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3 / racial segregation and public life during the amelioration era In 1823 the British government adopted a policy of pursuing the “amelioration ” of slavery as, in theory, part of the process of slavery’s “gradual extinction .” Amelioration consisted of a range of legal and social reforms whose objective was the improvement of the “moral” and physical condition of slaves and free people of African descent. This reform process was intended as a compromise that would indefinitely preserve the status quo in the British Caribbean. Yet even before 1823, years of what planters viewed as Colonial Office meddling had begun to effect enormous changes in Britain’s Caribbean slaveholding colonies. Amelioration had a profound impact on slaves and free people of color, their relations with whites, and the institutions that regulated their lives. Through amelioration policy, the imperial government sought to Christianize slaves and transform the legal environment of slave society by reforming slave and common law in order to give slaves and free people of color greater legal protection . But the Colonial Office left the responsibility for framing such policies in the hands of predominantly white West Indian slave owners who did everything they could to subvert the amelioration process and reinforce the legal apparatus of racial segregation. As a result, amelioration’s effects were contradictory. On one hand, free people of color in Barbados found themselves struggling against new forms of public segregation. On the other hand, debates over amelioration policy created space for free people of color and slaves in the British Caribbean to establish new roles for themselves in public life, and provided them with a new political language in which to articulate claims to equality with the empire’s white subjects. The proselytizing aspect of amelioration encouraged missionary activity and philanthropic work among slaves and numerous missionary societies, some with explicitly abolitionist mandates, sprang up in Britain and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Philanthropy quickly became another terrain on which whites and Afro-Barbadians battled over racial segregation and 88 the children of africa in the colonies civil rights.1 For elite Afro-Barbadians, Christian philanthropic organizing provided a platform to further their demands for political reform, since philanthropy was a form of civic involvement that planters could not easily suppress as subversive . Through philanthropy, free people of color challenged the state’s racial segregation policies, creating their own outlets for the provision of such services as education and poor relief. Afro-Barbadian philanthropy also helped to forge and articulate a sense of community among people of African descent while ensuring that socioeconomic inequality would be one of that community’s organizing principles. Even if the Afro-Barbadian elite did not view the enslaved as their equals, they did not entirely exclude them as outsiders. The charities established by free people of color were notable for not being segregated by legal status—slaves as well as lower-class free people of color were designated as the beneficiaries. This community organizing illustrates Arnold Sio’s point that “the continuation of relations with slaves was not a barrier to a free coloured identity.”2 amelioration and religious reform West Indian planters had been pursuing what they termed amelioration measures since the late 1700s, largely as a means to increase estate productivity and maintain the size of the estate labor force without such heavy reliance on the slave trade.3 Abolitionist MPs were not convinced by these efforts, and the battle in the 1810s over the establishment of slave registries was among the first in a long series of struggles between the imperial government and West Indian legislatures over slave amelioration. The Colonial Office wanted legislatures to extend greater common law protection to slaves and free people of color in order to decrease the arbitrary power of slave owners. Imperial officials also wanted creole elites to support missionary activity with legislative reforms in order to counter the abolitionist argument that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. Amelioration was predominantly intended to “modernize” the laws relating to slavery and Christianize slaves but the reforms also had implications for free people of color. In 1818 the 1. For comparison, see Lowes, “Peculiar Class,” 131–132, on philanthropy and elite free black and colored identity in Antigua. 2. Sio, “Marginality,” 153. 3. Robert Luster, The Amelioration of the Slaves in the British Empire, 1790–1833 (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Ward, British West Indian Slavery. [3.144.48.135] Project MUSE (2024...

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