discourses of rule and the acknowledgment of the peasantry in Dominica, W.I., 1838–1928

Abstract

Designations used by colonizers to describe colonized populations emerge through a multi‐layered process that is affected by local social relations, by the colonizers' sociocultural outlook, by imperial tensions and by the metropolitan context. This paper describes the emergence of such a designation, the centurylong process by which cultivators in Dominica came to be called “peasants” by British colonists. Proponents and opponents alike saw in the word a metaphor for the acknowledgment of new relations of production that gave cultivators firmer control of the labor process.[Naming, colonialist discourse, British colonialism, peasantry, Dominica, Caribbean]