Browsing by Author "Gaspar, David Barry"

Anticipating Freedom explores the numerous ways enslaved and freedpeople shaped the politics and policies of gradual emancipation in the British Empire, using Barbados as a case study. It binds antislavery debates, legislative reforms, and slave resistance into one conceptual frame to reveal the processes that informed the British Parliament’s decision to pass the Emancipation Act of 1833, thereby conditionally freeing thousands of enslaved men, women, and children across the British Caribbean. As a major sugar-producing colony for the British Empire, Barbados offers a unique context for studying emancipation in the Atlantic World. At first glance, the prospect of freedom seemed impossible due to the planters' utter dependence on slave labor. Still, emancipation in Barbados was achieved through the unyielding determination of enslaved people to resist their captivity and the antislavery legislation initiated by abolitionists in the British Parliament. Hence the project is arranged both chronologically and thematically. It begins with Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 — the only large-scale slave insurrection in the history of Barbados — and its impact on British Parliamentary reforms designed to lessen some of the coercive aspects of slavery during the 1820s. Then, I examine the rise of slave resistance in the months leading up to Emancipation Day and their effect on the Emancipation Act of 1833. My dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implementation of conditional freedom known as ‘Apprenticeship’ in 1834 and the factors that led to its premature demise in 1838. Anticipating Freedom argues that the covert and explicit means through which men and women of African descent resisted enslavement influenced the British Parliament’s decision to implement an intermediate period between slavery and absolute freedom in Barbados. This revelation is significant because it broadens our understanding of what factors were taken into consideration during the antislavery debates between the abolitionists, planters, Members of Parliament, and Barbados legislators. Moreover, by prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of enslaved and freedpeople in Barbados, we step away from romantic notions often associated with emancipation to focus on the quotidian realities of a society no longer ruled by slave labor.

This is a dissertation about identity and governance, and how they are mutually constituted. Between 1838 and 1917, the British brought approximately half a million East Indian laborers to the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations. The dissertation argues that contrary to previous historiographical assumptions, indentured East Indians were an amorphous mass of people drawn from various regions of British India. They were brought together not by their innate "Indian-ness" upon their arrival in the Caribbean, but by the common experience of indenture recruitment, transportation and plantation life. Ideas of innate "Indian-ness" were products of an imperial discourse that emerged from and shaped official approaches to governing East Indians in the Atlantic. Government officials and planters promoted visions of East Indians as "primitive" subjects who engaged in child marriage and wife murder. Officials mobilized ideas about gender to sustain racialized stereotypes of East Indian subjects. East Indian women were thought to be promiscuous, and East Indian men were violent and depraved (especially in response to East Indian women's promiscuity). By pointing to these stereotypes about East Indians, government officials and planters could highlight the promise of indenture as a civilizing mechanism. This dissertation links the study of governance and subject formation to complicate ideas of colonial rule as static. It uncovers how colonial processes evolved to handle the challenges posed by migrant populations.

The primary architects of indenture, Caribbean governments, the British Colonial Office, and planters hoped that East Indian indentured laborers would form a stable and easily-governed labor force. They anticipated that the presence of these laborers would undermine the demands of Afro-Creole workers for higher wages and shorter working hours. Indenture, however, was controversial among British liberals who saw it as potentially hindering the creation of a free labor market, and abolitionists who also feared that indenture was a new form of slavery. Using court records, newspapers, legislative documents, bureaucratic correspondence, memoirs, novels, and travel accounts from archives and libraries in Britain, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago, this dissertation explores how indenture was envisioned and constantly re-envisioned in response to its critics. It chronicles how the struggles between the planter class and the colonial state for authority over indentured laborers affected the way that indenture functioned in the British Atlantic. In addition to focusing on indenture's official origins, this dissertation examines the actions of East Indian indentured subjects as they are recorded in the imperial archive to explore how these people experienced indenture.

Indenture contracts were central to the justification of indenture and to the creation of a pliable labor force in the Atlantic. According to English common law, only free parties could enter into contracts. Indenture contracts limited the period of indenture and affirmed that laborers would be remunerated for their labor. While the architects of indenture pointed to contracts as evidence that indenture was not slavery, contracts in reality prevented laborers from participating in the free labor market and kept the wages of indentured laborers low. Further, in late nineteenth-century Britain, contracts were civil matters. In the British Atlantic, indentured laborers who violated the terms of their contracts faced criminal trials and their associated punishments such as imprisonment and hard labor. Officials used indenture contracts to exploit the labor and limit the mobility of indentured laborers in a manner that was reminiscent of slavery but that instead established indentured laborers as subjects with limited rights. The dissertation chronicles how indenture contracts spawned a complex inter-imperial bureaucracy in British India, Britain, and the Caribbean that was responsible for the transportation and governance of East Indian indentured laborers overseas.

This dissertation centers on Antillean women’s brushes with the French colonial state in nineteenth-century Martinique and Guadeloupe. It argues that while nineteenth-century French Caribbean of African descent women were, by and large, ignored by colonial authorities—unsurprisingly, considered less-than-citizens and, more surprisingly, seldom targeted for or involved in interventions aimed at ‘moral uplift’—they found myriad ways to enact citizenship and forms of belonging. Close analysis of women’s encounters with colonial power in the French Antilles reveals the ways in which gender shaped the contours of women’s political subjectivities. Anchored and intervening in the broad, overlapping fields of Caribbean history, French imperial history, women’s and gender history, and labor history, this dissertation examines subaltern women’s political praxis as they engaged in the realm of reproduction writ large in the midst of their work in both plantation labor and non-plantation waged labor. I argue that, through these engagements, women often offered visions of home and citizenship that transcended the commodifying logics of slavery, racial capitalism, and colonialism.

This dissertation examines amelioration – the effort to create a more “humane” or reformed version of slavery – as it intertwined with enslaved people’s everyday conflicts and the legal system of the Jamaican colonial state. In the context of a rising anti-slavery movement in metropolitan Britain, some pro-slavery advocates adopted colonial legal reform as a strategy to present slavery as redeemable and colonial governments as capable of restraining slaveholders’ worst impulses. While these reformers were often cynical in their aims, enslaved people took these proclaimed legal rights seriously and strategically mobilized their rhetoric to secure a semblance of justice and redress within – and without – the legal system. Whether through fighting in court for the return of their stolen possessions, or seeking justice for a friend brutally murdered by an overseer, enslaved people were savvy and calculated legal actors who stretched the modest reforms conceded by the state. Each dissertation chapter develops a thematic approach to a key area of the law of slavery– enslaved people’s flight, property ownership, maltreatment by enslavers, and criminal procedure – and examines enslaved peoples’ attempts to strategically mobilize reformist legal principles to secure rights and justice within the legal system. In the process, the centrality of the legal system to the maintenance of the broader edifice of white supremacy and plantocracy is also considered.