Power and Resistance in Caribbean Slavery, 1624–1853

Introduction: The Complex Legacies of Caribbean Slavery

Although abolished for what appears to be a long time, slavery remains very much an issue in the collective cultural conscience of today. The sheer inhumanity of treatment, and the often violent reactions it provoked, still elicit considerable emotion in many hearts. However, brutality is not the only issue that slavery brought about. There are many complex economic, cultural, gendered, and other issues that resulted from the relationship between the oppressive forces and the oppressed. These complex forces — and the various forms of power exerted both by slave owners and by their slaves — are the focus of this study.

Specifically, this paper explores the historiography of slavery in the Caribbean from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century (1624–1853). It considers the economic basis and motivation for slavery, which often took precedence over simple humanity. Economic gain lay at the heart of the frequently cruel treatment of enslaved people by Europeans, who located their power in their economic prowess and capacity for commercial development. Issues such as skin color, medical and scientific attitudes, slave gender roles, slave resistance to white power, and social factors all informed the power relationship. For slaves, by contrast, power tended to reside in their cultural knowledge and their ability to survive in an often hostile natural world. The result was a clash between two different forms of power: economic progress on one side, and native ways of living and knowing on the other.

It is also worth noting that the European drive toward economic growth produced oppression through slavery not only for Africans, but also for immigrants and indigenous peoples throughout the world. It is an interesting but little-known fact, for example, that Chinese workers played a significant role as enslaved laborers in the economy of the British West Indies. In addition, the oppression suffered by enslaved people frequently took the form of sexual oppression, with white slave owners fathering mixed-race children with female slaves.

During the centuries in question, European imperialism ushered in a new era of economic growth that could only be achieved through the use of enslaved labor. The large sugar plantations and the ever-expanding Atlantic slave trade lay largely at the foundation of this economy. What Europeans at the time perhaps failed to reckon with was that the masses would not submit indefinitely to oppression. In addition to their cultural and native propensity for survival, enslaved people possessed an additional source of power relative to the European economy: their numbers.

Although slavery in the early twentieth century was a subject that historians tended to avoid, this attitude has largely changed, and recent scholarship has brought to light a significant body of knowledge. Slavery in the French, Danish, and British West Indies, as well as the Caribbean as a whole, is addressed in this study. The governments of these colonial powers tended to sacrifice moral principle for economic reward, largely ignoring their own sense of human decency in favor of expanding their empires. Enslaved peoples suffered the consequences of this unabated greed and quest for power. It is nonetheless significant that, while Europeans were cruel and acquisitive in their treatment of those they enslaved, enslaved people also exerted considerable influence and power over their white owners. White slave owners wielded economic power; the power of enslaved people resided in the combination of their cultural values, their knowledge of the native environment and its potential dangers, and their capacity to survive.

The paper is organized around four areas of inquiry: (A) Slavery in the British West Indies; (B) Slavery in the Danish West Indies; (C) Slavery in the French West Indies; and (D) Slavery in the broader Caribbean.

Slavery in the British West Indies

In The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, Vincent Brown structures his arguments around the central concepts of death and power, and around how these shaped the culture of Atlantic slavery during the eighteenth century. Although popularly held conceptions of slavery assign the paradigm of power to the European colonist and death to the black or otherwise ethnic slave, Brown points out that death was an equally present reality for European colonists. At the same time, power was not an unfamiliar paradigm to the once-free slave, or indeed to black slave owners. The uncomfortable relationship between Jamaican slaves and their British owners is therefore addressed in terms of the equally uncomfortable relationship between death and power. Brown's thesis is that there is an intrinsic relationship between death and power during this period — one that can be understood through the lens of the cultures involved. It is the result of this death-and-power dynamic that, although Jamaica was a fertile land filled with rich potential, the wealth it yielded came at a terrible price.

Brown also notes that the sheer numerical disproportion between the enslaved population in Jamaica and the number of European colonists was a cause of constant concern. He shows that, like death, power was a mobile concept, relevant to both Europeans and their African counterparts. The enslaved were powerful because of their numbers, while Europeans relied on their social rank and wealth to wield power over them. This asymmetry generated the pervasive sense of unease that characterized the relationship between the British and the Jamaican enslaved population.

The concept of death also shapes Brown's use of sources. Whereas it was generally accepted elsewhere that disease and immune deficiency claimed mainly the elderly and very young, Jamaica killed young, strong adults as well. Hence the author's preoccupation with death and his use of the illustrated satirical work Johnny New-Come in the Island of Jamaica — a late-eighteenth-century caricature depicting the rapid physical deterioration of a newly arrived white man — as a primary source and illustrative device.

Trevor Burnard's subject is equally brutal, and in some respects more graphic than Brown's. Also concerned with power, Burnard offers the reader an understanding of brutality and tyranny, and how these were employed as instruments to bend and break the will of enslaved people. As his primary source, Burnard uses the often harrowing accounts recorded in the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a slave owner in Jamaica during the early 1750s.

The brutality, as Burnard notes, is only part of the story surrounding paradigms of power within the institution of slavery. He addresses three basic dimensions of the relationship between black and white in Thistlewood's account: white brutality as an instrument of oppression; black resentment as a countermeasure; and a relatively more amicable sphere of interaction between the two groups. Thistlewood, having lived within a predominantly black culture, acquired considerable knowledge of native food, medicine, and local customs.

These interactions did little, however, to temper the underlying violence generated by slavery. According to Burnard, white slave owners were acutely nervous about the obvious power that black slaves possessed through their numbers and the solidarity forged by shared suffering. Nicolas Lejeune's defense of his own brutality toward his slaves illustrates the general attitude among slave owners: that enslaved people were volatile and unhappy, and could be controlled only by a fear greater than their growing discontent.

History, as Burnard demonstrates, validated white concern. There were many revolts and near-revolts in Jamaica, of which Tacky's Revolt was so well organized that it nearly ended European rule on the island. The power of enslaved people resided in their collective emotion and solidarity, whereas the oppressive power of Europeans was rooted in economics and in the perceived superiority conferred by skin color.

It is also noteworthy that European power and economic resources were used to oppress not only African slaves but also other cultures, including Chinese and Indian workers, whom Lisa Yun collectively terms "Coolies." Yun's work focuses primarily on Chinese workers in Cuba and draws on the primary sources of testimonies, petitions, and depositions by Chinese workers, highlighting many aspects of this group's suffering that have been previously ignored or unknown.

One aspect of Chinese and Indian slavery is the internal diversity within the Coolie community, which Yun attributes largely to the diversity of circumstances to which these workers were subjected. She also examines the power relations between Chinese enslaved workers and their owners, which took a particularly distinctive form: Chinese workers were removed from their families and homes with little hope of return. This absence of hope was paradoxically the basis of a particular form of power — they had little regard for their individual lives but acted collectively in revolt against their masters. From the slave owner's perspective, such revolts were calculated simply as part of the "cost of production."

Slave owners maintained control by dividing a revolting workforce through various means: physically removing dissenters to different work stations, executing them, or breaking their resistance through punishment. According to Yun, replacing Chinese workers was relatively cheap and easy, making it a more viable control strategy than other methods. The power that enslaved workers derived from an individual disregard for their own lives was therefore effectively countered by an equally callous disregard for human life on the part of slave owners, whose power lay in their economic capacity to replace workers at will.

Conclusion

When investigating the phenomenon of slavery, it is challenging not to become embroiled in issues of injustice and the emotions they generate. Considered from a more analytical viewpoint, however, it becomes clear that enslaved people did not simply accept their circumstances or regard themselves as passive victims. Investigating the ways in which power manifested itself on the part of both enslaved people and their owners reveals important information not only about the formal status of all parties, but also about the inherent humanity present on both sides of this brutal institution.

Slavery was frequently a struggle for power on the part of both the enslaved and those who claimed to own them. It remains important and relevant for contemporary society to examine the various forms that power took during the colonial period in the Caribbean, so that the full complexity of this history — and its lasting consequences — can be properly understood.

Bibliography

Brown, Vincent. The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Burnard, Trevor G. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Moitt, Bernard. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848. Blacks in the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Sandiford, Keith Albert. The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Savage, John. "Black Magic and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th Century Martinique." Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 635–662.

Simonsen, Gunvor. "Skin Color as a Tool of Regulation and Power in the Danish West Indies in the Eighteenth Century." Journal of Caribbean History 37 (2003): 256–276.

Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Asian-American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.