Category Archives: Africa

by | 14 January 2025 · 6:35 am

Transatlantic Animal Dispersals

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 23-25:

Oceanic dispersals are extremely instructive because they reveal what is biologically possible, showing what oceans could be crossed and in what direction and which ones constituted insurmountable barriers. The Atlantic, for instance, has been breached several times. One hundred million years ago, South America became something of an island unto itself, having broken off from Africa and decoupled from North America (until about three and a half million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama finally connected the two halves of the hemisphere). South America therefore existed in “splendid isolation” for tens of millions of years, as one scholar has put it. Yet several dispersals from Africa occurred during this time. South America was originally rodent-free, but a type of rodent called caviomorphs—related to guinea pigs, chinchillas, and capybaras but different from mice and rats—irrupted into it between fifty-five and forty-one million years ago. The closest relatives to the South American caviomorph rodents live in Africa, clearly indicating the source population. Primates followed suit. Again, South America possessed no primates at first. Yet a monkey that scientists call Chilecebus carrascoensis somehow got across the Atlantic Ocean thirty-five to twenty million years ago. To succeed, any primate had to be small and extremely resilient. To judge by the extant fossils, Chilecebus carrascoensis weighed less than two pounds and had a skull barely two inches long. This intrepid voyager would give rise to all New World monkeys, including spider monkeys, capuchins, and marmosets.

As far as we know, about a dozen species have made it across the Atlantic Ocean, including rodents, primates, bats, tortoises, a blind snake, and even a weak-flying bird called the hoatzin. Of all these creatures, geckos and skinks were particularly capable of surviving long oceanic passages, as they hid underneath branches and laid eggs resistant to desiccation and even short-term immersion in seawater. Yet, irrespective of individual capabilities, two main factors explain these successful crossings. First, the closest two points across the Atlantic (Kabrousse, Senegal, and Touros, Brazil) now lie about 1,740 miles apart and, thirty or forty million years ago, perhaps half that distance. Nine hundred miles is far but not overwhelmingly so. Second, the rivers of western Africa constitute excellent launching pads to catch western-moving Atlantic currents leading to the Americas. Although crossing the Atlantic has never been easy, the biological record shows that it has occurred from time to time, and what is true for geckos and rodents applies no less to humans. When Christopher Columbus set out to cross the Ocean Sea in 1492, he and his crew were embarking on a voyage that other species had already made successfully.

Other oceanic paths have been less common. The reverse Atlantic passage from South America to Africa, for instance, has played a much smaller role in the dispersal of species. Negative evidence cannot settle the matter definitively. South American organisms may well have crossed but been attacked on arrival, or perhaps they survived in Africa but without leaving much of a trace. Still, it is striking that no terrestrial vertebrates are known to have made the eastward passage across the Atlantic.

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by | 16 September 2024 · 6:23 am

Eastern Europe c. 1800

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 31-33:

When Westerners discuss Eastern Europe, they stress its complexity. It seems a place where an endless array of different peoples lay claim to the same spaces—so many, and so different, that the region seems to resist historical understanding. Yugoslavia alone consisted of some ten ethnicities, and there are subgroups and minorities (for example, the Muslims of southern Serbia, in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, or the Hungarians to the north in Vojvodina). Interwar Czechoslovakia had five major nationalities, and the Habsburg Empire contained many more. As I write, three ethnic groups are making claims on parts of tiny Bosnia. Furthermore, the boundaries have changed so often and rapidly in the past two hundred years that it seems impossible to relate nationality to statehood. Poles lived in three states just over a century ago, and currently, Hungarians live in five; while Albanians live in Albania, they also populate Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and Macedonia (and are of three religions).

But on a global background, Eastern Europe appears not so different from much of Africa and Asia, where numerous ethnic groups are settled across smaller regions and where, in certain periods of history, colonial empires have ruled many groups simultaneously, drawing administrative borders with little concern for ethnic homelands. Take a map of Africa around 1900. West European powers had seized huge stretches of diverse territory, and political maps suggested a simplicity at odds with ethnic diversity, for example in German Southwest Africa, French Equatorial Africa, or the Belgian Congo.

In 1800, the peoples of East Central Europe lived in just four states: the Russian and Ottoman Empires, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the lands of the House of Habsburg (officially known as the Austrian Empire from 1804 to 1867). Within these lands, one could identify older political divisions, but if one simplifies a bit, one sees a map that is not difficult to grasp. In the north were the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, defunct from 1795, when Austria, Prussia, and Russia divided the Commonwealth’s lands among themselves. Farther south we find the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms, possessions of the Habsburg monarchy from 1526. Hungary comprised the kingdom of Croatia as well as the principality of Transylvania. The Ottoman Empire included the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia—the future heartlands of Romania—as vassal states, but it ruled directly the provinces (eyelets) of Bosna, Rumeli, and Silistre (which would become Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria) and contained the lands of the defunct medieval Bulgarian, Serb, and Bosnian kingdoms. Though nominally under Turkish rule, Montenegro maintained de facto independence because of its location in rugged mountain terrain.1 Finally, the Ottomans occupied much of central Hungary from 1526 to the 1680s, using it as a launching ground for campaigns of aggression on Habsburg lands farther north.

As in any imperial space, the political borders imposed by foreign powers belied the linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity that had resulted from the settlement and mixing of diverse tribes centuries earlier. Much of this region had been ruled from Rome and later Constantinople (for example, the provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Macedonia on the Balkan Peninsula) but some of it, especially north of the Danube, remained beyond Roman power, and the documentary record is scantier. Still, in broad terms, we know what transpired.

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by | 12 September 2024 · 5:10 am

Caribbean Syncretic & Creole Religions

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 409-412:

Caribbean religions are among the most complex examples of the emergence and transformation of cultural lifeworlds in the Americas. Given their numerous sources and formations, and their tendency to eschew orthodox axioms in favor of heterodox practices guided by a few broad principles, religions emerging from the Caribbean are characterized by amalgamation and recombination. Added to syncretic or creole religions deriving from the Caribbean context are religions whose doctrines and belief systems, themselves varied and changing over time, derive from “Old World” origins. Thus, today even a cursory list of religions in the region would be long—Catholicism, Protestantism, evangelical and Pentecostal movements, Judaism, Hinduism, vodou, Santería, Islam, espiritismo, Rastafari, and orisha—made even longer by a number of demographically smaller but socially significant traditions such as Kali worship in Guyana, brujería and Mita worship in Puerto Rico, Quimbois in Martinique, and Winti in Suriname.

Equally important are historical and contemporary magical practices (often subsumed under the term “obeah”) that involve supernatural powers, deriving largely from West African divination and healing practices and, to a lesser extent, Hindu and Christian cosmologies. The meaning of obeah has changed over the centuries. Among 17th- to 19th-century Africans and Afro-Caribbeans it was associated with salutary objectives, such as alleviating illness, protecting against harm, and avenging wrongs. Euro-colonial and local bourgeois ideologies emphasized the dangerous aspects of obeah, often equating it with Judeo-Christian interpretations of evil forces. Often, positive and negative assessments existed simultaneously, making local opinion about obeah ambiguous. Today, as in earlier eras, its practice represents tensions between the ways in which practitioners interpret obeah’s methods and objectives, and the ways in which those methods and objectives are perceived by outsiders.

Caribbean religions are expressions of traditions of creativity, resistance, and flexibility that continuously build on as well as disassemble older and current forms of knowledge, heritage, and custom. The challenge in understanding them is to grasp that difference and similarity exist at the same time. Hinduism, as practiced by the progeny of indentured laborers, reflects both the remembered traditions that early immigrants brought with them from India and a contemporary global Hinduism that travels across the Hindu diaspora. While Caribbean Hindus may interpret their forms of worship as replicating those in India, they also recognize that certain transformations and syncretisms have occurred for almost 170 years in the Caribbean.

In contrast, Rastafari’s origins are in Jamaica, where religious movements based in Afro-Caribbean folk Christianity, the pan-Africanism of Marcus Garvey, grassroots reinterpretations of the Old Testament, and the veneration of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia coalesced in the 1930s, giving rise to the religious, philosophical, and political worldview of today’s Rastafari movement. In it, Africa plays a great symbolic role as a place of desired return and the antithesis of “Babylon”—all places and forms of consciousness in which predatory relationships and “mental slavery” abound. Yet although thus memorialized, Africa is not literally remembered by many Rastafari, the vast majority of whom have never had direct experience with societies and cultures in Africa or Ethiopia (two terms often used synonymously). Nonetheless, Africa/Ethiopia represents for them an indispensable emblem of unity, self-determination, authenticity, and morality.

Islam, meanwhile, first came to the Caribbean as the religion of some African slaves. With the advent of indentured laborers from India, Islam gained an increased presence in the region. Notable today are the numerous masjids (mosques) that dot the landscape of many countries, from Trinidad to Guyana, Puerto Rico, and Suriname. Some masjids are humble, built to serve small communities and local villages; others are grand, built as centers of learning as well as centers of worship for larger populations in the towns and cities. In these places of worship that serve jamaats (congregations) large and small, imams (religious leaders) work to preserve the Sunnah (Muslim way of life). At the same time, Islam in the Caribbean encapsulates the simultaneous inclusiveness and exclusions of a religion claimed by different ethnic groups, practiced according to divergent interpretations of doctrine, and, in certain contexts, participated in by non-Muslims. This is perhaps best seen in the ritual of Hosay, the Caribbean version of Shi’a Islam’s commemoration, Muharram.

Historically spread throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, today Hosay is practiced on a major scale only in Trinidad, where it is simultaneously an important religious event, a freighted political statement, an embattled heritage claim, and a multicultural symbol. Mourners of Hussain march with enormous, elaborate representations of the tadjas (tazzias, or representations of the martyrs’ tombs; see fig. 27.2). This procession has been treated by some local participants less like a sacred commemoration than like a parade, where music and general revelry may occur on the sidelines. Despite its Muslim origins, Hosay in Trinidad also has always involved Hindus and Afro-Trinidadians. Hindus have long been key participants in the building of the tadjas, and Afro-Trinidadians traditionally have played a significant role as drummers as well as bearers (along with Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians) of the tadjas in procession. Moreover, Hindus sometimes make their own vows and offerings during Hosay. This ritual was the only significant element in the Indian cultural repertoire that provided a social bridge to the rest of 19th-century Trinidadian society (Singh 1988, 4). Given its multiple interpretations and diverse participants, Hosay lends a distinctive religious and cultural tenor to Trinidad’s national culture. The combination of participants and their varied forms of involvement has given rise to debates among Muslims and non-Muslims about the authenticity of Hosay and its appropriateness in Islam. Other observers argue that this ceremony’s heterogeneity and cooperation counters the divide-and-rule antagonism among subordinate groups (notably Afro- and Indo-Caribbeans) encouraged by British colonizers, offering a natural space for a creole unity.

Religion is just one of innumerable examples of the ways in which Africa, Europe, and Asia have together produced the 20th-century Caribbean.

I hope the author of this chapter (Aisha Khan) and the editors and publisher forgive my multiple extracts from this chapter, which is my favorite in this meaty volume from U. Chicago Press.

Aisha Khan is an associate professor of anthropology at New York University. She is the author of Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad and co-editor of Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz.

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by | 9 September 2024 · 5:43 am

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

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by | 21 August 2024 · 8:40 am

Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 214-215:

As the 17th century drew to a close, English and French colonists were no longer able to justify investments in indentured servitude, even as temporary chattel, on economic grounds. They were, however, able to promote the institution on social and political grounds. The policy decision to pull white women from field gangs because they were better placed to serve the colonial enterprise in the field of reproduction exemplifies the significance of social forces in determining the shape of the labor system. Importantly, it shows that the planters’ efforts to reinvent servitude as slavery received some pushback for social and political purposes. In addition, there was the matter of sustaining militia regiments to assist in the suppression of enslaved Africans. To these ends colonial governments, rather than planters, sought to ramp up the demand for male servants.

Given the harshness of Caribbean work and epidemiological environments, for many servants the plantation experience amounted to lifelong enslavement. The legal requirement of fixed-time servitude and the social reality of lifelong labor were offset by mortality trends and management policy. To suggest, as one scholar does, that it “was, of course, inconceivable that any of the [white] labor pools mentioned (convicts, prisoners of war, or vagrants) could have been converted into chattel slaves” is to ignore what was taking place on the ground in the colonies (Eltis 2000, 70).

The conversion of servitude into slavery was conceived by planters of cotton, tobacco, and sugar. If these planters failed at this conversion, it was not because of weak managerial resolve, but because of the multiple internal and external forces that militated against them, including servants’ unrelenting ambition to participate in colonialism as independent wealth makers.

From the beginning, those Barbadian planters who received large grants of land calculated the benefits of importing African labor to work them. Pre-sugar Barbadian planters, such as James Drax, were directly involved in sponsoring slave voyages to the African coast; the Drax family later became sugar barons in Barbados and Jamaica. Other English merchants with investment interests in Barbados were known slave traders. The Earl of Warwick, who claimed in 1629 that Barbados was granted him by the monarch, and Maurice Thompson, a large landowner, were involved in the supply of enslaved Africans directly to Barbados before the “sugar revolution.”

The contrast with smaller landholders is sharp. Before the [Dutch] Brazilian political crisis of 1645 wrecked that country’s sugar industry, the Dutch West India Company was selling slaves on easy terms to creditable planters in Barbados and Guadeloupe. Strapped for cash and alienated from credit, the “small holders did not take to sugar,” says Blackburn, “because it was a new and unfamiliar crop, and because it could not be harvested for at least eighteen months after the first planting” (Blackburn 1997, 231). They did not attract Dutch or English credit, had no access to core funding for slave purchase, and thus remained in the servant market. In this way they drove the demand for servants despite the potential availability of slaves.

“Slavery and cotton,” then, was as established in Barbados and Guadeloupe in 1640 as would be “sugar and servitude” in 1650 and “sugar and slavery” in 1660. Between 1645 and 1650, the midpoint of the transition, the mixed-labor regime was at its peak. As big investors in cotton production, planters with financial access did two things that prepared them for sugar: they consolidated small plantations into large ones, and they made substantive purchases of enslaved Africans. Economies of scale in cotton production enabled many of these planters to access larger external credit instruments that enabled the expansion of both the servant trade and the slave trade. In addition, the planters sped up the land consolidation process that facilitated the sugar industry.

These investors became industry leaders who championed the charge into sugar production and plantation expansion after 1645. In effect, they were deepening rather than creating the reliance upon enslaved Africans. Capital was scarce and expensive; risks were high. In pursuit of profits, planters fully exploited whatever labor was within their reach. Alongside “sugar and black slavery” there was “sugar and white slavery.” Plantation agriculture before, during, and after the sugar revolution generally meant disciplined, coerced labor—and, as Williams so aptly concluded, “at times that labor has been slave, at other times nominally free; at times black, at other times white or brown or yellow” (Williams 1944, 29).

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by | 18 August 2024 · 8:30 pm

African Origins of Caribbean Slaves

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 246-247:

Between 1500 and 1870, the Caribbean region (construed as the islands and associated mainland rim) was the destination of about 5.75 million Africans, about 46% of all captives involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Four years after the first black slaves came from Seville in 1501, 17 African slaves arrived in Hispaniola to work in its copper mines and 100 or so in its gold mines. In 1525, 213 captives from São Tomé landed in Santo Domingo, marking probably the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas. For the next century Africans continued to arrive in small numbers (perhaps 7,000 total) in the Spanish Caribbean islands. Not until the second quarter of the 17th century did a significant number (about 27,000) arrive in the British Caribbean. The 18th century was the high point of the trade, accounting for two-thirds of all Africans shipped to the Caribbean, although Cuba received most of its slaves (710,000) in the 19th century. The British Caribbean received the most Africans—almost 2.8 million—with the French next at 1.3 million, the Spanish about 1 million, the Dutch about 500,000, and the Danish just 130,000. About 15% to 20% of Africans arriving in the Caribbean were subsequently traded within the Americas.

The origins of these Africans varied. Overall, West-Central Africa supplied the most slaves—about 1.6 million. After 1595 Angola became the leading source of slaves for Spanish America; later it contributed about one-third of Africans brought into Cuba. The next most important region was the Bight of Biafra, which supplied about 1.3 million slaves, while the Gold Coast supplied just over a million, mostly to the British West Indies. The Bight of Benin exported just under a million, over a third of them to the French West Indies. The three regions of Upper Guinea—Senegambia (500,000), Sierra Leone (300,000), and the Windward Coast (300,000)—were minor suppliers despite being geographically the closest to the Caribbean. South East Africa sent fewer than 200,000.

Particular islands drew on specific regions of Africa for considerable periods of time. Before 1725, about three-quarters of Africans in Jamaica came from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, accounting for the early prominence of so-called “Coromantees” from the former coastal region and Adja-speakers from the latter on the island; later, however, Jamaica received most of its Africans from the Bight of Biafra. In the first quarter of the 18th century, 60% of African arrivals in Saint-Domingue were from the Bight of Benin; by the third quarter of the century, 60% came from West-Central Africa. Overall, about half of Saint-Domingue’s Africans came from Angola and the Congo. When the slave trade into Cuba began in earnest in the late 18th century, about a third of its Africans were from the Gold Coast. Thereafter, West-Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra predominated.

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by | 17 August 2024 · 4:57 pm

Caribbean Demographic Changes, 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 197-199:

European and African populations in the Caribbean grew quickly, almost exclusively through migration rather than natural increase. If the numbers are often vague, two patterns are clear. First, the white population in the islands was predominantly young and male until the late 17th century. Second, the population came to be dominated by enslaved Africans by the end of the century, first on the English islands and then on the French. The population of the French islands was 19% black by 1650 but 36% by 1660 (Boucher 2008, 115). By 1655 the population of Barbados contained some 20,000 Africans and 23,000 Europeans; 18 years later, the slave population outnumbered the European population, 33,184 to 21,309 (Dunn 1973, 87). Enslaved Africans came from a variety of ethnic groups, as did Europeans—especially on the English and Dutch islands.

Although most European migrants traveled as indentured laborers, there were some free migrants as well. Some were ambitious men eager to improve their economic condition: Tom Verney hoped in 1639 that his time in Barbados would “be an engagement for mee for my new lead-life,” promising both prosperity and personal redemption for past failures (Games 1999, 80). Some were men of the cloth. The presence of Caribs on French-occupied islands not only hindered French settlement but also inspired the French to send Catholic missionaries to proselytize. Jews found haven in Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados, and Jamaica. English Catholics, forbidden to practice their faith openly at home and banned from holding public office, inhabited all of the English colonies in the Caribbean. French Huguenots made their way to the islands, too, where many governors tolerated their presence. If for many the 17th-century Caribbean was a place of violence, premature death, and avarice, for others the islands offered relative sanctuary—whether prompted by indifference or acceptance from neighbors—from some of the religious and political violence of the era.

European affairs continued to punctuate Caribbean life in the middle of the 17th century, defining mature colonial settlements just as they had facilitated their creation. Other regions of the Atlantic also began to shape the Caribbean. Trading ties thickened connections to the American mainland, Europe, and Africa. One overpopulated Caribbean colony, Barbados, even spawned a supply colony on the American mainland, Carolina. Africans became a larger presence in the region, dominating some islands and posing strategic challenges and opportunities for residents and invaders. Several regional transitions illustrate these new intersections.

The first transition involved sugar, another commodity of growing popularity in Europe. Tobacco may have sparked interest in Caribbean land in the 1620s, but sugar wrought an even greater frenzy. It took hold gradually in the English and especially the French Caribbean, primarily because sugarcane cultivation and processing required a large capital investment in equipment and labor, one well beyond the reach of most European planters, many of whom also lacked expertise in processing cane. In 1654 came a crucial turning point in the Caribbean, sparked by events outside the region: the Dutch, after nine years of struggle with the Portuguese, finally abandoned Brazil, where they had learned the complicated and costly techniques of sugar cultivation and, more important, of transforming sugar into rum and molasses. As Dutch merchants, planters, and investors dispersed into the Caribbean, they brought those techniques with them. While some English settlers had already begun to experiment with sugar on Barbados, the infusion of Dutch capital contributed to the “sugar revolution,” in which sugar monoculture replaced other crops and enslaved Africans replaced European indentured laborers.

Sugar wrought major environmental transformations wherever it took hold, and those changes assisted the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had crossed the Atlantic from Africa in slaving vessels. As Europeans cleared land for sugarcane, they felled trees, removing bird habitats and facilitating the survival of insects the birds had once consumed. Sugar processing also required clay pots, which stood empty much of the year, collecting rainwater that enabled mosquitoes to flourish. A. aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, and it is no accident that the Caribbean’s first yellow fever epidemic started in Barbados in 1647, in the wake of sugar’s introduction to the island. In that first epidemic, as much as one-third of the island’s population may have died.

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by | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

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These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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Filed under Angola, Brazil, Britain, Congo, economics, Equatorial Guinea, labor, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, war

by | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

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Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

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The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, labor, migration, military, slavery, Virginia, war

by | 11 August 2024 · 3:41 pm

Sugarcane on the Atlantic Islands

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 77-80:

From the mid-15th century, the Portuguese took slaves to work on Madeira: Moroccans and Berbers, black Africans, and Canary Islanders. The number of slaves who could be profitably employed was limited because the Madeiran sugar establishments were still relatively small in comparison to the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Because of population growth in Portugal itself in the 16th century, many free Portuguese laborers migrated to Madeira, further lessening the demand for slaves. There were even proposals to export some of the slaves already there. In the 15th century, Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas, but by the early 16th century its development had transformed it into a replica of metropolitan Portugal.

The Portuguese established sugar production on other Atlantic islands, but none rivaled the early profits of Madeira. In the Azores sugar production met with little success because of the unfavorable climate; there grain and dyestuffs were always more important, and slaves were few in number. Portuguese agriculture in the arid Cape Verde Islands concentrated on cereals and fruits and was complemented by cattle raising. São Tomê, which became a crucial entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade, experienced a sugar boom in the 16th century and can also be seen as a prototype of the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

With sugar production and trade prospering, shiploads of sugar were delivered to the large European markets: Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and cities of the Mediterranean. Although most of the plantations and mills were in the hands of Portuguese, the bulk of the export trade was controlled by foreigners, many of them Italians resident in Portugal. Columbus traded in Madeiran sugar early in his career and lived on the neighboring island of Porto Santo for a time in the 1470s. The European demand for sugar was strong, and the lower costs of Madeiran sugar caused heavy competition for the longer-established Mediterranean producers.

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans who were developing the Atlantic islands during this time. In the early 15th century, Castile began sponsoring conquests in the Canaries, and by the end of the century it had secured control of all the islands. Unlike the other Atlantic islands, the Canaries had a native population who were likely akin to the Berbers. Foreshadowing events in the Americas, the Spaniards subdued the islanders and enslaved those who resisted. Of these, a number were exported to Europe or Madeira, while others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations.

The island population was relatively small to begin with, and its numbers fell due to epidemic disease after the European incursion. Members of indigenous groups whose leaders had signed treaties could not be enslaved legally, unlike members of the non-treaty groups, and those who were enslaved frequently attained manumission. In the early years of the 16th century, the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Since native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries, the islands witnessed an influx of other workers, including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers. Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula. Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa, and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans, Berbers, and other slaves. Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas, a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries, but the Spanish crown soon outlawed the slave trade in Indians.

These sugar establishments on Madeira and in the Canary Islands turned out to have some important features of the Caribbean plantations that would emerge in the 16th century, including elements both agricultural (growing the cane) and industrial (refining the sugar), the use of slave labor, and the export of a product to be sold in the growing markets of Europe. The significant difference between the sugar establishments on the Atlantic islands and the later plantations of the Caribbean was size; the former had smaller plots of land and fewer laborers. Those Atlantic islands provided a link between Mediterranean sugar production and the plantation system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the 19th century.

Madeira and the Canaries formed the staging area from which sugar cultivation and refining would reach Hispaniola, the island where sugarcane was first planted in the Caribbean. Columbus, knowledgeable in the Portuguese sugar trade, had ships of his second transatlantic voyage stop in Madeira for additional supplies. These included refined sugar as a medicinal store and cuttings of sugarcane, which were later planted at Columbus’s ill-fated settlement of La Isabela on the north shore of Hispaniola. The first canes grew but failed to establish permanent sugar production. Only in the first decade and-a-half of the 16th century did successful sugar plantings and newly introduced sugar mills on Hispaniola establish the foundations for the fateful beginning of the colonial plantation complex in the Americas.

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