Who should be treated “with every degree of humanity”? Debating rights for planters, soldiers, and Caribs/Kalinago on St. Vincent, 1763–1773

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen England received the island of St. Vincent from France after the Seven Years War in 1763, it sought to develop it for sugar production. It was inhabited by small French planters, indigenous Caribs/Kalinago, and the so-called “Black Caribs,” who were of mixed indigenous and African ethnicity. The British attempted to relocate the “Black Caribs” to a reserve to open up their fertile lands for sugar cultivation and keep them separate from white settlers. They fiercely resisted surveying and (re)settlement efforts, leading to war in 1772–1773 and 1795–1797. This article highlights how the racial mixture of the Black Caribs and selective emphasis on either the indigenous or African portion of their ancestry was important in determining what land rights, if any, they possessed. Cognitive dissonance among Britons about an increasingly authoritarian empire and circulating humanitarian ideas also provoked sympathy toward them. This article examines British responses to the First Carib War in both Parliament and the press, particularly in light of the “Black Caribs'” legal rights and humanitarian sentiment toward them. Such feelings were mixed with ambiguous attitudes toward white planters and concern about the morality of waging a war at the urging of Caribbean slaveholders. This article will argue that the racial mixture of the “Black Caribs” opened them up for vilification based on their African background, but also possibly indigenous land rights and humanitarian sentiment. While other scholars have touched on these debates, this article notes the application of humanitarian sentiment not only to indigenous peoples but also to planters and the soldiers who would be sent to fight in St. Vincent. It highlights St. Vincent as a site where empire, law, race, and humanitarianism intersected to produce a complex late eighteenth-century story indicative of larger debates within the expanding British Empire.