- Reproducing the British Caribbean: Sex, Gender, and Population Politics after Slavery by Juanita de Barros
By Juanita de Barros.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 279pp. Paper $32.95, e-book $29.99.
Shifting from tradition, this book takes a novel approach, showing how population issues became central to colonial administration after emancipation. It posits that population anxieties were manifest at the administrative levels in the British Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a population deficit crisis alarmed the authorities, through to the 1930s when the pendulum shifted to an equally alarming surplus crisis. Hence it links all developments in the region and examines them through the lens of population. Framed within the context of Emancipation in 1838 and the protests of the 1930s, the book discusses the forces which shaped the responses of the authorities, the strategies they employed, and their outcomes.
The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters, each detailing an aspect considered central to the main argument and a conclusion. Chapter 1 deals with slavery, emancipation, the nature of the African race and the genesis of the population problem. Chapter 2 discusses the central population concern, infant mortality. Chapter 3 examines solutions, such as training midwives to replace the ignorant grannies. Chapter 4 discusses mechanisms for uplifting the race: infant welfare programs and maternal education, which would facilitate international involvement in the child-saving process, the focus of chapter 5.
The book focuses on developments in Barbados, Guyana, and Jamaica, which, though they reflect “diverse colonial responses to the population questions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” have been deemed to provide sufficient fodder “to address regional patterns” (5). The borders for the discussion are based on the centrality of the demographic argument in the antislavery movement, which asserted that enslavement caused low birth rates and high mortality, causing evaluations of freedom’s success to be based on reversing this trend. Reproduction, which became “a medical, moral and economic issue,” assumed prominence in the attempt to remove the frequent epidemics, symbols of emancipation’s failure making a more aggressive attempt to civilize the African population imperative (65).
By the early twentieth century, when the force of numbers of the emerging nationalist groups was as perplexing as their rhetoric, the problem changed [End Page 178] from deficit to surplus, then the focus was on population, especially birth, control. De Barros argues that the response of the authorities was shaped by a range of factors, including ideas of racial difference and white superiority, scientific knowledge, labor needs, and the emergence of tropical medicine. She asserts that it became necessary to denature the disease-prone, supposedly irrational Africans by a policy focused on infant mortality, infants, and their mothers, which was applied across the region in disregard of territorial differences. Thus infant survival in the Caribbean became of central imperial concern with an emphasis on mothering and baby care.
The civilizing solution included encouraging formal marriage, improving infant health, education and training, and philanthropy. But de Barros points out that these bred new hostilities due to the differing agendas of varying groups, as race, gender, and class identities came into conflict. This is an important contribution, as medical/health-stimulated tensions have not been adequately aired in the existing historiography.
This smoothly written book, although somewhat repetitive, is well researched and draws on a wide range of sources. Through its attempts to frame all developments around the population issue, it demonstrates the complexities and contradictions of Caribbean society. It breaks new ground, offering a fresh perspective on the region’s historical development and a wealth of information on the history of the region’s health as well as the relationship of the health sector to other sectors in the territories.
Missing from the discussion is an examination of the legal strategies that formed an important part of the civilizing mission, as well as the role of the church in health matters.
The conclusion is disappointing. While it does offer information on the state of the population issue in the 1930s, rather than linking this...