Reproducing the British Caribbean, by Juanita De Barros, maps the new concerns that emerged after slavery in the British Caribbean over control of the size of the population and focuses on the territories of Barbados, Jamaica, and Guiana. In the words of its author, “This book examines ideas about reproduction and the size and health of Caribbean populations in the British Caribbean from the early nineteenth century to the 1930s” (p. 14). This anxiety over the size of the population had profound effects on the development of policymaking, which governed the work of midwives as well as issues concerning health, hygiene, and sanitation and which also had implications for the building of infant welfare clinics in the region. It was in this sociohistorical context that colonial reproductive policies were formed. The primary apprehension of the postemancipation period revolved around “the effects of falling birthrates, rising rates of infant mortality, and population ‘degeneration’” (p. 8).The effects of emancipation on sugar production and profitability in the British Caribbean increasingly disillusioned the planter class there. Quite naturally, the blame for the region's economic decline had to be placed on the formerly enslaved. Blame was placed on their behavior and on the lifestyles of African-descended men and women. In this regard, De Barros makes a strong case for understanding the impact of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the creation of colonial policymaking. This confluence of social factors is also germane to the colonial distinctions made between African Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean people. Though poverty was recognized as a serious problem for the social reproduction of these countries, it did not exculpate the formerly enslaved for their alleged ignorance of modern sanitation and hygiene (p. 8). “Poor women in particular,” as De Barros notes, “found themselves condemned as ignorant and indifferent mothers whose poor mothering skills were seen as contributing to infant mortality” (p. 8).Reproducing the British Caribbean is clear in its analysis of how the colonial authorities and the planter class viewed the sexual and domestic practices of the formerly enslaved, who were characterized as uncivilized and immoral and therefore in need of colonial tutelage in the form of the assistance of British women in the colonies. Indeed, the argument might have been strengthened in this regard if the author had pointed to the literature, travel accounts, and novels of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean that viewed the British Caribbean as a site of sexual profligacy. Nevertheless, the author notes that “in Britain's colonies, white British women were believed necessary to solve a range of social problems that were attributed to the behavior of colonial people, including infant mortality” (p. 12). De Barros described the work of these British women as “maternal imperialism,” an adjunct to the “imperial ideological and administrative system” (p. 12).Given the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice by British Caribbean women of home births, the contracting of traditional midwives for their services was not surprising. As is to be expected, therefore, the formally trained nurses were critical of the traditional midwives, most of whom were of African or Asian descent. It was the midwives who were blamed for infant deaths, because they were deemed prone to superstition and lacking in adequate training and medical knowledge. Given their sheer numbers and relationships with local women, the midwives could not be eliminated and had to be integrated “into the regulated world of colonial midwifery” (p. 93). Whereas the early nineteenth-century discourse in the British Caribbean revolved around population size, infant mortality, and the general health of the region according to De Barros, the early twentieth-century concern began to focus on overpopulation. Thus a new set of anxieties began to emerge with respect to British Caribbean labor.Reproducing the British Caribbean makes a useful contribution to an understanding of the social and historical factors that shaped the colonial policy of the early nineteenth-century Caribbean. However, it would have been useful to tie colonial policymaking more specifically to the control of labor in the postemancipation era beyond a focus on the labor unrest of the 1930s. Indeed, a stronger critique of the need to oppress labor in the interest of reproducing capitalism would have been quite welcome in this text. Social control over the labor process was not restricted to slavery but was crucial to reproducing the status quo, whether through the regulation of sexual reproduction, population size, or health status. A more specific focus on how these concerns related to the development of peripheral capitalism in the British Caribbean would have added another layer of complexity to this important project.
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Dec 6, 2019
Ineke De Kruijff + 10
