The British Caribbean: From the Plantation Economy to Independence

The British Caribbean between 1834 and 1962 is a long, slow story of economic decline, demographic reshuffle, and political mobilisation. The sugar economy that had made the British West Indies the most valuable colonies in the empire by the 1790s was, by the 1840s, in irreversible decline. The freed population refused to work on the plantations under the conditions the planters demanded; the planters, in turn, struggled to maintain profitability. Sugar beet production in Europe added an external pressure. The result was a century of adjustment, in which the Caribbean was transformed from a slave society into a society of free peasants, indentured workers, and a small planter class — and in which, in the 1930s, a mass political movement first emerged that would, within thirty years, produce a dozen independent states.

The Decline of the Plantation Economy

The abolition of slavery in 1834 and the development of European sugar beet production in the nineteenth century led to a long-term decline of the Caribbean sugar economy. The plantation colonies of the British Caribbean had been among the richest in the British Empire, but they entered a long period of relative economic decline in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The freed population refused to work on the plantations under the conditions that the planters demanded, and the planters struggled to maintain profitability. The result was a long period of adjustment, in which the sugar economy gradually gave way to other crops, including bananas, citrus, and cocoa, and in which the population became more diversified. The devaluation of the Brazilian slave system in 1850 removed one of the last sources of competition in the transatlantic trade; the British West Indies had been declining relative to Cuba and Brazil for decades.

The Apprenticeship System

The apprenticeship system, established by the 1833 Abolition Act, bound the formerly enslaved to their former masters for a period of years. The system was widely criticised as a continuation of forced labour, and it was ended in 1838. The apprenticeship system provided for the former slaves to work for their former masters for 40.5 hours per week without pay, with the rest of their time free to work for wages. The system was bitterly resented, and the colonial legislatures in the British Caribbean passed laws that effectively extended the working hours of the apprentices. The criticism of the apprenticeship system, led by abolitionists in Britain, led to the decision to end the system in 1838, two years earlier than originally planned.

The Indentured Labour System

The decline of the plantation economy led the British authorities to develop the indentured labour system to provide a labour force for the plantations. The system brought perhaps 500,000 Indian workers, together with smaller numbers of Chinese, African, and Pacific Island workers, to the Caribbean between 1834 and the early twentieth century. The Indian diaspora in the Caribbean was particularly important, and it transformed the demographic composition of the British Caribbean, particularly in Trinidad, British Guiana, and Suriname. The Chinese diaspora in the Caribbean was smaller, and it was concentrated in Trinidad and British Guiana.

The indenture system, as the historian Hugh Tinker showed in A New System of Slavery (1974), “was in many respects a continuation of the slave trade under another name.” The recruiting agents, the “arkatis,” travelled the villages of Bihar and the United Provinces and induced Indian workers to sign five-year contracts they could not read; the death rate on the sugar estates of the Caribbean was, in the early years, comparable to that of the Middle Passage.

The Demographic Transformation

The Caribbean was transformed demographically by the post-emancipation migrations. The Afro-Caribbean majority population, descended from the enslaved Africans of the colonial period, dominated most of the British Caribbean. The Indian-Caribbean population, descended from the indentured workers, was concentrated in Trinidad and British Guiana, where it eventually became a majority or near-majority of the population. The European population, mainly of British origin, and the mixed-race population, of mixed European and African descent, were smaller minorities.

The demographic composition of the modern Caribbean is the product of these historical migrations, and the political tensions between the different communities have shaped the modern West Indies. As the historian Brinsley Samaroo put it, “the Caribbean is a place where race, colour, and class are not separate categories; they are the same category, expressed in different registers.”

The Political Awakening

The twentieth century saw a major political awakening in the British Caribbean, with the growth of trade unionism, the emergence of political parties, and the demand for self-government. The 1938 West Indian disturbances, which began in the sugar plantations of Jamaica and spread to other British Caribbean colonies, marked a major turning point. The British government responded by appointing the Moyne Commission (1938–1939) under the chairmanship of Lord Moyne, which reported in 1940 and recommended major social and political reforms.

The 1938 disturbances were, as the historian CLR James argued in a contemporary pamphlet, “the first time in the history of the West Indies that the people of the islands have spoken with one voice.” The post-war constitutional development of the British Caribbean was rapid, and most of the major territories achieved universal adult suffrage and a substantial measure of self-government by the 1950s.

The West Indies Federation

The West Indies Federation (1958–1962) was a short-lived political union of ten British Caribbean colonies, established in 1958 with the aim of preparing the colonies for full independence as a single state. The federation collapsed in 1962, principally because of the withdrawal of Jamaica, and the constituent territories eventually became independent separately. The federation’s collapse was a major disappointment for West Indian nationalism, but it reflected the deep political and economic differences between the larger and smaller members of the federation.

The Independence of the Major Territories

The major British Caribbean territories achieved independence in the 1960s. Jamaica became independent on 6 August 1962, with Alexander Bustamante as the first prime minister, and the country became a republic in 1970. Trinidad and Tobago became independent on 31 August 1962, with Eric Williams as the first prime minister, and the country became a republic in 1976. Barbados became independent on 30 November 1966, with Errol Barrow as the first prime minister, and it became a republic only in 2021. The smaller British Caribbean territories, including Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent, became independent in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Post-Independence Caribbean

The post-independence Caribbean has been marked by economic challenges, political development, and the continuing influence of British institutions. The modern Commonwealth Caribbean is one of the more stable regions of the developing world, although it has faced challenges from the global decline of the sugar and banana industries. The Caribbean and the British monarchy remain closely linked, and the British monarch is still the head of state in several Caribbean countries. The reparations debate and the Caribbean is one of the most significant contemporary issues, with CARICOM (the Caribbean Community) leading a campaign for reparations from the former colonial powers. The legacy of the British period continues to be a central part of the political and cultural identity of the modern Caribbean.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British Caribbean has been transformed. The older West Indian nationalist accounts, embodied in the work of Eric Williams and CLR James, treated the colonial period as a story of British exploitation. The post-independence scholarship of the last thirty years, exemplified in the work of Hilary Beckles, Verene Shepherd, and the more recent writing of the Caribbean historians of the reparations movement, has produced a more nuanced picture, in which the colonial period is read as a contested terrain on which the British and the Caribbeans were both active agents. The current debate, exemplified in the recent work of O. Nigel Bolland and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire, is over how far the post-emancipation political and economic decline of the British Caribbean was the result of British mismanagement and how far it was the consequence of deeper structural problems of the plantation economy.

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