Abstract
The social structure of the slave societies in the Caribbean can best be understood by examining the complex interplay of race, colour, gender, occupation, caste and class. This is in part because these soci- eties evolved in a similar pattern. Europeans largely destroyed the native Amerindian population, imported Africans as slave labourers, and developed the plantation system. Although slaves formed the backbone of these societies, the other social groups were also significant. Whites not only con- trolled the economies of the Caribbean colonies but also dominated their politics and society. Coloureds, who were originally the offspring of unions between whites and blacks, complicated the social structure. Some were freed and formed an important element in the social structure of these societies.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles Françaises (Basse-Terre: Société d’;Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), p. 67
Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969), p. 153.
David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of StDomingue, 1793–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 28.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London: T. Lowndes, 1774)
Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 249.
Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 155.
Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 230.
Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 146.
Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), p. 61.
O. Nigel Bolland, The Formation of a Colonial Society: Belize, from Conquest to Crown Colony (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 56.
J. Harry Bennett, Jr., Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), p. 18.
David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene (eds), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 335–9
N. A.T. Hall, ‘The 1816 freedman petition in the Danish West Indies: its background and consequences’, Boletin de estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 29 (1980), pp. 55–73.
Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 6.
Goveia, Slave Society, p. 219; Jerome S. Handler and Arnold A. Sio, ‘Barbados’, in Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free, p. 231; Edward L. Cox, Free Coloureds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984), pp. 93.
Bridget Brereton, A History of Modern Trinidad, 1783–1962 (Kingston: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981), p. 64
Klein, Slavery in the Americas, p. 203; Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 134–5
Jerome S. Handler, Joseph Rachell and Rachel Pringle-Polgreen, ‘Petty Entrepreneurs’, in David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (eds), Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 3821–91.
R. A. J. Van Lier, Frontier Society: A Social Analysis of the History of Surinam (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), p. 78.
Frank Moya Pons, Historia Colonial de Santo Domingo (Santiago, Dominican Republic: Universidad Catölica Madré y Maestra, 1977), pp. 79–80
Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados... (London: Peter Parker and Thomas Guy, 1657), p. 43.
Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 147.
Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 145
B. W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 121–3
B. W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 232.
Reverend George W. Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1828), vol. 2, p. 371
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2003 UNESCO
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Heuman, G. (2003). The social structure of the slave societies in the Caribbean. In: Knight, F.W. (eds) General History of the Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73770-3_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73770-3_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-73772-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-73770-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)