Category Archives: labor

by | 25 October 2024 · 5:58 am

Serbian & Bulgarian Peasant Leaders

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 261-263:

Though an underproductive agricultural regime also dominated the economies of Serbia and Bulgaria, a relation developed between elites and people in these countries that was more reminiscent of the Czech case, with national leaders drawn not from the gentry but rather from the common people; there was no native class of large landholders. Though like Romania, Serbia was a former Ottoman possession, where the overwhelming majority lived in the countryside, and socioeconomic development lagged, as in Bohemia, the medieval nobility had been destroyed. Also similar to the Czech areas of Bohemia, the emerging national elite was of peasant origin, and in the following generation, like the Czech lands, Serbia produced no significant native fascism.

In Ottoman times, spahis had held the land and produce of peasants in return for service, and then came janissaries, who later degenerated into marauding raiders. But although the right to extract dues and tributes remained in Turkish hands, unlike rural populations in Hungary or Romania, Serb peasants were not enserfed. When the Serb principality took form in the decades after 1817, the Turkish landholders gradually left, and the Serb leader Miloš Obrenović refused to permit the emergence of large landed estates, fearing they might dilute his power (he became fabulously wealthy). Thus, he left Serb society mostly of one class, a highly undifferentiated peasantry. Besides him, none of the few power holders who emerged after the 1840s had more than a few hundred hectares of land, and no one was tempted to trace a grand lineage to noble or racially superior forebears.

The Serb state at first seemed to rule by liberal principles. The constitution of 1868 provided for a legislature, and beginning in 1880, political parties developed. There were three centers of power: the bureaucracy, the politicians who had success in electoral politics, and the prince. Like Romania’s king, the prince constantly interfered, preventing the emergence of a bona fide democracy. The most important political movement was the Serb Radicals, co-founded as a peasant party in 1881 by Nikola Pašić, a peasant’s son who fell in with socialist circles during engineering studies in Zurich—a crossroads of East European Marxism—becoming Serbia’s and then Yugoslavia’s uncontested political leader until his death in 1926.

But rather than act in the peasants’ interest by promoting rural development, the Radicals evolved into an establishment political machine, advancing the state’s power and wealth by focusing public resources on the army, bureaucracy, railroads, and diplomatic service, fostering virtually every civic project short of the needs of peasants. In 1908, the Ministry of Agriculture received only 3 percent of the annual budget, while 23 percent of that budget went directly to the military and 28 percent to debt services (mostly interest on loans for railroads and the army). The justification for these expenditures was to spread the Serb state into areas considered ethnically Serb.

Yet because that agenda was broadly supported, the Serb Radical Party never sacrificed the loyalties of the peasantry, and indeed used the education system to stoke irredentist feeling. It helped that the per capita debt burden on the peasants decreased in the decades before World War I. But the Radicals also had good fortune in timing: they had claimed peasants’ loyalty from the first days of independence, through the semi-populist program of Pašić’s friend and mentor Svetozar Marković, Serbia’s first socialist, who promised to lessen state intervention into peasants’ lives. Although the Radicals were an establishment party, its intellectuals and professional politicians never lost contact with the villages, where they kept networks of supporters. When necessary, they could speak perfect peasant vernacular. Society and government thus remained cohesive, even if the competing wings of the Radical party vigorously debated politics and went in and out of government from 1892 to 1900.

Bulgaria was similar in terms of the landholding regime. When the Bulgarian national renaissance began in the mid-nineteenth century, the country was almost completely rural, run by Turkish landlords. After independence in 1878, the Turkish landowners were ejected, leaving Bulgaria a place of smallholding peasants who produced for subsistence. The most coherent institution, as in Serbia, was the state, which grew beginning in the 1870s, becoming a kind of “class” in itself and filling a social vacuum. But as we will see in Chapter 11, in contrast to Serbia, a major peasant movement emerged here—the Bulgarian Agrarian Union—with an original political philosophy that challenged the liberal state machine and irredentist nationalism as well as the monarch who pursued it.

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Filed under Bohemia, Bulgaria, democracy, economics, labor, language, nationalism, religion, Turkey, Yugoslavia

by | 24 October 2024 · 6:20 am

Hungarian & Romanian Gentry, 1910s

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 257-259:

Rather than getting involved in risky commercial activity and taking on the role of a middle class as their liberalism demanded, for the most part Hungary’s nobles turned to Jews, many from Galicia, who within a generation formed the backbone of the entrepreneurial and professional classes. In the process, they acculturated. If in 1880, 58.5 percent of Hungary’s Jews claimed Magyar as their mother tongue, by 1910 that number had risen to 77.8 percent. Enjoying full legal equality, young Jews advanced through Hungarian educational and professional institutions and then excelled in urban pursuits in commerce, finance, and industry. They also took an important place in the agricultural economy, as landowning farmers, but also as tenants and salaried employees of large landowners, who valued Jews as efficient and rational producers.

By World War I, Hungary’s elite seemed to be opening up to Jews as well. In 1914, one-fifth of the large landholders were Jews, and over one-fifth of the deputies in parliament were of Jewish parentage. Tens of thousands of upwardly mobile Jews also excelled in patriotism, and as teachers, journalists, and professionals went into Slovak and Romanian areas spreading Magyar culture. Numerically, Magyarized Jews made the culturally Magyar population just over half of the Hungarian kingdom. At the same time, the lower class Magyar Christian population, unable to adapt as quickly to the challenges of modernization, looked on the advance of Jews with skepticism and jealousy, becoming further alienated from the gentry elite.

In contrast to the Czech national elite, Hungary’s gentry thus failed to provide perspectives for social and economic advancement for the land’s village dwellers. Instead, it endeavored to use state resources to slowly Magyarize ethnic others. Because of the property limitations on the electorate, and multiple forms of administrative chicanery, the spaces for opposition politics in Hungary, whether social or national, were severely constrained. A Hungarian Social Democratic party emerged but not a significant movement for Christian Socialism or agrarianism. The elite’s suppression and neglect of the interests and rights of the local ethnicity virtually ensured a full outburst of radical nationalism when economic circumstances reached a nadir in the early 1930s.

The relations between elite and common folk were similar in Romania, but the extremes were greater. In 1912, 82 percent of Romanians still lived in the countryside. Some 2,000 families had owned 38 percent of arable land in 1864, and that percentage worsened: in 1905, some 5,000 families controlled 50 percent of all arable land. The share of medium-sized properties was negligible (10 percent), while 40 percent of all lands consisted of tiny plots between five and ten hectares. By 1905, there was probably no country in Europe where the disparity was so great between large- and smallholdings: a few thousand families held as much land as more than a million. Like its Hungarian counterpart, the elite was quasi-aristocratic, and through control of the local administrative apparatus, they became a law unto themselves, with little concern for the welfare of peasants.

As in Hungary, professional bureaucrats of gentry (boyar) background dominated the state apparatus and acted as nationalist modernizers, focusing on development in a few large cities, but stopping short at the countryside, where grain and cereal were grown on huge estates, and asymmetrical social relations remained untouched. Also similar to Hungary was the low level of overall development, with industrial output not exceeding 15 percent of national income before World War I.

Jews likewise had particular roles in the economy and society in Romania, but as we have seen, Romania’s elite stalled on granting them citizenship rights—in defiance of the stipulations of the Congress of Berlin. Jews could not own land and therefore lived in cities, becoming artisans, traders, administrators, bankers, peddlers, tailors, and craftspeople. In 1900, less than 5 percent of Romania’s population was Jewish, but it was almost entirely urban, constituting 50 percent of the inhabitants of Iaşi and one-third those of Bucharest. Jews were employed in the advanced sectors of economy, as in Hungary, and though enjoying far less official support, they still managed to develop the economy.

The ethnic Romanian elite preferred city life and as a rule left the administration of their huge estates to middlemen, usually Greek, Armenian, Jewish, or German, who pressed as much from the peasants as possible in seasonal contracts. In Moldavia, the percentage of Jewish leaseholders approached 40 percent, and therefore in the eyes of peasants, Jews became identified as the outstretched hand of an exploitative system that extended from the remote and alien cities into their own rural homelands.

The peasants either had no land or too little to make ends meet and tended to sharecrop on the large estates. As their numbers increased, so did their misery, and many fell victim to poor diets and pellagra (a disease caused by a chronic lack of niacin, often among people heavily dependent on maize for sustenance, reported cases of which rose between 1888 and 1906 from 10,626 to more than 100,000). A particular index of peasant poverty was the high mortality rate among children. Meanwhile, the government did little to protect peasants from exploitation by landowners and their middlemen, against whom the peasants had almost no bargaining power. In tough times, desperate need for money forced peasants to sell grain to speculators at below-market value. The loans on offer were extortionate, and state taxes could amount to 80 percent of the peasants’ annual production.

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Filed under democracy, economics, Germany, Greece, Hungary, labor, language, migration, nationalism, religion, Romania

by | 23 October 2024 · 5:25 am

Protofascism in East Central Europe

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 252-254:

Bohemia’s ethnic strife did not produce protofascism in Czech politics, and indeed, fascism would remain marginal in East Central Europe as a whole, emerging in strength in only German Bohemia, Hungary, and Romania. It flourished where national leaders, usually liberals, lost touch with the common people, thereby exposing themselves to accusations of treachery and contempt by forces further to the right. Like the Linz Program authors, these forces freely mixed socialism into their nationalism.

The liberal German leadership in Vienna, who “soft-pedalled their Germanism in the interest of a multi-national state,” had alienated Bohemia’s Germans by showing little concern for the nationality struggle in Bohemia. Usually of high bourgeois background, these liberals considered lower-class supporters of Schönerer and Wolf unripe for the political process. We hear echoes of their social elitism in the words President Paul von Hindenburg later found for Adolf Hitler: he was a “Bohemian corporal.” Hitler was not from Bohemia, but in Hindenburg’s mind, he fit the stereotype of a German ethnic of poorer quality. The 1882 Linz Program spoke for marginal people like Hitler and Wolf, in whom fears of national and social decline overlapped because they felt an urgent threat to a precarious status. They were being forced back down the social ladder before they had reached the first rung of respectability.

Yet the situation differed markedly among Bohemia’s Czechs. Their national leadership included few high bourgeois or large landholders, and the movement was about national as well as social upward mobility from the start, so that Czech politicians felt personally impugned when Germans said Czechs were a people of field hands and kitchen laborers. The directors of new institutions, political parties, scholarly organizations, and newspapers were one or two generations removed from small towns or the farm. Of the Czechs serving as deputies in the Austrian Parliament in 1900, 43.1 percent came from peasant and 36.5 percent from working-class backgrounds.

This upward mobility was the consequence of institutions that Czechs themselves had built, with some help from the Austrian state, to make the world around them one that seemed their own. By 1850 Czech-language schooling was close to universal, and the Czech movement built on it with secondary and higher education. In the late nineteenth century, the wealthy architect Josef Hlávka put up hospitals as well as administrative offices for the new elites. The movement’s ability to raise money for schools, hospitals, and museums reflected the wealth of a rising ethnic middle class, often pooled in Czech savings and loans associations.

The Czech middle classes rose in an economy that was already complex and well integrated with transregional commerce. Bohemia possessed one-third of the Habsburg monarchy’s industry, with mining and textile production that went back generations; the land’s agriculture was diversified and well capitalized, and featured very old productive sectors, like fish farming. As capitalism grew and Czechs became wealthier, the abundance of social and material goods dulled the edge of class conflict, opening paths to cooperation across the political parties that had emerged by World War I, including the Marxist one. When Czechoslovakia was created in 1918, Czech parties continued to cooperate across the political spectrum.

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Filed under Austria, Czechia, democracy, economics, education, Germany, Hungary, labor, language, nationalism, Romania

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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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 | 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

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.

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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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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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