending of slavery itself between 1834 and 1886 in five different imperial systems; the British, French, Danish, Dutch and Spanish. Moreover, it should not restrict itself, as many studies have done, to the slavery of large plantations (especially sugar plantations) where black slaves hugely outnumbered free coloureds and whites, but should also include non-plantation slavery, the areas where slavery co-existed with other forms of production and labour and slaves did not necessarily outnumber the free, and the many marginal areas where slavery legally existed but was not the primary mode. Yet this very complexity and prolongation allows us to consider what was unique and what common in each phase and area, what constituted a standard pattern, what was the result of cumulative internal developments, and what of changing external forces. Covering such a broad spectrum in the central arena of the plantation system also provides the best of opportunities to distinguish all the distinct and often counterposed ideologies that were involved: those of the planters, the imperialists, the philanthropists, the slaves and ex-slaves, and by no means least, the many historians who have described and analysed the process. Above all, the micro-study of slavery and its aftermath in each sub