In the British Caribbean, many freed slaves had little choice but to continue to work for their old masters. Production was still mainly aimed at supplying the external British market and it was a white British elite who remained in overall control of economic activity.

The British Caribbean islands differed from other British colonies in that the original inhabitants had long since died out and most of the people were living there as a result of some form of slavery. From 1845 onwards, plantation owners could draw upon so-called ‘coolie-labour’, in addition to the ex-slave population. ‘Coolies’ referred to thousands of indentured Indian labourers who were brought to the colonies. The labourers worked in slavery-like conditions, contractually bound to their employers for fixed periods. Prior to the development of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, white British indentured labourers had worked on the plantations, along with thousands of Irish Catholics who were shipped out following Cromwell’s brutal campaigns in Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century. These people, who struggled to adjust to the difficult climate, were too few in number to sustain production so slaves had been transported from Africa to work beside them. In the mid-nineteenth century the British government introduced Chinese labourers to the colonies, adding to the cultural melting pot and the multiple ethnic reference points that form Caribbean identity. Around 40,000 African indentured labourers were also brought in at this time.

Novelist and cultural critic Mike Phillips writes:

In the Caribbean, the African descended majority had no pre-existing claims on the land, no widely accepted institutions which predated slavery and no historical continuity before their arrival in the region. Therefore national identity had to be created from scratch, and using only what was available. Given the polyglot nature of the community and their total isolation from previous custom and practice, the Black majority in the Caribbean territories ruled by Britain had no alternative but to echo and mirror the life of the British.

The injustices of the old trade lived on after abolition in discrimination based upon skin colour. In Bermuda, for example, a system of racial segregation similar to that of the southern states of the USA existed until 1959, restricting the public places where black people could go. More subtle forms of discrimination also existed. When purchasing slaves or hiring employees, plantation owners tended to favour the lighter-skinned for house work, the darker ones for field work, thereby instilling a class distinction based on degrees of blackness. In Small Island, when Celia Langley says Jamaicans must help with the war effort as the Nazis would bring back slavery, her friend Hortense reflects:

I could understand why it was of the greatest importance to her that slavery should not return. Her skin was so dark. But mine was not of that hue – it was the colour of warm honey. No one would think to enchain someone such as I. All the world knows what the rousing anthem declares: ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’.

This ‘grading’ of skin, informed by Western rather than African aesthetics, became an accepted practice among both black and white. A light-brown skin was perceived for many years as being more attractive and more civilised than a dark one.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2004, Andrea Levy said:

My parents came from a class in Jamaica called ‘the coloured class’. There are white Jamaicans, black Jamaicans and coloured Jamaicans. My parents’ skin was light. They were mixed race, effectively. They came to Britain with a kind of notion that pigmentation represented class. They didn't necessarily have more money or education, but because they were somehow closer to being white, this was seen as a badge of pride.

In Small Island the character Hortense is astounded on her first full-day in Britain that Queenie should try to reassure her by saying, ‘I’m not worried about what busybodies say. I don’t mind being seen in the street with you’. The well-spoken, honey-coloured, white-gloved Hortense thinks if anyone is to be ashamed it is her for being seen with a woman ‘dressed in a scruffy housecoat with no brooch or jewel, no glove or even a pleasant hat to life the look of her’. She has yet to realise that to the British she is black and therefore an object of curiosity, contempt and even hostility.



Sugar mill worked by cattle from The Nature and Properties of the Sugar Cane by George Richardson Porter, 1830 (Bristol Library Service).

After abolition, the slave trade continued to shape the colonisation of Africa. The failure of some African states to find alternative sources of income to that of slave trading encouraged Britain to interfere with African affairs. Previously, Europeans had not ventured far into Africa and had had to obtain permission from local kings and chiefs before engaging in trade for slaves in the designated trading areas. Now that slavery was deemed immoral, British colonisation was ‘offered’ as a means of developing more respectable forms of trade. As the other colonial powers gradually abandoned the slave trade too, a similar justification was used by them to start exploiting Africa for their own ends. At first, European trading activity remained largely confined to the Western coast and the Cape, but intense rivalry between the colonial powers by the late-nineteenth century led to the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in which areas of the interior that previously were only informally influenced by the Europeans came directly under their control. Describing the jostling for position, a British politician wrote in 1892:

We are to effect the reconquest of Equatoria and occupy the Albert Lakes and the whole of the basin of the Upper Nile, Why? For fear of the French, the Germans, the Belgians etc etc.

Africa was a source of gold, rubber, cocoa, diamonds, palm oil, ivory, pepper and other valuable trading goods. The colonisation of Africa by the European powers contributed to the inequalities that exist today between the prosperous West and the impoverished, debt-ridden African countries. In addition, because the Europeans ignored centuries of tribal and cultural differences when carving up the continent, with the coming of independence has also come the outbreak of long-simmering civil wars.



The Indo-Caribbean community. Read more...



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