An Overlooked Dimension: The Emigration of Barbadian Labourers to Suriname in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

IntroductionIn the immediate post-emancipation period, planters and their supporters throughout the British Caribbean installed reactionary legal and other barriers to restrict the formerly enslaved people in realizing their expectations of what emancipation would bring. Those expectations, as Woodville Marshall informs us, included equality before the law, freedom of religion, freedom of movement, consolidation of family, just and equitable negotiated labour arrangements and easy access to provision grounds.1 The expectations for some of the formerly enslaved people represented all of these or some combinations thereof.Whatever the labourers might have wished or expected, the former enslavers were equally intent on restricting them in all of these areas and others. In Barbados, the most extreme of the restrictive legislation passed in the post-emancipation period was represented in the Masters and Servants Act (or Located Labourers' Act, as it was sometimes called). This act was itself supported by other legislation governing the hiring of labour. Thus, on 24 February 1840, in an Act entitled An Act to regulate the hiring of servants and to provide for the recovery and security of their wages, the manner of contracts between employers and labourers was prescribed. Additionally, the framers, in an attempt to bind the formerly enslaved people to plantation labour, went on to establish a framework in which written contracts were not a required instrument. Thus, the Act stated inter alia:Provided always, nevertheless, that where any such contract shall be entered into for one month, and at the expiration thereof, any such servant . . . shall with the consent of his or her employers, either expressed or implied, continue in such service either after the first month, or after any subsequent month, every such continuance shall be deemed and taken in every such case to be a renewal of the contract of service.2In short, once a labourer continued in estate employment after the ending of the Apprenticeship system in 1838, even in the absence of a written contract, the law assumed that he or she was under an obligation to so continue. The sanction for such breach of this implied contract was a fine, or imprisonment, or both.In Barbados, then, labourers found themselves in a legal bind: bound to the plantations under a contract to which they did not specifically consent. Moreover, a shortage of land for settlement or peasant agriculture meant that the labourers were often at the mercy of their former enslavers, dependent on them for land for housing and subsistence farming. It is not surprising, then, that many of them looked to labour markets elsewhere. In addition to the constraints that faced them, labourers found themselves forced to cultivate staples on the estates, such as yams and sweet potatoes, and having to purchase this fruit of their own labour from the very estates that employed them. In 1863 W.G. Sewell described the wages and general economic condition of the labourers in Barbados in this way:The rate of wages for field labor is almost 24 cents (12d) per day, but the laborer, fettered by the system of tenancy-at-will, is compelled to work for his landlord at 20 cents (1Od) per day. He is, therefore, virtually a slave. . . . No credit is due to the Barbadian plantocracy for retaining that adequate laboring population in their employ. To the latter it was the option of work at lower and on most illiberal terms, or starvation.3Sewell observed, further, that up to the early 1860s no material emigration from the island [had] ever taken place.4 It is at this point that we might question his understanding of the situation. It is likely that he was unaware of movements of Free Blacks throughout the region even before emancipation had been enacted. Indeed, he attributes the alleged reluctance to emigrate, partly, to a fear on the part of the formerly enslaved people that they could be re-enslaved in other Caribbean locations. …