Category Archives: Europe

by | 17 September 2024 · 5:53 am

Premodern natio vs. Modern “Nation”

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 54-55:

The word “nation” (natio) existed in the premodern period but did not have the meaning it has in our day. The “nation” in the lands of Croatia, Hungary, or Poland was the hereditary elite, the gentry and nobles who enjoyed privileges that separated them from the “common” people. For example, nobles had a right to be tried by their peers and not imprisoned without charges, to raise soldiers, or to intermarry. In some cases, for example in Central Poland, the gentry were sizable, comprising up to one fourth of the population. The Hungarian gentry were about 6 percent; in France, by contrast, the nobility constituted less than 1 percent of the population. In Poland and Hungary, the rights to self-rule became substantial and made the hereditary nobility more powerful than counterparts in France, not to mention in Russia. By the sixteenth century, the Polish gentry elected its kings; during the seventeenth century, a practice emerged in which passage of legislation in the Sejm (parliament) required unanimous consent, a practice called “liberum veto.”

By the seventeenth century, the Polish nobility thus felt a strong sense of cohesion, politically and culturally, over a vast territory, and increasingly practiced Roman Catholicism, though the Protestant Reformation was at first popular and tolerated. A myth emerged according to which Poland’s nobles derived from “Sarmatians,” an ancient Iranian people who had subjugated Slavic tribes during early Christendom. This had the function of tying the group together even more tightly against all others on Polish territory, reinforcing its sense of privilege, and tending to exclude all others from the idea of nation. But the cultural identity of noble nations was premodern. Polish or Hungarian poets wrote in their own tongues from the fifteenth century (native liturgical texts are much older), producing important literatures, but they did not make a cult of language. And unlike liberal-democratic patriots of the nineteenth century, early modern nobles did not believe that all those who happened to speak Polish or Hungarian constituted a Polish or Hungarian “nation.” From the seventeenth century on, they tended to speak French or Latin among themselves and felt a cultural affinity with other European elites, with whom they shared tastes in architecture and music, and with whose sons their own mingled at universities in France and Italy.

Unlike modern nationalism, the idea of natio was therefore exclusive to a social group rather than insistently inclusive across a complex population ostensibly of one ethnicity. The early modern Polish or Croatian nobility did not think of Polish or Croatian-speaking peasants as part of their nation and often considered these peasants a lower form of humanity. The word for “peasant” was often synonymous with “slave,” evoking coarseness and absence of all taste. In decades when Western European peasants were being freed from the land and from compulsory services, a “second serfdom” was taking hold in much of Eastern Europe: those who worked the land became tied to it and could not leave without the master’s permission. They were people whom he could whip and otherwise humiliate in dozens of ways. No clear line existed dividing Eastern from Western Europe in terms of agricultural regime, but as one traveled to the east, the freedoms of the peasants tended to decrease, as did the productivity of agriculture.

When Polish or Hungarian nobles made claims to territory, it was therefore not in order to unite people of the same language or “blood.” They had no idea of including all people of their ethnicity in a particular state. But this early modern noble national identity was also not ethnically exclusive in the sense of modern nationalism. Native Ukrainian-speaking nobles living in Galicia considered themselves part of the Polish noble nation, and many of them over time became culturally Polish with no questions asked. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican had supported arrangements permitting Orthodox believers in Ukraine (under Polish rule) and in Transylvania (under Habsburg rule) to be “reunited” with Rome while maintaining much of their own liturgy and practices, including married clergy. These churches of the Byzantine rite that recognize papal authority are commonly known as “Uniate.”

The importance of the older legacy of noble rights is that feelings of corporate identity and privileges survived in social groups even after political structures supporting them declined or disappeared altogether, and then were spread to other social groups, usually very slowly and unevenly. Thus the Polish, Hungarian, and Croatian gentries continued to insist on rights of self-rule and “freedom” after medieval and early modern statehood was crushed. Among the Polish gentry, even after the destruction of the Polish state in the final partition in 1795, Poland continued as a community of ideas and practices—as a common culture—and was as present among the colony of émigré Polish writers in Paris in the 1840s as it was among Polish-speakers in Polish territories then part of Austria or Russia. The ideas of this “Great Parisian emigration”—that Poland had not perished and had a mission to humanity—made their way back to the Polish lands to inspire young people from other groups, including peasants, especially as Polish education became more widespread (often through the efforts of underground nationalist activists).

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Filed under democracy, Eastern Europe, education, France, labor, language, nationalism, religion

by | 15 September 2024 · 6:31 am

Boundaries of Eastern Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 25-26:

This book ascribes no stereotypes to Eastern Europe beyond saying that it is an anti-imperial space of small peoples. In the corners of its political nightmares dwells this indistinct fear of being absorbed into larger powers. The anti-imperial struggle kept ethnic cultures alive, but it also promoted ideologies of exclusion that can become racist. The old empires, especially the Habsburg empire, inspire nostalgia, because they protected human rights and indeed nations and peoples better than did many nation-states that came later. This book uses “Eastern Europe” interchangeably with “East Central Europe” to cut down verbiage, but also because both terms are understood to refer to a band of countries that were Soviet satellites not in control of their own destinies. It denotes not so much a space on the map as shared experience, such that peoples from opposite ends of the region, despite all cultural or linguistic differences, employ a common narrative about the past. When he made his odd invocation of national survival, Viktor Orbán used words that would resonate not only in Hungary and Slovenia but also in Poland, the Czech Republic, or Serbia.

The former western republics of the Soviet Union—the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Belarus—are not included, because they formed a separate story throughout much of the period studied, subject to Sovietization that tested local cultures to a degree not seen in East Central Europe. For the same reason, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is included: this small country shared the destiny of being controlled by a superpower without being absorbed into it. But the GDR was also special. The East German regime eagerly took part in efforts to crush dissent in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Poland in 1980, home to small-time co-imperialists with enough hubris to tell the Motherland of socialism what socialism was really about.

The inclusion of the GDR underscores the fact that Germans cannot be thought to be outside East Central Europe, and not only because millions have lived in this space for centuries. The question of how Germany would form a nation-state after the Holy Roman Empire became defunct in 1806 has shaped the region’s fortunes and misfortunes. Bismarck’s supposed resolution of the question in the “second empire” of 1871 only exacerbated the German question by provoking a sense of abandonment among the Habsburg Germans, one in three of the total number. It was no coincidence that the original Nazi Party was founded in Bohemia in 1903. What happened when German nationalism entered Eastern European space in a time of imperial decline—first of the Holy Roman Empire, then of the Habsburg monarchy—was that it gradually moved from the old practice of absorbing Slavs into German culture to a new one of displacing them from a vast supposedly German space.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, economics, Germany, migration, nationalism, philosophy, USSR

by | 14 September 2024 · 6:41 am

East European Communist Nationalism

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 17-19:

What Hitler, the “Bohemian corporal” (he was actually Austrian) achieved through his war was to make northern parts of Eastern Europe much simpler. With the aid of local collaborators, his regime segregated and then killed the overwhelming majority of East European Jews. But when the Red Army drove the Wehrmacht back to Vienna and Berlin in 1945, millions of Germans fled Eastern Europe as well, never to return. At the war’s conclusion, as a result of allied decisions, Polish and Czech authorities placed the remainder of Germans from Bohemia and eastern Germany in railway cars and deported them to a Germany that was much smaller than Bismarck’s Reich, let alone the Holy Roman Empire.

The most avid ethnic cleansers among the East Europeans were Polish and Czech Communists, and indeed, Communists everywhere proved enthusiastic nationalists. This is astounding for two reasons. First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had little concern for national identity: workers had no fatherland. Nationhood was not a lasting site of human subjectivity but something ephemeral, which diminished in importance as capitalism advanced. They had little but derision for East Europeans wanting to create their own nation-states. Engels called the small peoples to Germany’s east “relics.” Czechs were destined to be “absorbed as integral portions into one or the other of those more powerful nations whose greater vitality enabled them to overcome greater obstacles.” Other “remnants of bygone Slavonian peoples” slotted for assimilation included Serbs, Croats, and Slovaks. In 1852, Engels blithely predicted that the next world war would cause entire reactionary peoples to “disappear from the face of the earth.”

Second, when the world divided into two camps, appearances suggested that there was little room for East European nationalism. By 1949, every state in the region seemed to be a miniature USSR, with the same sort of ruling Communist Party, five-year plan, economy based on heavy industry, collectivized agriculture, and socialist realism. Few Poles or Hungarians, even within the Party, doubted that the annual pageant in red of May Day reflected doctrines and practices whose nerve center was in Moscow. For the first time, millions of East Europeans learned Russian, and many became as proficient in copying Soviet reality as they could. Hundreds of thousands became “self-Sovietizers,” even holding their cigarettes the Russian way, or dressing in the militaristic style of the Bolshevik party. The Yugoslav Communists, with red stars on their caps, went so far that the Soviets tried to hold them back.

But these states were not Soviet replicas, nor were they (unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Belorussia) actual parts of the Soviet Union. Beyond the façades of May Day processions in Warsaw in 1949, one saw banners in Polish, not Russian, and placards honoring Polish heroes. A few blocks from the parade route the Polish socialist state, governed by a Marxian party, was lovingly resurrecting old Warsaw, razed by the Nazis in 1944. This included rebuilding many of its churches, according to plans from the eighteenth century, with attention to the details of a saint’s halo. Bookstores across the state socialist world stocked romantic authors like Jan Kollár, but also the Polish, Hungarian, or Romanian national bards Adam Mickiewicz, Sándor Petofi, and Vasile Alecsandri; the philologists Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić; and the ethnographer Pavel Šafárik, who had studied theology with Kollár in Jena. In Poland’s west, the state fostered the destruction of all signs of the German past, including cemeteries, and proclaimed the new territories Polish to the core, though they had been German for centuries.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, language, migration, military, nationalism, philosophy, USSR, war

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 | 11 September 2024 · 1:56 am

Caribbean Categories of Race, Color, Class

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. 405-406:

From the earliest days of colonial rule, the Caribbean social and moral order was based on ranked gradations of “races” and “colors” represented by such physical attributes as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. These criteria were treated as literal descriptions of appearance, and their presumed fixed qualities formed a hierarchy of identities—from “white” at the top to “black” at the bottom, with various mixtures and gradations in between—supported by legal structures as well as social values and mores. Consequently, for much of Caribbean history, race and color also have connoted social position and class status. Yet the recognition of a vertical color continuum separates the Caribbean from the rigid binary racial logic of the United States.

Given the legacies of colonial rule and ideology, color and race are still commonly used in daily conversation as idioms for social organization. In Jamaica, for example, the color term “brown” (or “colored”) serves as a category of racial identity but also connotes middle-class status. Color terms are necessarily relational; being “white” or “brown” or “black” necessarily means not being something else. In Haiti, mulâtre is an in-between term connoting a mixture of “black” and “white,” flexible in its interpretation yet typically positioned above “black” and below “white.” In the Dominican Republic, indio literally translates as “Indian,” suggesting indigenous heritage, but its contemporary application signifies a lighter skin color (and perhaps straight hair)—someone not “black,” yet also not “white.” In Martinique, beke refers to French “white” slave owners and their descendants. “Trinidad white” and “French creole” have served as categories of racial identity in Trinidad, specifically distinguished from British, French, and Spanish “whites,” who, in this racial accounting system, historically could claim to be “pure” white and, concomitantly, members of the upper classes. In Trinidad, the term “red” generally refers to a light-skinned individual of mixed “black” and “white” parentage (positioned toward the upper-status end), while in Barbados it is also a historical reference to “red legs” communities—poor whites who, from the days of the slave plantation, labored outdoors and hence were likely to get sunburned.

Mixedness can also refer to multiple combinations, not simply the amalgamation of “black” and “white.” Thus, in the Francophone Caribbean, the term marabou refers to a black-white-Amerindian combination. In Trinidad the term “Spanish” should be interpreted as if in quotation marks, indicating a particular and fluctuating combination of local criteria, including area of origin (Venezuela, or certain locations in Trinidad with historical concentrations of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Venezuelan immigrant labor), skin color (some variation of “brown” or “red’), hair texture (not curly), and self-ascription (Khan 1993).

Notably, these terminologies are based on an African-European axis: the hierarchical color continuum does not lexically include South Asians or Chinese, or the mixed offspring of South Asian or Chinese and European parents. Though the term achinado is used in Cuba to index Chinese phenotypical features (as, for example, in mulato achinado), there is only one term, dougla—common in Guyana and Trinidad—indicating individuals of mixed South Asian and African descent. Indio (Amerindian) in the Hispanophone Caribbean and “Spanish” or “French creole” in Trinidad are not color terms per se, but are measured along the continuum of black and white ancestry. “Indian” (South Asian), “Chinese,” and “Syrian-Lebanese” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “Hindustani” in the Dutch Caribbean, and Hindou in the Francophone Caribbean are common categories not amalgamated into the black-white lexicon.

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Filed under Britain, Caribbean, democracy, France, language, migration, nationalism, Spain

by | 10 September 2024 · 6:16 am

Caribbean Language Demographics

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. 402-405:

Four major languages are spoken in the Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The 17 Caribbean countries that are predominantly Anglophone comprise more than 17% of the region’s population, yet the total English-speaking population of the Caribbean is less than that of the Dominican Republic alone. These statistics clarify the demographic predominance of the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which represent 61% of the Caribbean population. Of the 20% of Caribbean peoples who speak French or variations of French, three-quarters live in Haiti. The Dutch speakers of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles represent another 2% (Knight 1995, 34). Other languages, spoken by fewer numbers of people, include Hindi and Javanese. The languages of the European colonizers remain the official languages of formal Caribbean education and legal systems, but numerous African languages brought by the slaves fused with European, Asian, and Amerinidian languages to create numerous “creole” languages, which are the spoken vernaculars of everyday life in a number of Caribbean countries. Most Caribbean creole languages are young as languages go, having existed for not more than two or three centuries. Today, however, there are growing written literatures in creole languages, and movements to promote the languages to equal standing as vehicles of formal instruction and communication. Among the most familiar examples is Haitian Kreyol, the spoken language of approximately 12 million insular and diasporic Haitians, which along with French has been an official language in Haiti since 1961. Other widely spoken creoles include Jamaican patois, which is spoken by about four million people in and outside Jamaica, and the patois of Trinidad and Tobago, a historical legacy primarily of French on Trinidadian English, which has been in decline since about the mid-20th century. In Suriname, Sranan Tongo is the language of approximately 300,000 people; in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Papiamento is spoken by more than 350,000. And although the varieties of Spanish spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a number of linguistic properties, they also have discernable differences based on geographic location and local histories.

…

From its colonization, the Caribbean has represented newness, which Europeans captured in the term “creole.” When applied to the region, the Spanish word criollo and the Portuguese word crioulo (derived from the verb criar, “to raise or bring up”) signified something or someone originating in Europe (or Africa) and reproducing itself in the New World. Thus animals, plants, and people could all be designated as creole. Creole people were the descendants of Europeans or Africans born in the Caribbean, as well as the offspring of African and European parents. Inherent in the idea of creole identity was an assumption that being born in the Caribbean or being the “mixed” descendant of two racially differentiated parents meant losing one’s ancestral cultural heritage.

…

In the Anglophone Caribbean, Brathwaite’s analysis of what he called the “creole society” of Jamaica emphasized the creation of new forms through the synthesis of existing ones. Arguing against understanding black and white populations as “separate nuclear units,” Brathwaite saw them as being “contributory parts of a whole” that produce a uniquely Caribbean culture. Creolization here represents the potential for social integration and unity, where the “mixed” population serves “as a bridge, a kind of social cement” that integrates society (Brathwaite 1971, 307, 305). In calling for a renewed emphasis on creole identity and the literary value of the creole language, the most recent Francophone creoliste writers and activists celebrate the heterogeneous dimensions that together comprise the Caribbean or, in the words of Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, constitute Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The creoliste position, along with those of other thinkers, points to the abiding debates about how to characterize and give meaning to the forms of diversity so apparent in the region.

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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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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, China, France, Indonesia, industry, labor, Lebanon, migration, Netherlands, Portugal, slavery, South Asia, Spain

by | 4 September 2024 · 5:26 am

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

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by | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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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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Filed under Africa, Brazil, Britain, Caribbean, disease, economics, France, labor, migration, Netherlands, slavery