Abstract
Historically cast as idle, indolent, destitute, and degenerate, the “poor whites” of Barbados are viewed as being ostracized from island and global economic spheres and processes of capitalism. Although implicated in processes of modernization, their roles within island society were markedly different from those of enslaved and, following emancipation, formerly enslaved Afro-Barbadians. As “white” plantation residents, they represent the starkest escape from slavery, given their free status, yet their presence on the landscape raises significant questions about labor on the plantation during and after the period of slavery. Archival data suggest that producers of the historical record had particular notions of appropriate forms of labor that didn’t neatly coincide with localized economic activities. Therefore, I suggest that “poor white” Barbadians were active participants in informal economic networks and engaged with capitalist processes on their own terms, characterized by the politics of work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Given the nature of and political motivations inherent within census data, such an argument is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Handler (1974) illustrates that “mulattos” or “free people of color” only represented a small fraction of the official Barbadian population in the decades leading up to emancipation. However, Cecily Forde-Jones (1998) illustrates that the perceived maintenance of racial boundaries was essential to the success of racial hierarchies and ideologies.
- 2.
- 3.
Excavation units were placed at three different house sites, but given materials present and the invaluable ethnographic insight provided by Wilson Norris, his childhood home became the focus of the project.
- 4.
Most of the imported ceramics dated to the immediate decades prior to, and following, emancipation. In addition, a high proportion of the sherds were Scottish-made spongeware. In general, these wares were of poorer quality in terms of production than their English counterparts and were less expensive (see Cruikshank 2005).
- 5.
Loftfield notes that although many of the hollowware vessel forms found in Barbados may have roots in Europe, “[their] use in Barbados, however, is most likely associated with African foodways” (2001, p. 226).
- 6.
Believing that the enslaved would not be capable of successfully transitioning from slavery to freedom, a period of apprenticeship was imposed in 1834 and was supposed to last for six years before being cut short in 1838 for a host of reasons including laborer unrest as well as pressure from abolitionists.
- 7.
- 8.
In the post-emancipation era (after 1838) it is possible that those listed as residents of Clifton Hall were residing on top of the cliff in the newly-established tenantry. However, given that St. John’s parish church is in close proximity to the post-emancipation site, it is likely that those residing on Clifton Hall lands and being baptized at St. Margaret’s were living below the cliff. This was confirmed by former village residents.
References
Agorsah, E. K. (2007). Scars of brutality: Archaeology of the maroons in the caribbean. In A. Ogundiran & T. Falola (Eds.), Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African diaspora (pp. 332–354). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Amussen, S. D. (2007). Caribbean exchanges: Slavery and the transformation of english society, 1640–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Armstrong, D. V. (1990). The old village and the great house: An archaeology and historical examination of Drax Hall Plantation St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Armstrong, D. V. (1999). Archaeology and ethnohistory of the Caribbean plantation. In Theresa A. Singleton (Ed.), I, too, am America: Archaeological studies of African-American life (pp. 173–192). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Armstrong, D. V. (2003). Creole transformations from slavery to freedom: Historical archaeology of the East End Community, St. John, Virgin Islands. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Armstrong, D. V. (2008). Excavating African American heritage. Historical Archaeology, 42(2), 123–137.
Armstrong, D. V., & Hauser, M. W. (2004). An East Indian laborers’ household in nineteenth-century Jamaica: A case for understanding cultural diversity through space, chronology, and material analysis. Historical Archaeology, 38(2), 9–21.
Armstrong, D. V., & Kelly, K. G. (2000). Settlement patterns and the origins of African Jamaican society: Seville plantation, St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Ethnohistory, 47(2), 369–397.
Armstrong, D. V., & Reilly, M. C. (2014). Recovering evidence of initial settler farms and early plantation life in Barbados. Slavery and Abolition, forthcoming, 35(3), 399–417.
Armstrong, D. V., Hauser, M. W., Knight, D. W., & Lenik, S. (2009). Variations in venues of slavery and freedom: Interpreting the late eighteenth-century cultural landscape of St. John, Danish West Indies using an archaeological GIS. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 13(1), 94–111.
Barbados Department of Archives (BDA). Black rock, St. Michael, Barbados.
Bates, L. (N. D.). ‘The landscape cannot be said to be really perfect’: A comparative investigation of plantation Spatial organization on two British colonial sugar estates. In L.W. Marshall (Ed.) The archaeology of slavery: A comparative approach to captivity and coercion. Southern Illinois University Center for Archaeological Investigations, SIU Occasional Paper #41.
Beckles, H. M. (1989). White servitude and black slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.
Browne, D. V. C. (2012). Race, class, politics and the struggle for empowerment in Barbados, 1914–1937. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers.
Chakrabarty, D. (1992). Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: Who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts? Representations, 37, 1–26.
Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cohn, B. S., & Dirks, N. B. (1988). Beyond the fringe: The nation state, colonialism, and the technologies of Power. Journal of Historical Sociology, 1(2), 224–229.
Coleridge, H. N. (1826). Six months in the West Indies in 1825. London: John Murray, Ablemarle Street.
Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. (1991). Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Croucher, S. K., & Weiss, L. (2011). The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts, an Introduction: Provincializing Historical Archaeology. In S. Croucher & L. Weiss (Eds.), The archaeology of capitalism in colonial contexts: Postcolonial historical archaeologies (pp. 1–38). New York: Springer.
Cruickshank, G. (2005). Scottish pottery. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications Ltd.
Curet, L. A., Hauser, M. W. (2011). Islands at the crossroads: Migration, seafaring, and interaction in the Caribbean. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Delle, J. A. (1998). An archaeology of social space: Analyzing coffee plantations in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. New York: Plenum.
Delle, J. A. (2014). The colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of power in the plantation system. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dickson, W. (1814). Mitigation of slavery in two parts. London: R. and A. Taylor.
Dunn, R. (1972). Sugar and slaves: The rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Finch, J. (2013). Inside the pot house: Diaspora, identity, and locale in Barbadian Ceramics. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, 2(2), 115–130.
Forde-Jones, C. (1998). Mapping racial boundaries: Gender, race, and poor relief in Barbadian plantation society. Journal of Women’s History, 10(3), 9–31.
Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C.G. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galle, J. E. (2011). Assessing the impacts of time, agricultural cycles, and demography on the consumer activities of enslaved men and women in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Virginia. In J.A. Delle, M.W. Hauser, & D.V. Armstrong (Eds.), Out of many, one people: The historical archaeology of colonial Jamaica (pp. 211–242). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Gibson, H. R. (2009). Domestic economy and daily practice in Guadeloupe: Historical archaeology at La Mahaudiére plantation. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 13(1), 27–44.
Gidwani, V. (2008). Capital, interrupted: Agrarian development and the politics of work in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Glennie, P., & Thrift, N. (1996). Reworking E.P. Thompson’s ‘Time, work-discipline and Industrial capitalism.’ Time and Society, 5(3), 275–299.
Graeber, D. (2006). Turning modes of production inside out: Or, why capitalism is a transformation of slavery. Critique of Anthropology, 26(1), 61–85.
Handler, J. S. (1963). A historical sketch of pottery manufacture in Barbados. Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 30, 129–153.
Handler, J. S. (1966). Small-scale sugar cane farming in Barbados. Ethnology, 5(3), 264–283.
Handler, J. S. (1974). The unappropriated people: Freedmen in the slave society of Barbados. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Handler, J. S., & Lange, F. W. (1978). Plantation slavery in Barbados: An archaeological and historical investigation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Handler, J. S., & Wallman, D. (2014). Production activities in the household economies of plantation slaves: Barbados and Martinique, Mid-1660s to Mid-1800s. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 18(3).
Hartigan, J. (2005). Odd tribes: Toward a cultural analysis of white people. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harvey, D. (2006[1982]). The limits to capital. New York: Verso.
Hauser, M. W. (2008). An archaeology of black markets: Local ceramics and economies in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Hauser, M. W. (2009). Scale locality and the Caribbean: Historical archaeology. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 13(1), 3–11.
Hauser, M. W. (2011a). Routes and roots of empire: Pots, power, and slavery in the 18th-century British Caribbean. American Anthropologist, 113(3), 431–447.
Hauser, M. W. (2011b). Uneven topographies: Archaeology of plantations and Caribbean slave economies. In S.K. Croucher & L. Weiss (Eds.), The archaeology of capitalism in colonial contexts: Postcolonial historical archaeologies (pp. 121–142). New York: Springer.
Hauser, M. W., & Hicks, D. (2007). Colonialism and landscape: Power, materiality and scales of analysis in Caribbean historical archaeology. In D. Hicks, L. McAtackney, & G. Fairclough (Eds.), Envisioning landscape: Situations and standpoints in archaeology and heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast.
Hirschman, A. O. (1970). Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hoyos, F. A. (1978). Barbados: A history from Amerindians to independence. London: MacMillan Caribbean.
James, C. L. R. (1963). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House.
Jones, C. (2007). Engendering whiteness: White women and colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Jordan, W. D. (1968). White over black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Kelly, K. G. (2008). Creole cultures of the Caribbean: Historical archaeology in the French West Indies. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 12(3), 388–402.
Lambert, D. (2005). White Creole culture, politics and identity during the age of abolition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lenik, S. (2009). Considering multiscalar approaches to creolization among enslaved laborers at Estate Bethlehem, St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 13(1), 12–26.
Lenik, S. (2012). Mission plantations, space, and social control: Jesuits as planters in French Caribbean colonies and frontiers. Journal of Social Archaeology, 12(1), 51–71.
Leone, M. P. (1999). Ceramics from Annapolis, Maryland: A measure of time routines and work discipline. In M.P. Leone & P.B. Potter (Eds.), Historical archaeologies of capitalism (pp. 195–216). New York: Springer.
Leone, M. P. (2005). The archaeology of liberty in an American capital: Excavations in Annapolis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Loftfield, T. C. (2001). Creolization in seventeenth-century Barbados: Two case studies. In P. Farnsworth (Ed.), Island lives: Historical archaeologies of the Caribbean (pp. 207–233). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Marx, K. (1967). Capital vol. 1: A critical analysis of capitalist production. New York: International Publishers.
Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. New York: Penguin Books.
McGuire, R. H. (2002). A Marxist archaeology (2nd Ed.). Clifton Corners: Percheron.
Menard, R. R. (2006). Sweet negotiations: Sugar, slavery, and plantation agriculture in early Barbados. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Mintz, S. W. (1974). Caribbean transformations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Monahan, M. (2011). The creolizing subject: Race, reason, and the politics of purity. New York: Fordham University Press.
Newman, S. P. (2013). A new world of labor: The development of plantation slavery in the British Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ortiz, F. (1995[1947]). Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar. Durham: Duke University Press.
Palmié, S. (2002). Wizards and scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and tradition. Durham: Duke University Press.
Parliamentary Papers. (1790). Vol. 88, Accounts and papers 30. London, UK.
Pulsipher, L. M. (1994). The landscapes and ideational roles of Caribbean slave gardens. In N.F. Miller & K.L. Gleason (Eds.), The archaeology of garden and field (pp. 202–226). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Richard, F. G. (2011). Materializing poverty: Archaeological reflections from the postcolony. Historical Archaeology, 45(3), 166–182.
Richard, F. G. (2013). Hesistant geographies of power: The materiality of colonial rule in the Siin (Senegal), 1850–1960. Journal of Social Archaeology, 13(1), 54–79.
Scott, J. C. (1988). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Scott, D. (2004). Conscripts of modernity: The tragedy of colonial enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sheppard, J. (1977). The “Redlegs” of Barbados: Their origins and history. New York: KTO.
Sheridan, R. B. (2000[1974]). Sugar and slavery: An economic history of the British West Indies, 1623–1775. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith, M. M. (1994). Counting clocks, owning time: Detailing and interpreting clock and watch ownership in the American South, 1739–1865. Time and Society, 3(3), 321–339.
Smith, A. T. (2004). The end of the essential archaeological subject. Archaeological Dialogues, 11(1), 1–20.
Smith, F. H. (2008a). The archaeology of alcohol and drinking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Smith, N. (2008b[1984]). Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
St. Margaret’s Parish Church Registries. (2013). Housed at St. John’s Parish Church, St. John, Barbados. (Accessed April–May 2013).
Stoler, L. A. (2009). Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Thome, J. A., & Kimball, J. H. (1838). Emancipation in the West Indies: A six months’ tour in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, in the year 1837. New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society.
Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism. Past and Present, 38, 56–97.
Tomich, D. W. (2004). Through the prism of slavery: Labor, capital, and world economy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon.
Trouillot, M. R. (2003). Global transformations: Anthropology and the modern world. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilkie, L. A. (1999). Evidence of african continuities in the material culture of Clifton Plantation, Bahamas. In J.B. Haviser (Ed.), African sites: Archaeology in the Caribbean. Princeton: Markus Wiener.
Wilkie, L. A. (2000). Culture bought: Evidence of creolization in the consumer goods of an Enslaved Bahamian family. Historical Archaeology, 34(3), 10–26.
Wilkie, L. A., & Farnsworth, P. (1999). Trade and the construction of Bahamian identity: A multiscalar approach. International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 3, 283–320.
Wilkie, L. A., & Farnsworth, P. (2005). Sampling many pots: An archaeology of memory and tradition at a Bahamian Plantation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Williams, E. (1994[1944]). Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Woodward, R. P. (2011). Feudalism or agrarian capitalism? The archaeology of the early sixteenth-century Spanish sugar industry. In J.A. Delle, M.W. Hauser, & D.V. Armstrong (Eds.), Out of many, one people: The historical archaeology of colonial Jamaica (pp. 23–40). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reilly, M. (2015). The Politics of Work, “Poor Whites,” and Plantation Capitalism in Barbados. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12759-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12760-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)