LABOUR, ABOLITION AND CAPITALISM

Interuniversitaire Cursus Caraïbistiek Michiel Baud CEDLA (www.cedla.uva.nl)

Caribbean society, 1870-1930 - Growth world market - ‘Liberation’ of labour =>Abolition of slavery, but also attacking

peasant ‘autonomy’ - Export-oriented agriculture (and mining and, later, tourism) => New integration in world market

World market, 1870-1930 ‘Regional specialisation’ • Transport => steam ships, railroads, but also Panama-

canal (1914) • Innovation => kooling ships, industrial production • Communication => telegraph • Political stability => modernizing (colonial) state • New mass consumption of tropical products

Modernizing project: Export agriculture and ‘modernization’ • Economic growth and modernity • ‘Civilizing’ (peasant) population • Creation of labouring class • Political and cultural connection with industrial world

Ideological roots of modernization • Colonialism => profits and ‘civilization’ • Belief in ‘progress’ • Social-darwinism => ‘Scientific racism’ • Liberalism => belief in free market

Ideologies of progress • José Ramón López (1896): “No nation has the right to

occupy a piece of land and then to not use it for civilization and progress."

Joseph Chamberlain, 1895: "I believe that the British race

is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen... It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world's surface unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate."

=> Progress is holy duty!

Labour situation • Scarcity of labourers • New labour conditions • Legacy of slavery

Sugar • Boswell (in Hillman et al., 35): “The rise and fall of

sugarcane in the West Indies”!

• Crucial: in 19th century emergence of Spanish Caribbean => So: different ‘waves of commodities’…

Sugar • Regional shift => Cuba, Dominican Republic • Increase of scale => 40.000 ha plantations • Centrales => differentiated technology (manual labour

and industrial technology) • Capitalism (goal: ‘profit, not sugar’ (Knight) )

Logics of labour use

Sugar ‘centrales’

• Sugar and bananas => large-scale production

• But also, coffee, cacao and tobacco => small-scale peasant agriculture.

Logic Caribbean transition

Geography

Demography

Crop (sugar/tobacco)

Labour relations

Slavery/peasant production/ plantation labour

Fernando Ortiz, Cuban counterpoint (1940)

• Sugar as a ‘totalitarian’ crop • Monopolizing land and labour • Political inequality

• Tobacco • Small-scale, family labour • democratic, horizontal

Two models of transition 1. Abolition of slavery and new forms of labout coercion (‘koeli-

labour’) 2. Transformation of peasant society and ‘liberal reforms’ (esp.

Spanish Caribbean)

• Struggle for land • Struggle for labour • Struggle for culture

=> Important: ‘ethnic-racial segmentation’

1. Abolition of slavery Gradual process, stimulated from England (“England rules

de waves”) => 1807 Slave trade abolished 1823 Anti-Slavery society 1834 Abolition of slavery in British territories.

Abolition in Latin America

• Suriname, 1863 • Brazil, 1888 • Cuba, 1886.

Explaining Abolition

• Religious-ethical origins: William Wilberforce

• Contradiction capitalism and slavery (Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery, 1944) => ‘compatibility’-debate => Simon Drescher: ‘Econocide’.

• Today: emphasis on agency of slaves =>

Slave resistance and Abolition

• Marronage => Esp. Suriname and Jamaica In Jamaica 1738 treaty with ‘Captain’ Cudjoe in which

marrons obtain ‘autonomy’! • Slave resistance => Haitian Revolution o.l.v. Toussaint

Louverture, 1791 (C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 1938)

• But also ‘within’ plantations =>

• Emergence of ‘proto-peasantry’ (counter-plantation economy; Mintz)

• Autonomous trading metworks (higglers) • New opportunities for wage labour: In Brazil migration

to coffee regions around São Paulo.

Consequences

• New forms of coercion and control (apprenticeship, ‘Staatstoezicht’); not in French ‘departments’

• Creation of new peasant class of ex-slaves => peasantization, métayage

• New labour relations: ‘from whip to wages’ => continuing (racial) inequality!

• Koeli labour from Asia

2. Transformation of peasant society

Privatize land => Dissolution of communal land property

* (Dominican Republic: ‘terrenos comuneros’) * In British Carribean directed against ex-slaves (‘village communities’)

But also expropriation of (Roman Catholic)religious properties (Manos muertas)

Labour recruitment

• Compulsory labour for State: corvées (f.i. conscripción vial)

• ‘Obligatory’ wage labour: working books (libreta) • Bonded labour (share-cropping)

Emergence (new) peasantries • Spanish Caribbean => tobacco • But also St Lucia, where sugar cane is cultivated by

sharecroppers. Or Dominica: bananas

Always in conflictive and dynamic relations with state, large landowners and commercial sector

New conflicts • Morant Bay Rebellion: Jamaica, 1865 • ‘Ten Years’ War (Guerra de los Diez Años): Cuba, 1868–

1878

• But also ‘silent’, ‘every-day’ resistance

Long-term consequences

• Economic growth (sometimes!) • European and especially US imperialism (expanding

Monroe doctrine of 1823 => Roosevelt corrolary) • Weakening of peasant agriculture • Migration • New nationalistist ideas => Romanticizing disappeared rural society (guajiro) =>Later: Dependency theories => Walter Rodney, “How

Europe underdeveloped Africa”!

But also continuation of peasant economies => Subsistence agriculture, connected to market => - Internal consumption - International market (via merchants) - Sometimes incorporated in large-scale companies