British Caribbean Colonies Research Articles

Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, African-derived spiritual practices glossed as “obeah” came to be intensely associated with pathologies of the imagination, first by British Caribbean slaveholders, and then much more widely by others. This article focuses on how early writings about, and legal regimes against, African Caribbean spirit work were shaped by theories of mind-body interaction during the final decades of British Caribbean slavery. Medical ideas about the powers of the imagination had played a key part in the decriminalization of “witchcraft” across Western Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This study examines how, conversely, medical theories of the imagination influenced the criminalization of obeah as a capital offense in British Caribbean colonies in the context of rising abolitionism and slave rebellion. I argue that the colonial association of obeah with imaginative pathology was used by slavery defenders to explain away high rates of slave mortality and to portray severe measures of social control as paternalistic. Reciprocally, the chapter points to how early writings about, and laws against, obeah informed theories of mental influence on bodily health during this period and thereafter.

Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas 1880–1960 by Gail Saunders

Reviewed by: Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas 1880–1960 by Gail Saunders Brian L. Moore (bio) Gail Saunders. Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas 1880–1960. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016. xi + 372 pp. Territorial coverage within Caribbean historiography is quite uneven. Some places like Jamaica and Trinidad are fairly well researched, but even they suffer from some significant period gaps. On the other hand, the Bahamas is among the least researched areas of the region; but Gail Saunders stands out as the researcher who has made the greatest contribution to the small body of its history writing. Her Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas 1880–1960 adds to this, and it is certainly her most important and comprehensive published work. Several reasons account for why the Bahamas has not attracted greater attention from historians. It is remote from the rest of the former British Caribbean colonies, and Bahamians themselves are ambivalent about their "Caribbean identity". Saunders occasionally echoes that ambivalence when, as for instance on page 145 (and other places), she seems to suggest that the Bahamas and the British West Indies are two different entities. The Bahamas was also not a typical sugar or coffee plantation (or commercial) colony like most of the others in the region, and its status as just a small, impoverished, unimportant outpost of British imperialism in the western hemisphere hardly recommended it as a place worthy of serious study. Additionally, the multiple islands comprising the Bahamas make it very challenging to research and write comprehensive historical studies of the whole archipelago. Saunders' new book, however, goes a long way toward debunking much of the above. She shows that although the Bahamas may have developed differently from its regional "neighbours", that very difference is potentially of major analytical significance in Caribbean historiography. For a start, the book demonstrates that the economy of the region as a whole was more diverse than just a narrow focus on the plantation complex; and, likewise, though the social and cultural configurations were in some ways similar (white and black brought together [End Page 199] unequally through slavery), there were important variations worthy of study. With the exception of Barbados and the Hispanic islands, the percentage of whites in the Bahamas was comparatively higher than in most Caribbean plantation colonies. That had very important political consequences which differentiated the Bahamas. One of the strengths of the book is the author's ability to incorporate the ecological, demographic and economic variations among the many islands comprising the Bahamas into a single holistic account without over-simplification or over-generalization. This is no easy task, but she successfully makes the insular diversity of the country intelligible for the reader without losing sight of the main theme of the work. Although this book purports to be a social history, it is much more than that. It discusses economic, political, and cultural developments throughout the period of its stated coverage. At all times the author ties those developments to the social realities of race and class so that the reader always has a very clear picture of the social identities of the actors. Saunders not only discusses those identities as broad social categories, but names and describes the individuals who were the principals in the historical events she describes. That is complemented by some well-chosen pictures in the middle of the book. One of the noteworthy features of the book is her attention to detail. It is literally a treasure trove of data, mined from a wide variety of historical sources: government documents, missionary and church records, newspapers, memoirs, private letters, oral testimonies, published books, et cetera. Saunders is remarkably meticulous in her documentation of the data. This book is an excellent source of information on all aspects of Bahamian life from the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s. Beginning with a fine description of the racial and class composition of the population, their cultural practices, and their spatial distribution not only in New Providence (the principal island), but in the Out Islands as well, Saunders also discusses the economies of the component islands and the labour systems (centred primarily on the iniquitous truck system...

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery by Juanita DeBarros (review)

Reviewed by: Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery by Juanita DeBarros Katherine Paugh Juanita DeBarros. Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 296 pp. $32.95 (978-1-4696-1605-6). This fascinating study of the history of reproduction traces efforts by imperial and local government officials and agencies, as well as philanthropic organizations, to tailor the size and health of populations in the British Caribbean colonies to political and economic demands. The book traces an intriguing evolution in the aims of population policy. In the mid-nineteenth century, in the immediate aftermath of the emancipation of enslaved Afro-Caribbeans, many colonial officials and wealthy landowners saw the promotion of reproduction among both Afro-Caribbeans and East Indian indentured laborers as an antidote to the declining profitability of Caribbean plantations. Consequently, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, schemes to promote formal training for midwives emerged alongside philanthropic “baby saving leagues” aimed at promoting hygienic practices among working class mothers. These maternal and child welfare initiatives were initially staffed primarily by white British women. Single women who were older and of “less attractive appearance” were seen as particularly qualified to provide the asexual yet maternalistic care of a “benevolent colonialism” (pp. 96, 100). By the early twentieth century, however, the growth of pan-Africanism and the rising influence of creole politicians and labor leaders led to the growing involvement of middle class women of color with philanthropic organizations such as the Garveyite Black Cross Nurses. This opportunity to publicly espouse a “maternalist” perspective aimed at racial uplift helped to cement these women’s status in colonial society (p. 123). This focus on racial uplift, ironically, coincided with a growing interest in eugenics among some colonial officials and medical experts during the early twentieth century and the concomitant assertion that reproductive policy should focus on cultivating only the best “stock” while discouraging childbearing among the unworthy. By the mid-1930s, in the context of violent protests that swept through the Caribbean, concerns about overpopulation among Afro-Caribbean workers escalated into a proposal by a government committee in Bermuda for the compulsory sterilization of the parents of illegitimate children. This proposal was bashfully deferred by colonial officials and angrily condemned by radical advocates for the Caribbean working class. Nonetheless, the report of the Moyne commission, a British government inquiry to investigate the causes of protests in the region, emphasized the problems created by overpopulation. De Barros thus skillfully connects the political and economic history of the Caribbean with key shifts in the aims, strategies, and personnel of colonial and imperial organizations focused on shaping reproduction. The tendency of colonial officials to associate the size and health of Caribbean populations with the effects of moral and sexual vice is also a theme that runs throughout the book. The supposed lack of civilized sexual mores in the Caribbean was, in fact, marshaled by colonial officials at various times to explain both underpopulation and overpopulation. The civilizing mission of British colonialism thus provided a sustained and adaptable rationale for governmental [End Page 157] intervention in Afro-Caribbean reproduction. Disease, too, was frequently seen as a consequence of colonial barbarism with unfortunate consequences for Caribbean populations. DeBarros discusses medical discourses surrounding cholera, hookworm, malaria, and venereal disease, in which the language of hygiene was employed by both colonial officials and London-based experts in tropical medicine to condemn the “racial habits” of Afro-Caribbeans (p. 155). Yet significantly, some Caribbean physicians who gathered at a multiethnic regional conference in 1921 rejected racialized ideas about hygiene, arguing that in fact unsanitary habits in the Caribbean were more attributable to social and working conditions in the region. Overall, the book focuses on governmental and philanthropic interventions in the Caribbean, and on the perspectives of the colonial officials and medical personnel who carried out these interventions. Through their stories, we catch glimpses of the practices of those working people who were targets of intervention. We hear, for example, of the objections of a public health educator in Guyana to the local practice of giving infants tea in their mothers’ absence, and...

Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, gender, and population politics after slavery by Juanita De Barros (review)

Reviewed by: Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, gender, and population politics after slavery by Juanita De Barros Meleisa Ono-George Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, gender, and population politics after slavery By Juanita De Barros. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. In her most recent book, Reproducing the British Caribbean, Juanita De Barros explores the politics of reproduction and public health in the immediate post-slavery Caribbean. Covering the period from the abolition of slavery in 1834 to the 1930s labour riots, De Barros demonstrates how racial and gendered discourses of Afro-Caribbean men and women, and to a lesser extent Indo-Caribbean peoples, shaped colonial concerns and policies around the size and the health of the population. In addition, this well researched book tracks not only how these discourses informed the policies and programs on infant and maternal welfare that developed in the British Caribbean colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana, but also how various local actors contributed to these initiatives. De Barros begins by examining popular debates around population between the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean (1834) and the 1850s cholera epidemic that spread throughout the region. Abolitionist and colonial officials had hoped that emancipation would bring about the “natural increase” of the population following abolition. However, by the late 1840s and 1850s, the high mortality rate signaled to them that the population was in decline, despite the ending of slavery, and that abolition had failed to uplift the population. The same racial and gendered attitudes that shaped perceptions of abolition also informed how colonial officials and elites attempted to address the perceived population decline. As part of their efforts to ensure a continued source of labour, colonial officials initiated programs to tackle infant mortality, what they discussed as one of the major causes of the post-slavery population decline. Attitudes around the perceived high rate of infant mortality amongst the Afro-Caribbean population, as De Barros shows, drew upon long-standing racializations of Black women as bad mothers and Black men as neglectful fathers. Such attitudes were also informed by nascent ideas around medicine and public health. De Barros considers the involvement of colonial officials, physicians and researchers, nurses and midwives from Britain and other parts of the empire, but also locally, in the shaping and development of policies around population and reproduction. She explores the efforts of colonial officials to introduce a state-sponsored midwifery program to train local midwives, who then provided educational programs on pregnancy and infant care to poor Caribbean women. In addition to state-sponsored efforts, middle-class and elite women of African descent were also involved in baby-saving leagues that sought to educate poor non-White women on modern and hygienic child-rearing practices. Understandings of race and sexuality were intrinsic within these programs, as De Barros reveals. For instance, recruiters purposely sought out single, “less attractive” White British nurses, women they saw as “nonsexual,” to train non-White midwives in the British Caribbean islands. These desexualized British nurses were thought to stand as symbols of colonial authority and righteousness, in contrast to the overt sexualized imaginings of Black and Coloured women that they would train. As De Barros shows, these British nurses were “enmeshed in the nets of imperial power” and were necessary instruments of empire. British and Caribbean people were not the only ones concerned with the “crisis” in population decline or involved in efforts to find a solution. Working with a growing class of creole physicians and middle-class professionals, American physicians and researchers targeted tropical diseases, including hookworm and malaria, as well as venereal disease as a means of curbing high mortality and poor health in the island, especially amongst the young. However, despite the advancements in medicine, these officials continued to blame population decline and the state of health on the familial and sexual practices of poor Caribbean peoples. As De Barros shows, up into the 1930s and the West India Commission, racialized and gendered attitudes around sex and reproduction continued to inform discussions and the solutions proposed to address these concerns around the size and health of the population. This book makes a most welcome contribution to the study of...

Steven Palmer, Lauching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation, Conversations in Medicine and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. xi + 301, $70.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-472-07089-3.

Steven Palmer, Lauching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation, Conversations in Medicine and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), pp. xi + 301, $70.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-472-07089-3. - Volume 55 Issue 3

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's A Gossip's Story

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good daughters of the British empire.

Dutiful Daughters and Colonial Discourse in Jane West's <i>A Gossip's Story</i>

In A Gossip's Story and a Legendary Tale (1796), Jane West engages with both the contemporary ideology and the political reality of the British empire by explicitly supporting British overseas trade while acknowledging the precarious nature of a transatlantic empire. For West, the female body is a potent site through which to explore colonialist ideologies. The fates of various female characters reinforce ideas about feminine virtue and sexual regulation shaped by British contact with the Atlantic world, thus promoting a moral code that would come to define the empire. If young women do represent the British subject in didactic fiction of this period, with the father figure representing state authority, West's portrayal of these characters in A Gossip's Story against the backdrop of British Caribbean colonies alters our understanding of the national culture she promotes. A Gossip's Story's overt message —the importance of filial duty—urges its female readers not just to be good daughters, but to be good d...

The Diasporic Dimensions of British Caribbean Federation in the Early Twentieth Century

[Second and third pragraph]While much has been written on the significance of British Caribbean activists in various movements associated with black diaspora politics in the twentieth century, particularly their important roles in Pan-African struggles, little has been written on how the various British Caribbean colonies themselves were envisioned among diaspora activists and within the scope of black diaspora politics. Did such Caribbean activists, especially those interested in and connected to diasporic movements beyond the British Caribbean, and their African American and African counterparts forsake the British West Indies as a focus of political engagement for other lands and causes? If not, what was the place of “West Indian liberation” and nation building in the British Caribbean in relation to black diasporic struggles in the early twentieth century?This article address these questions through an examination of how the idea of a united “West Indian nation” (via a federation or closer union) among British Caribbean colonies was envisioned within black diaspora politics from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s, and the ways in which racial consciousness and motivations informed conceptualizations of such a nation among black political activists of the British Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora. This study argues that efforts to create a federationin the Anglophone Caribbean were much more than simply imperial or regional nation-building projects. Instead, federation was also a diasporic, black nation-building endeavor intricately connected to notions of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination.

'Possessing Slaves': Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the time of Emancipation 1834 40

This article examines the ownership of the enslaved in the British Caribbean colonies at the time of Emancipation. Through a systematic investigation of the records underlying the work of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, who were charged with distributing the twenty million pounds in compensation granted to the slave-owners under the 1833 Act, it seeks to map comprehensively the recipients of the major awards of compensation by geography, function and gender, and to identify the beneficial owners behind each such award. It demonstrates that while absentee ownership varied significantly between colonies, nevertheless across the Caribbean colonies as a whole more than half the compensation awarded can be traced to owners or other recipients in Britain. It acknowledges the widely-recognized importance of mercantile interests in London, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow as beneficiaries of compensation, both as owners and creditors, and emphasizes that new entrepreneurial capital continued to flow into highly profitable areas of the slave economy even after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Through tracing the flows of compensation payments, the article also identifies a hitherto neglected but material component of rentier slave-ownership, both large-scale ownership of the enslaved on colonial estates among sections of the British aristocracy and gentry, and smaller-scale ownership of the enslaved among the urban upper middle-classes in centres of polite leisured society along the south coast and in towns such as Bath, Clifton and Edinburgh. Within this rentier ownership, ‘property’ in the enslaved had been transformed in the years prior to Emancipation into an array of financial assets which were then managed by the established means of transmission and control of property between generations and genders, through marriage settlements, entail, annuities and legacies, thereby disseminating ownership more broadly within sections of British society. The article shows that the slave owners of the metropole, numbered in their thousands, appear disproportionately influential, being relatively heavily represented both in the unreformed and reformed House of Commons as well as within county society, for example as sheriffs. Slave-owners who received compensation were also concentrated in newly assertive Anglican organizations and activities of the period, including the subscribers to the funding of King’s College London in the late 1820s. The article goes on to explore the discourses adopted by the metropolitan slave-owners in their dealings with the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, noting the gendered languages deployed, of entitlement by male slave-owners and of entreaty by female owners. The article seeks to raise two overarching issues. One is the extent to which traditional narratives of Emancipation require revision to incorporate more fully the role of compensation in securing the end of slavery in the British colonies, given the apparent continued influence of slave-owning and slave-owners within British society into the 1830s. The second is to suggest that, while more work is required to complete the tracing of the recycling of the compensation money into the British economy, notably the railway boom, nevertheless the work already done clearly highlights the existence of a number of families and firms still prominent in Britain which benefited directly from slave compensation, and that these historic linkages need to be weighed in any discussion of reparations for slavery.

Managing the Transition to a Free Labor Society: American Interpretations of the British West Indies during the Civil War and Reconstruction

American reactions to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 reveal that three decades after abolition, British West Indian emancipation was still considered relevant to policy debates in the United States. The early 1860s saw a significant shift in northern views of the British Caribbean colonies, in particular as a result of the writings of William G. Sewell on the subject. For Republicans, escalating social conflict in Jamaica highlighted above all the need to prevent former slaveholders from monopolizing political power after emancipation, and this interpretation of the West Indian experience reinforced the evolving case for equal rights. Many had argued that former slaves’ economic independence had been the major cause of declining plantation production in the West Indies. However, Republicans tended to accept representations of black farmers in the Caribbean as an incipient middle class, and never concluded from the British case that access to land for freed slaves would be fundamentally at odds with maintaining future cotton production.

'Restoring the Family': Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860-1920

'Restoring the Family': Wife Murders and the Making of a Sexual Contract for Indian Immigrant Labour in the British Caribbean Colonies, 1860-1920

Growth in Afro‐Caribbean slave populations

AbstractHeight data for African slave populations in Trinidad, Guyana and other British Caribbean colonies in the early nineteenth century are analyzed and compared with Cuban and United States slave populations. Slaves born in Trinidad and Cuba achieved final heights greater than their African‐born parents, but those born in Guyana were shorter. Afro‐Caribbean slaves living in sugar‐producing colonies showed inferior growth compared to those living in colonies based on less arduous forms of economic activity, such as the Bahamas and Bermuda. The latter groups achieved heights similar to those of the United States slaves. Menarche occurred in the United States about 2 years earlier than in Trinidad. These differences in growth cannot be explained adequately by genetic variations in growth potential or by heterosis, but were a result of differences in nutrition, infection and work regime. Superior growth was associated with high rates of natural increase, whereas apparent stature reduction occurred in slave populations subject to the heaviest mortality. Modern Afro‐Caribbean adult populations are about 10 cm taller than their genitor slave populations.

The Impact of the International Crisis Upon the Negro in the Caribbean

In 1940 the American public was informed of a deal by which, in return for fifty destroyers, the United States Government was granted by Great Britain a chain of naval bases in the British Caribbean colonies. That deal, together with the German conquest of France and Holland (with the possibility of a German demand for the French and Dutch Caribbean islands at the peace), made Americans acutely conscious of the existence of these islands and their strategic importance vis-a?-vis the Panama Canal. This strategic importance has received its due emphasis in the American press. That the Caribbean islands are inhabited by millions of people of predominantly Negroid stock who may have some views of their own regarding the transfer of parts of the areas they inhabit has received comparatively no attention from press or public. The American public has not bothered to concern itself with the opinions of a few niggers. The American Negro, however, will continue to treat these racial brothers with the indifference of the white folks only at his peril. Trinidad may be far from Texas, Martinique may have no apparent connection with the problem of Mississippi, but what happens in the Caribbean will influence, one way or the other, the situation of the Negro mi-