Search -
Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers' Protest in Barbados, 1838-1938
Great House Rules Landless Emancipation and Workers' Protest in Barbados 18381938 Author:Hilary Beckles This book sets out for the general reader and student alike the peculiar features of the post emancipation condition of the formerly enslaved community in Barbados. It was here on this small island of 166 square miles that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean first experienced the full brutality of the sugar plantation. It was... more » here also, in this incubator of chattel slavery, that Africans received the worst possible emancipation deal the Caribbean, if not the Americas. Barbados, the first black majority slave plantation society in the New World, remained structurally unaltered by the powerful source for change that was unleashed on August 1st 1838 – emancipation day. Here, an unrelenting landless freedom was imposed upon the blacks whose conditions of work and life remained largely unchanged for a century on plantations that produced more sugar with less labour for below subsistence wages. The formerly enslaved community, persisted with its protest and rebellion; Wage protest in the sugar fields intermingled with the civil rights agitation on the assembly floor, finally led to open warfare in the form of the 1876 Rebellion. Against this background of 19th century popular protests and workers’ agitation, the modern labour movement, the anticolonial campaign, and agitation for democratic governance came to maturity by the 1920s. The final breach in the walls of the structures of white supremacy was achieved in 1937 when the workers took to the streets and field with arms under the ideological leadership of the charismatic Garveyite organizers, Clement Payne. It had taken a full century of struggle after emancipation to see, even at a distance, the freedom that was promised by the abolition of slavery legislation.« less