CAPÍTULO IV: MARCO PROPOSITIVO
4.5 MARKETING Y COMERCIALIZACIÓN
The history of the anglophone Caribbean up to the late-1950s can be read as a series of three movements: the movement inward of the non-indigenous populations, the movement upward of the formerly dominated to positions of near-dominance, and the movement outward of masses of emigrants. Though British powers intended this region to form a crop of settler
colonies on a par with those later created in the United States, Australia and Canada, the idea was quickly abandoned. Rampant, fatal disease and the dominant sugarcane industry’s requirement for large estates greeted the first arrivals from Britain and quickly discouraged immigrants who could not afford vast tracts of land, or endure local ailments, from establishing themselves in the new colonies.3 Due to the dominance of plantations and the undesirability of the region for long-term settlement, the English-speaking colonies, like their French and Dutch counterparts, became tropical factories for the production and distribution of goods.4
Indeed, any sense of creating societies connected by communal bonds seems to have been absent altogether from the minds of British powers. African slaves were brought in to work, or to be funnelled to other locations within the Empire; landlords owned the ground but were absent, often Europe-based, their lands cultivated by hired overseers; communal bonds of any kind were either actively discouraged or seemingly not thought of at all. The islands existed to produce goods and were essentially ‘staffed’ and ‘managed’ as a assembly line might be: when vacancies appeared, they were filled; when things broke down, they were hastily fixed: any feeling of community was unnecessary to their desired function, production. Even inter-island exchange and contact did not take place; as noted by H. V. Wiseman, the purpose of the colonies, initially, was to trade with England, solely, and they were therefore linked only to the metropole and not to each other at all.5
This glaring failure to actively bind the whole British-Caribbean community is clear in the societies’ structures and in the policies they implemented to respond to social change. All islands had an upper-class of white property holders, a lower-class of black servants and
3 Wiseman, pp. 88-89.
4 We will consider the differences between the anglophone and francophone Caribbean in the next section. For more information on the Dutch colonies of the region, see Gert Oostindie, Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean, Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005) for a recent study which includes contemporary effects of historic colonial practices. For a comprehensive history of the colonial era, see Cornelius Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and the Guianas: 1680-1791 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1985) and Ibid., The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam: 1791/5 – 1942 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1990).
a middle class of coloured gentry that operated as almost wholly distinct, only somewhat- intersecting units. Many white residents of the islands resisted being identified as ‘West Indians’, their imagined bonds, identities and frames of reference being, to them, European, despite negative opinions of them in Britain.6 Between disempowered slaves and their white owners were the mixed-race, ‘coloured’ offspring of, usually brief, interracial unions. Sometimes manumitted, sometimes granted preferential treatment as slaves, the coloured class lived at the intersection between the powerful and the disempowered. Where the ‘white elite’ were in firm hold of ‘commercial, political and educational opportunities’, free members of the coloured class had access to some, but not all of these things.7 Winston James recalls Edward Long’s term ‘the pride of amended blood’ to describe this phenomenon. This pride was one that placed free coloureds in an improved position on a spectrum of racial purity and one that self-justified increased rights, including the right to own slaves.8 This early social separation created a legacy that can be seen through the anglophone region’s history – from pre- to post-emancipation and even to the present day. Despite the division between whites, coloureds and blacks initially corresponding to a divide between rural-based labour and urban-based professionals and owners – division continued even after the movement of the black masses from plantations into cities after emancipation. In fact, the end of slavery did little to create unity; in many regions all that occurred was further social fragmentation due to the import of more groups to be slotted into the white- coloured-black hierarchy.
Nonetheless, emancipation was the first major social change in British Caribbean history, its mismanagement creating social upheavals whose repercussions would affect the area for well over a century. Abolition was a grand disruption to the islands’ existing
6 Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Background’, in West Indian Literature, ed. by Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 11-26 (p. 12); Wiseman, p. 90.
7 Cobham, p. 16.
8 Winston James, ‘Migration, Racism and Identity Formation: The Caribbean Experience in Britain’, in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, ed. by Winston James and Clive Harris (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 231-87 (p. 236)
structure, one that was not at all welcomed by the colonial ruling-class. The desire to free African slaves was primarily a metropolitan-driven programme that created conflict between white island residents and those in Britain who forced through the legislation.9 Because of the serious threat to profits that paid plantation labour represented, colonials argued with the Crown that some compromise had to be reached to protect their investments. Eventually it was agreed that slavery would be phased out slowly, through an ‘apprenticeship’ system that would keep slaves labouring on plantations for six years. By some accounts, apprenticeship ‘was even worse than slavery, in that slave-owners sought to maximise the output from their slaves whom they were going to lose shortly’; the system inspired owners to even greater disregard for those Africans with whom they felt no bonds. 10 Apprenticeship was doomed to failure; in the end it lasted only four years, from 1834 to 1838. Once the experiment was definitively abandoned, many slaves defected from plantations, refusing the small wages offered by owners, their awareness of the real worth of their labour linked to knowledge of their old purchase prices.11 Manumission was a painful economic blow to the islands, its impact illustrated by a sharp decline in the output of sugar on most islands from 1838-39.12 This massive social upheaval elicited a hasty response that prompted further social fragmentation. Rather than raising wages, or otherwise enticing back the lost labourers, experiments with alternative cheap labour sources were undertaken. Waves of Chinese and Portuguese were brought into the English islands in the region but neither of these two groups proved an effective replacement workforce. The Portuguese were not used to cultivating cane and did so poorly; the Chinese were recruited from the merchant class and
9 Wiseman, p. 114.
10 David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, ‘Introduction’, in Across the Dark Waters: Ethnicity and
Indian Identity in the Caribbean, ed. by David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1-11 (p. 1)
11 Malcolm Cross, ‘East Indian - Creole Relations in Trinidad and Guiana in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Across the Dark Waters, ed. By David Dabydeen and Brinsley Samaroo, pp. 14-38 (p. 16).
many drifted back to that profession to become Caribbean shop owners.13 Again lands were left to be tended at increased expense, and again, rather than suffering from lowered profits, landowners acted to import more people. Due to rumours about the ‘tractable nature of Indian labourers’ and their success as imports to the island of Mauritius, Indians were shipped into the region as indentured servants from 1838.14 As of 1917, when indenture ended, 551,000 Indians had been transplanted, the vast majority placed in British Guiana and Trinidad.15