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Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2023
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Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth century appears a further testimonial to European racism, to the arrogance of great power, and to the political influence of the West India planters and their merchant associates. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have characterized the whole process of nineteenth-century indenture as a “new system of slavery.”
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- Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies, 1983
References
1 See for example, Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920 (London and New York, 1974); Johnson U.J. Asiegbu, Slavery and the Polities of Liberation 1787-1861: A Study of Liberated Afriean Emigration and British Anti-Slavery Poliey (New York, 1969); and Monica Sehuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A Social History of Indentured Afriean Immigration into Jamaica, 1841-1865 (Baltimore and London, 1980); Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, 1972); Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore and London, 1981).
2 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p 191.
3 Howard Temperley, British Antislavery 1833-1870 (Columbia, S.C., 1972). This work provides a full treatment of anti-slavery endeavors after British emancipation.
4 The position established by L.J. Ragatz [The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (New York, 1982)] and pursued in Williams's Capitalism and Slavery that the British slave system was a declining economic entity after American independence has been decisively rebutted in Seymour Drescher's Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1972). Drescher argues that abolition of the British slave trade occurred when that commerce was at its prime; moreover, he urges, the slave colonies in the early nineteenth century, far from being old and wasted, generally constituted a young empire with rich economic prospects. R.K. Aufhauser has further shown that slavery in one of the oldest and least fertile of the British West Indies was a rewarding form of investment in the 1820s. See, “Profitability of Slavery in the British Caribbean,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, V (1974), 45-67.
5 David Eltis, “Abolitionist Perceptions of Society After Slavery,” in James Walvin, (ed.), Slavery and British Society 1776-1846 (Baton Rouge, 1982), p. 201.
6 The best, brief exposition of these views appears in David Roberts, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), pp. 2-9. All four draft plans for the Emancipation Bill generated within the Colonial Office in 1833 were intended to create circumstances in the West Indies which would be conducive to the growth of regular habits of industry among emancipated slaves. The apprenticeship period following emancipation was viewed as a time for establishing regular industrial routines. This point is more fully developed in William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830-1865 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 114-127.
7 In this regard the Colonial Office and the abolitionists expressed the same attitude toward post-emancipation colonial legislation. The Permanent Undersecretary justified leniency in these terms: “The large powers which in England are confided to the Magistracy for the punishment of Vagrants are kept in check by many circumstances which have no existence in the West Indies, and the identical Law, which in the Mother Country may be nothing more than a necessary security against crime, may in the colony become the ready instrument of oppression.” Stephen to Gleneig, 22 Aug. 1838, CO. 323/53, Law Officer's Reports.
8 Since the abolitionists’ outlook was shaped by lingering hostility toward the planters and a sublime affirmation that free labor was superior to slave labor, they were inclined to blame any economic failures that might arise in the free period on the incorrigible behavior of planters.
9 ‘The apprenticeship was conceived as an interim condition between emancipation and full freedom. Scheduled to last six years (it was abolished two years early), it extended many civil liberties to the ex-slaves while requiring that they perform forty-five hours of unpaid labor for their former masters per week.
10 Alexander Barclay, Remarks on Emigration to Jamaica: Addressed to the Coloured Class of the United States (New York, 1840); Edward Carbery, Inducements to the Coloured People of the United States to Emigrate to British Guiana (Boston, 1840). For a discussion of this, see Mary Elizabeth Thomas, Jamaica and Voluntary Laborers from Africa 1840-1865 (Gainesville, 1974), pp. 18-23.
11 Burniey to Russell, 19 June 1840, CO. 295/132; H.S. Fox to Aberdeen, 29 July and 27 Aug. 1843, CO. 318/158. 12 W.L. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London, 1937), p. 291.
13 ‘Madden Correspondence, CO. 318/125; MacLeod to Russell, 30 April 1840 and draft response, 23 June 1840, CO. 295/129, no. 7; Treasury Correspondence, CO. 318/147.
14 Hill to Aberdeen, 3 Mar. 1835, CO. 295/106, no. 8.
15 Memorandum, Taylor to Stephen, 19 April 1835, Ibid.
16 This plan called for five year indentures and a return passage to India at the proprietor's expense. These arrangements were made prior to the 1838 order in council which limited contracts to a single year. I.M. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834-1854 (London, 1953). pp. 13-18.
17 Enclosure, Light to Russell, 28 Nov. 1839. P.P. 1840 XXXIV (77), no. 12.
18 John Scoble, Hill Coolies. A Brief Exposition of the Deplorable Condition of the Hill Coolies in British Guiana and Mauritius (London, 1840); for a more moderate view, see Enclosure, Light to Russell, 6 Dec. 1839, P.P. 1840 XXXIV (77), no. 13; P.P. 1839 XXXIX (463), nos. 8, 9. 10, 11.
19 The Guiana Chronicle, vol. 23, 14 May 1838.
20 Burnley to Russell, 13 Dec. 1839. Burnley Correspondence, CO. 295/127.
21 P.P. 1840 XXXIV (151), no. 23.
22 Memorials, C.O. 318/143; CO. 318/147.
23 James Stephen made a clear distinction between Indian and African labor migration in a long memorandum, declaring that objections voiced against Indian immigration were not “equally plausible” to those raised in opposition to African migration. Memorandum, Stephen to Vernon Smith, 3 Nov. 1840, CO. 318/148.
24 This was not a frivolous point. In 1838, Barbados, a colony with no need of immigrant labor, refused to accept Africans liberated from slave ships on grounds that “lawless savages just released from a slave ship might endanger the tranquility of the country” and that “their intercourse with the population of Barbados, emerging as it was from Slavery into freedom, would be most injurious, as leading to the introduction of Obeah, and other Evil and immoral influences, which are now happily almost eradicated.” MacGregor to Glenelg, 4 July 1838, CO. 28/123, no. 158. In 1840, St. Vincent also declared itself unwilling to accept Africans captured by British cruisers. MacGregor to Russell, 22 Feb. 1840, CO. 28 133, no. 21.
25 Memorandum, Stephen to Vernon Smith. 3 Nov. 1840, CO. 318148.
26 These were the descendants of English blacks and Negro loyalists from North America who were established in Sierra Leone under the auspices of the Province of Freedom and the Sierra Leone Company at the end of the eighteenth century.
27 Maroons were escaped slaves who lived in the high country of Jamaica. After an encounter with British colonists in the late eighteenth century, many were transported, first to Nova Scotia, thence to Sierra Leone.
28 Vernon Smith to Messrs. Stewart and Westmoreland, 28 July 1840, enclosure 2, no. 6, Russell to Doherty, 21 Aug. 1840, P.P. 1842 XIII (479), appendix I.
29 Russell to Light, 30 Dec. 1840, no. 8. Ibid.
30 Russell to Jeremie, 20 March 1841, nu. 10. Ibid. It should be observed that Russell greatly exaggerated the number of Christians among the slave population. Only a fraction of the West Indian slave population had adopted Christianity in a meaningful way.
31 Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”, p. 5.
32 For a discussion of the constitution crisis in Jamaica, see Anton V. Long, Jamaica and the New Order, 1827-1847 (Jamaica, 1956), pp. 32-43.
33 Philosophical Radicals, though commonly sympathetic to Exeter Hall, were also advocates of responsible colonial government. Elie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1950), III, 231-32, 236-41.
34 Metcalfe to Russell, 2 May 1840, CO. 137/249, no. 77; Metcalfe to Russell, 11 June 1840, CO. 137/249, no. 86.
35 Memorandum, Russell Papers, P.R.O. 30, 22/4A.
36 John Prest, Lord John Russell (Columbia, S.C, 1972), p. 173.
37 The average pre-duty price per hundredweight of British West Indian sugar in 1841 was 39s 8d; the average for Cuban was 21s 6d, for Brazilian, 20s 9d.
38 G. Kitson Clark, “Hunger and Politics in 1842,” The Journal of Modern History, XXV (1953), 355-74.
39 Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League 1838-1846 (London, 1958), pp. 104-05.
40 Donald Grove Barnes, A History oft he English Corn Laws from 1660-1846 (New York: reprint, 1961), p. 244.
41 Temperley, British Antislavery, p. 144.
42 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1841), pp. 396-98.
43 Evidence 6158, 6275, Select Committee on the West India Colonies, P.P. 1842 XII (479).
44 Joseph John Gurney, A Winter in the West Indies, Described in Familiar Letters to Henry Clay of Kentucky (London. 1840), pp. 103-04.
45 Metcalfe to Russell, 30 March 1840. CO. 137 248, no. 50.
46 In November 1841, Hall Pringle, a stipendiary magistrate in Jamaica, wrote, “the negroes, both males and females, are, with few exceptions, each of them in possession of a horse, and most expensive clothing, and many other superfluities….” Enclosure, CO. 137 248, no. 50. Years later, a missionary looking back on the first years of freedom noted how many freedmen were “wasting their earnings on pride and show-horses and guns, for which they had no use….” Hope Masterton Waddell, Twenty-nine Years in the West Indies and Central Africa (London, 1863), p. 145.
47 Report from District A, Lower Demerara. P.P. 1842 XII (551), appendix 23.
48 The annual appropriation provided £30,000 a year for education in the West Indies.
49 Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonisation and Colonies (London, 1928), p. 332.
50 Memorandum, Lord John Russell, 7 Nov. 1840, CO. 138/148.
51 John Peterson, Province of Freedom. A History of Sierra Leone 1787-1870 (Evanston. 1969), pp. 21-23.
52 See, for example, James McQueen, The Colonial Controversy (Glasgow, 1821).
53 Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa (Madison, 1964), p. 180. In the twentyseven years after 1824, twenty-eight different administrations governed the colony.
54 Peterson, Province of Freedom, p. 140. Peterson elaborates: “Of five missionaries sent to Freetown in 1823, four died within six months. Even by 1840 the situation had not substantially changed. In January of that year thirteen CMS people arrived in the colony, but by July five had already died and five had returned to England because of poor health.”
55 Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), p. 173.
56 Merivale, Lectures, p. 117.
57 Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, p. 164.
58 Report of the Select Committee on Sierra Leone and Fernando Po, P.P. 1830 X (661).
59 Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, pp. 211, 221.
60 Madden's experience in Jamaica was described in his A Twelvemonth's Residence in the West Indies During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship (Philadelphia, 1835).
61 Report of Commissioner of Inquiry on the West Coast of Africa, P.P. 1842 XII (551), appendix no. 15, pp. 246-49, 258-59. 261, 285.
62 Madden was ill during his visit, unable to travel to settlements at some distance from the seat of government.
63 Doherty correspondence. Report of Commissioner of Inquiry on the West Coast of Africa, P.P. 1842 XII (551), appendix no. 17, pp. 359-69.
64 Buxton's views coincided fairly closely with popular British opinion. See, Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 262-64, 267. 416, 421-22.
65 Buxton estimated the trade in the vicinity of 150,000 per year.
66 Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, The Remedy (London, 18401, p. 282.
67 Ibid, Preface.
68 Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Bart., ed. Charles Buxton (London, 1866), p. 455.
69 Its formal name was the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilization of Africa. Auxiliary societies were formed in York, Durham, Newcastle, Derby, Plymouth. Exeter. Bristol, Cheltenham, Oxford, and in two West India colonies, Jamaica and Antigua. Friend of Africa, no. 4. 25 Feb. 1841, pp. 59-62.
70 Temperley, British Antislavery, p. 55. Buxton observed the nonpartisan nature of his society, writing that “Whig, Tory, Radical: Dissenter. Low Church, High Church, tip-top High Church, or Oxfordism, all united.” Memoirs, p. 462. The June 1, 1840 meeting of the society was addressed by a variety of high clergymen, long-standing abolitionists, and by Robert Peel. Daniel O'Connell was in attendance. There can be little doubt that Buxton's society had captivated the attention and imagination of a large segment of the British public.
71 Gallagher, “Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy, 1838-1842,” Cambridge Historical Journal, X (19501, 45-47.
72 Mortality of the Niger Expedition, P.P. XXXI (83).
73 Friend of Africa, no. 21. July, 1842, pp. 94-107.
74 William Allen and T.R.H. Thomson, Narrative of an Expedition to the River Niger in 1841 (London, 1848), II, 434.
75 Samuel Crowther and Samuel Schon, Journals of an Expedition up the Niger in 1841 (London, 1842), p. 349.
76 Crowther, a recaptive, would become an Anglican bishop in 1864.
77 Crowther and Schon, Journals, p. 363.
78 Church Missionary Society, Fourah-Bay Institution Building Fund (1842), Appendix, Ibid., pp. 387-93.
79 For a description of his venture, see Macgregor Laird and R.A.K. Oldfield Narrative of an Expedition into Interior Africa (London, 1837). Laird's family firm constructed the steam vessels used in the Niger expedition of 1841.
80 Laird testified for two days in June 1842. He also provided a detailed statement on emigration which appeared in appendix no. 27 of the Report of the Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa, P.P. 1842 XII (551).
81 Ibid, p. xv.
82 Ibid. To some extent, such efforts were already underway. In 1840 the Colonial Office encouraged Caribbean governors to recommend the names of West Indians of African ancestry who could fill responsible positions in Britain's West African settlements. Draft, Russell to Melcalfe, 20 Nov. 1840, C.O. 137 254.
83 Evidence 6222-24, 6258, Select Committee on the West India Colonies, P.P. 1842 XIII (479).
84 Report from the Select Committee on the West India Colonies, P.P. 1842 XIII (479).
85 Since early 1841 the Treasury had advocated the emigration of Africans to the West Indies as being in the interest of the emigrants, the planters, British consumers, the future of free labor, and the civilization of Africa. Treveylan to Stephen, 21 January 1841, C.O. 318151.
86 Report of Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, P.P. 1846 XXIV (706), pp. 27-29.
87 Reports of R.G. Butts and R. Guppy, Commissioners of Inquiry into the Subject of Emigration from Sierra Leone to the West Indies, P.P. 1847-8 XLIV (732).
88 Tinker, New System of Slavery, p. 81.
89 C. Duncan Rice, ‘“Humanity Sold for Sugar!’ The British Abolitionist Response to Free Trade in Slave-Grown Sugar,” The Historical Journal, XIII (1970), 402-18.
90 The legislatures of Jamaica and British Guiana exercised control over colonial budgets. The Trinidad Legislative Council did not. Extensive cuts in colonial budgets undertaken in the wake of free trade involved British Guiana and Jamaica in extended constitutional crises with the metropolitan government. See, Green, British Slave Emanicpation, pp. 240-43.
91 Papers Relative to Emigration from the West Coast of Africa to the West Indies, P.P. 1847 XXXIX (191), p. 8.
92 Ninth General Report of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, P.P. 1849 XXII (1082), p. 20.
93 Between 1845 and 1849 over 13,000 Africans were landed in the British West Indies from Sierra Leone, the Kru coast, St. Helena, Rio and Havana. G.W. Roberts, “Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean.” Population Studies, VII (1954), 260. The reason for the large number is the increase in seizures by British cruisers occasioned by the expansion of the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil following the abolition of the British sugar duties, 1846.
94 Colonial banks as well as numerous metropolitan West India houses folded. In Trinidad, the governor had difficulty finding solvent colonists to serve in the Legislative Council. Harris to Grey, 12 Aug. 1848, CO. 295/164, no. 93.
95 Walker to Grey, 4 Dec. 1848, CO. 111/260, no. 151; Harris to Grey, 12 June 1847, CO. 295/157, no. 52; Harris to Grey, 21 Feb. 1848, CO. 295/160, no. 21; Harris to Grey, 1 July 1848, CO. 295/163, no. 75.
96 K.O. Lawrence, “The Evolution of Long-Term Labour Contracts in Trinidad and British Guiana, 1834-1863,” The Jamaican Historical Review, V (1965), 15-23.
97 Average export of sugar from Jamaica in the four years 1831-34 was roughly 68,000 tons; between 1854 and 1857 it was 21,875 tons. Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, (London, 1950), II, 198-99.
98 Ibid., p. 377. In general, sugar production declined in the Windward Islands and Jamaica after emancipation. It stabilized, even expanded slightly, in Antigua and St. Kitts. In Barbados, a colony having a very dense laboring population, it more than doubled by the late sixties. And, of course, production was sustained in Trinidad and British Guiana by virtue of indentured labor.
99 Merivale to Labouchere, 9 Oct. 1857, enclosed in CO. 28/187.
100 Tinker, New System of Slavery, p. 60.