Post-Emancipation Life

         To assert that slaves actually achieved their own emancipation by resistance would be to overstate the case. The freeing of the British slaves in 1838, in common with the ending of the British trade in slaves years earlier, could only be achieved by parliamentary decree. In 1834 Britain initiated the four year period of “apprenticeship” in the West Indies that was to grant full “emancipation: to slaves in 1838. This “emancipation” was to promise slaves this set of institutions constituting “freedom”: “emancipation” proposed a narrative development in which wage labor, contract, marriage, and family would be the formal institutions through which modern freedom could be attained and the condition of slavery overcome. Yet emancipation clearly did not establish freedom for black peoples in the British West Indies, many of whom were still confined to the plantation and others who left bound in economic servitude and poverty. The socialization of former slaves into liberal promises of freedom in Jamaica was part of the gradual disciplining of blacks into wage work, which Marx would call “another form of slavery”.

         The British inserted the Chinese so-called free laborers at the critical time of slave emancipation, calculating that they would occupy an intermediary position within this governmentality in which the colonized became human through development of economic and political freedom.

         Emancipation removed the legal infrastructure of slavery, but it also removed the systems of support for both the plantation owners and the ex-slaves. The former slave was free not to work for his former owner, or indeed for anyone but himself. But he was not free to make use of the provision grounds on the estate or of the estate ‘hospital’, or to receive the periodic handouts of clothing and imported food that were part of the routine of estate life under the lamented institution.

         Liberation of the slaves reduced the estate owner’s assets, for which he was generously compensated by the British Parliament- Jamaican planters receiving almost one-third of the total reparations paid out across the empire. It also sent up his costs since labor now had to be paid for. These two factors, combined with the lower costs for sugar production to other (slave) producers around the world, resulted in a wage being offered to the former slaves by the planters that was derisory, and did as much as emancipation itself to promote the establishment of an independent Jamaican peasantry.

After emancipation in 1838, thousands of blacks withdrew their labor from the plantations and settled on crown lands as peasants or small farmers. Some, with savings built up over years from the sale of foodstuffs from their provision grounds, and assisted by missionaries were able to buy small plots for themselves. The Jamaican sugar industry had been in decline for some years before the end of slavery. In 1846 the British parliament passed a Free Trade Bill, under which the protective duties that had long favored British West Indian sugar exports were abolished. Many planters lost their holdings to the British merchants to whom they had been in debt for some time. Hundreds of planters and their families and other whites, left the island during the mid-to late nineteenth century.

Citations:

Craton, Michael. Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the  Caribbean. 265.

Mordecai, Martin. Culture and Customs of Jamaica. 15.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of intimacy in     North American History. 201.