Jamaica's Labor Force

            Who was put to work on the island of Jamaica? Who was responsible for fulfilling the labor needs of the economy? The English began with the importation of the Irish ancestors who came as indentured labor. They were followed by the Africans who came as slave labor. They were joined by the Scots also as indentured labor. As the economy grew, those who had been persecuted in their host countries came to seek a better way of life. These people included Jews who originated from the Iberian Peninsula and Huguenots from Catholic Europe. Later, the Arab Christians from the collapsing Ottoman Empire made their way to Jamaica.

            During the early stages of the development of slave society in colonial Jamaica planters initially purchased adult Africans to serve as physical laborers. They sought healthy, young men and women who could provide the brute force necessary to convert the forested island into productive plantations. As the slave society matured, planters found a need for slave laborers outside of agriculture. The labor force on mature plantations can be divided into four categories: field hands, skilled laborers, domestics, and marginal employees- each having a distinct hierarchy. The prominent members of each category formed the slave elite of the plantation. Color and race were often more important than ability in determining which bondmen were promoted to these positions. Slave owners largely preferred to train males for positions that required skill and specialization. Moreover, they preferred to employ lighter skinned and usually locally born workers in positions that involved close contact with the white household. Many bondmen learned these skilled and semi-skilled trades from white artisans and domestics, and then passed them on to their friends and kinsmen. Soon, it became difficult for African migrants to become domestics or skilled craftsmen, despite their particular talents. The enslaved men and women who were elevated to skilled, semi-skilled, or domestic occupations were largely of either biracial descent or island born because planters assumed that they were more refined and familiar with white customs than African born bondmen.

            Jamaica’s colonial transition from dependence on transshipment and trade to agro-industrial production was gradual and driven by a massive forced migration of enslaved African labor into Jamaica. In addition to the economic impact enslaved laborers had on the island, they also brought with them ways of doing things, cultural knowledge that shaped the material and social landscapes of Jamaica. By the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, the plantation had become the dominant economic institution in Jamaica and African slavery the social foundation of its success. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sugar industry was the cornerstone of Jamaica’s economy, and slavery was the primary organizing principle of labor. The plantation system also created a context in which enslaved peoples of African descent refashioned the world they were entering using organizing frameworks brought from West Africa and applying them in new contexts, yet the plantation was a regime that required strict structural control over the daily lives and economic world of the people who provided the plantation’s labor.

Citations:

Dell, James A. Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica. 2011. 1-8.

Johnson, Amy Marie. Expectations of Slavery: African captives, White planters, and Slavery. 116- 120.

OUT OF MANY, ONE PEOPLE

            The concept of race has many different definitions. The different variations as they appear in Jamaica are different when compared to other Caribbean islands as well as the United States.The contrasts between Haiti and Martinique and between Puerto Rico and Ecuador naturally make one want to compare the American set of racial categories with that of another English-speaking New World culture. Like the United States, Jamaica was also a British colony with a slave economy, but its history is very different from our own. Thus, based on cultural reasoning, one would expect it to have developed a different folk taxonomy from ours. Its categoris would however be expected to show greater similarities to American ones than those of Haiti, Martinique or Puerto Rico. That is, despite Jamaica’s geographical proximity in the Caribbean to the latter three and similarity in climate, small size and insular form, one would predict that the British cultural influence would predominate in the formation of racial categories. This is, in fact, the case, despite Jamaican categories being based primarily on physical appearance rather than on ancestry.

            Social class is very important in Jamaica, money counts more than color. With regard to physical appearance, however African and European ancestry predominate and there has been considerable mixture among people from these backgrounds over the years. Although other groups are present, most Jamaicans view their physical appearance as resulting from both African and European traits- a common, expected, and nonproblematic state of affairs. Variation in physical appearance with a family is the norm and terms exist to refer to some of these differences.

            Unlike the situation in the Latin cultures just discussed, the main physical trait used to classify people in the Afro-European domain is skin color. Facial features, hair texture, and color and eye color are not usually used. Because intermediate shades are seen as the norms, the terms “black” and “white” apply to extremes and are rarely used for Jamaicans. Instead, distinctions are made primarily in the mid-range of skin as “fair” (or “light” or “red”), “brown” and “dark”. Thus, it would not be uncommon for a couple to have a fair child, a brown child, and a dark child, and for them and other Jamaicans to describe them that way if asked to do so. This is in contrast to the United States, where all three would be considered black. It also contrasts with the other cultures described above, where as in Jamaica, they would receive different classifications- but where skin color alone would provide insufficient information to categorize them.

            For Jamaicans in the United States, our folk taxonomy seems both impoverished and wrong. It seems impoverished because it offers only the two options of black and white, where Jamaicans routinely make more distinctions. And it seems wrong because it misclassifies people as white or black (usually just black) when they are actually something in between. Another way of putting this is to say that while both Americans and Jamaicans use the English words “white” and “black” in their folk taxonomies, the words refer to different overlapping groups of people and thus have different meanings in the two cultures. In the airplane example, someone who gets on as a black in New York City can get off in Kingston as fair or brown or dark.

Citations:

            Fish, Jefferson M. The Concept of Race and Psychotherapy.  21-22. 2010. Print.

            Johnson, Violet Showers. Racial Frontiers in Jamaica’s Nonracial Nationhood.  1-2.

Religion in Colonial Jamaica

            Much of the Caribbean’s colonial history contributed to the islands’ current religious practices. Jamaica is no exception. Though originally colonized by the Spanish, who were Catholic, the British took control of Jamaica early in the island’s history. They brought Protestantism- particularly the Church of England or Anglican faith- to the islands.

            Although many Irish-Catholic servants migrated to the island early in its colonial history, the importation of slaves soon overtook the usefulness of such servants. These European servants were freed after only a few years of service. The slaves were educated in the religion of their masters, which was usually Anglican. But majority of slave owners did not permit their slaves to be education in matters of religion. Many slaves, like the first generation of imports, had their own religions.

            Evidence of the cultural tenacity of religious Africanism was much stronger in the slave cultures of the Caribbean and South America than on the plantations of the American South. Jamaican slaves clung to traditional beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft and sorcery.

            Obean and myalism had roots among those West African traditions that stressed the dual potential of magicoreligious powers for help or harm. The obeahman or sorcerer practiced negative spiritual medicine. The myalman counteracted with positive spiritual medicine, which came through dancing and possession trances, sometimes referred to as Jamaican Cumina, an ancestral cult. Though the African gods did not survive by name in Jamaica, as they did in Haitian vaudou, enslaved Africans clung to beliefs in family spirits and “ancestral zombies”, sometimes in support of rebellion. The colonial planters and their representatives guarded against the influence of obeahmen, whose charms were said to protect insurgents from the weapons of whites.

            When at any time sudden or untimely death overtakes any of their companions, they impute it to the malicious art of some practioners in Obeah, or Obi, which is a term of African origin, and signifies sorcery or witchcraft. The practice of this art has a very powerful effect on the negroes, for, in a considerable degree, it gives a bias to their general conduct, dispositions, and manners.

            The professors of Obi are, and always were, natives of Africa, and none other, and they have brought the science with them from Africa to Jamaica, where it is so universally practiced.

            The Jamaican planters, who always comprised a small fraction of the island’s population and who commanded few police and limited military resources, considered that the key to slave control was the planter’s own unlimited power. To this end they assumed that as owners they had to have total control of their workforce and, as assemblymen they permitted the colonial state very limited rights to make statute law regulating slave labor.

            Religion was not regarded as an assistance to slave control. In the first place it interposed an authority figure with claims to supernatural powers between themselves and the slaves. Christian beliefs in England, moreover, once the Catholic Church was destroyed and Protestant sects and churches flourished, had become expressions of intellectual and class conflict rather than instruments of class cohesion, and the English Revolution had affirmed their disruptive potential. At the same time the organizational weakness of the state Anglican Church, which scarcely mustered manpower enough to serve the planter’s ritual requirements, complemented their reluctance to expose the workers to the uncertain effects of Christian instruction. By the end of the seventeenth century, the heathenness of the Africans was being used to justify their enslavement.

Citations:

Olmos, Margarite fernandez. Creole religions of the caribbean: an introduction from vodou and santeria. 2011. 22.

Sernett, Milton C. African American religious history: a documentary   witness. 1993. 20-21.