The Business of Slavery From Africa to the New World Part 4: The Counter-Ledger

By Professor C. Justin Robinson Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus

This series has read the business of slavery through its own documents. An African merchant’s diary at Old Calabar, an auctioneer’s price circular in Richmond and a plantation manager’s thirty-seven volumes in Jamaica. The compensation rolls, estate by estate, across what is now CARICOM. In every one of those documents, our ancestors appear as entries. This final part opens with a different kind of document, because on the first of August the story changes hands and it opens with a deed.

In 1835, three years before full freedom, a Baptist missionary named James Phillippo bought a hillside property in St Catherine, Jamaica, and began selling small lots to enslaved and apprenticed people who had saved the money, penny by penny, from the provision grounds and Sunday markets we met in part three. They called the settlement Sligoville and it is usually counted the first free village in the Caribbean, and it was founded before freedom itself. People still legally held as property were buying property, against the day. Hold that image as it is the hinge on which this whole series turns.

Because we should be clear-eyed about what the first of August, 1834, actually purchased. It freed roughly eight hundred thousand people in the British colonies, and in the same act it bound most of them as “apprentices” to their former owners, obliged to work about forty of their weekly hours unpaid, for four more years. The owners received twenty million pounds. The apprentices’ unpaid labour was, in effect, a second compensation, paid in sweat. And when full freedom finally came on the first of August, 1838, the freed received, precisely itemized, nothing, no land, no tools, no capital and no schooling. Eight hundred thousand people entered the market economy with a balance of zero, and the books were considered settled.

What happened next was decided, island by island, by an economist’s variable, the ratio of land to labour. Where unclaimed or purchasable land existed, in Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana, the freed could walk, and did, and wages had to rise to hold them. Where every acre was already owned, in Barbados, Antigua, St Kitts, there was nowhere to walk to. Planters tied the house and the ground to continued estate labour, wages sat near starvation, and the tenantry system kept the freed on the estate in fact long after they were off it in law. Our islands’ different destinies after slavery were set on day one, less by character than by geography and title. Bargaining power is not a sermon it is an exit option.

The enterprise, for its part, responded as enterprises do, it re-sourced its labour. Readers of part two will remember John Gladstone of Liverpool, the largest compensation claimant in the empire. In May 1838, months before full freedom even arrived, the first two shiploads of indentured Indian workers, four hundred souls history remembers as the Gladstone Coolies, landed in Demerara, bound for his estates. Behind them, over the following eighty years, came nearly half a million Indians to the Caribbean, alongside Madeirans, Chinese, and liberated Africans, on contracts that reproduced much of the old discipline under a new name. The supply chain that this series began with, on a beach in Africa, was simply rebuilt with a different coastline. The business did not repent it re-procured.

And yet, here is the part of the story the ledgers of the powerful never expected to record. The freed, handed nothing, capitalized themselves. In Jamaica, the number of small freeholds multiplied roughly tenfold within a decade of 1838, as families pooled wages, bought ruined estates through their churches, and cut them into villages, Sligoville, Sturge Town, and their sisters. Across the region the friendly societies and lodges appeared, collecting pennies weekly against sickness and burial, our first indigenous insurance companies, run from exercise books by people the banks would not receive. The provision ground became the freehold, the Sunday market became the town market and the higgler’s tray became the shop. And in St Vincent, the freed and their children turned to a smallholder’s crop, arrowroot, and built it patiently until this little country became the world’s principal supplier. Somewhere among those arrowroot smallholders walked the children of Grand Sable’s seven hundred and four. None of this was given; all of it was built from a standing start, by people who had learned, inside the cruellest firm in history, exactly how a firm works.

Elsewhere the books closed differently, and worse. Haiti, the only nation born of a successful revolution of the enslaved, was made to buy its recognition. In 1825, under the guns of a French fleet, it agreed to an indemnity of 150 million francs, later reduced to ninety million, compensation paid by the freed to the former owners, borrowed, refinanced, and dragged like an anchor into the twentieth century. Recent scholarly accounting puts Haiti’s loss in the tens of billions of today’s dollars, and some estimates run far higher. Brazil freed nearly three-quarters of a million people in 1888, last in the hemisphere, with compensation to no one. The United States freed four million by war and amendment, its only compensated emancipation being the District of Columbia’s, which paid loyal owners three hundred dollars a head, and the freed, again, nothing.

So the accounts were never truly settled, whatever the commissioners certified. The British compensation debt was serviced, as part two showed, until 2015, by taxpayers who included the descendants of the enslaved. And in 2014 the governments of our region, through the CARICOM Reparations Commission chaired by Sir Hilary Beckles, formally reopened the file with a Ten Point Plan for reparatory justice, addressed to the states and institutions this series has named. Understand that demand in the terms this series has used throughout. It is not a plea, it is an audit. Every figure in these four essays, the compensation awards, the insurance clauses, the interest collected, the unpaid apprenticeship hours, is an entry in a set of books that one side closed and the other side never signed.

I ended part two by saying the reckoning is ours. Let me now correct my own books. The owners’ ledgers closed in 1838 and ours opened. They opened in a deed on a Jamaican

hillside, in a friendly society’s exercise book, in an arrowroot patch above a Vincentian valley, in school fees paid out of market money. No one was coming to save us, not then, not since, that is the first law of Caribbean political economy, and the freed understood it before any economist wrote it down. On the first of August we do not commemorate a gift, because nothing was given. We commemorate the only account in this entire story that started at zero and never once ran a deficit, the one our ancestors opened in their own names. That is the ledger we keep. Happy Emancipation Day.

This concludes The Business of Slavery, a four-part series for Emancipation Day. Parts one to three covered the trade, the exchange, and the plantation.

Sources include the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org), UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery database, and the scholarship of Anstey, Ward, Richardson, Behrendt and Burnard. Specifics available on request.