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4. Class Struggle in a West Indian Plantation Society
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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4 Class Struggle in a West Indian Plantation Society Natalie Zacek In the summer of 1732, William Smith, the rector of St. John’s Parish, Nevis, visited an acquaintance on the neighboring island of St. Kitts. In a letter to his friend Charles Mason, the Woodwardian Professor of Geology and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he described his thoughts and impressions as he and his host rode “through many Sugar Plantations, till we came to the thick Woods.” These woodlands were ill suited to the cultivation of sugar, but, according to Smith, he and his friend “now and then . . . passed by a small Cotton Settlement, whose humble and temperate Possessor (Hermit like) lived by vertue of his own and three or four Slaves Labour.” In previous letters, Smith had expressed his admiration for the luxurious and leisured way of life among the islands’ great sugar magnates, but the small cotton cultivator was still more desirable to him. Such a man lived, according to John Milton, with far truer Satisfaction, in his lonely Retirement, than can be found in stately Palaces, or in the most extravagant and luxurious Cities, where The noise of Riot ascends above their loftiest Towers And Injury and Outrage: and when Night Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons Of Belial flown with Insolence and Wine.1 Smith did not claim that Charlestown or Basseterre, the respective capitals of Nevis and St. Kitts, either boasted lofty towers or harbored Satan’s offspring. However, it was evident to him that, even in islands that he repeatedly compared to tropical Edens, it was the small farmer, rather than the great planter, whose life approached the ideal in both sacred and secular terms. This admittedly sentimental and clichéd depiction of the allegedly idyllic life of the independent cultivator, as opposed to that of the great planter, appears at first glance to be a trivial and innocuous incident within an obscure work of eighteenth-century natural history. This vignette, however, represented to Smith and to his metropolitan audience a lost opportunity, a nobler resolution to the long-drawn-out and highly contentious process of disposing of the Caribbean territories that Britain acquired from France at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. By valorizing the figure of the “humble and temperate” small farmer, Smith presented a critique of metropolitan and colonial policymaking, which, he implied, had sacrificed the interests of the small farmer to those of the sugar magnate. This chapter explores the lengthy debates about these newly acquired territories, and it illuminates the class dimension of the white population of the plantation colonies of the first British Empire. Class has been the missing factor in the historiography of the English colonies of the West Indies, largely due to the adherence of many scholars to Edmund Morgan’s influential thesis regarding the work of racial difference in effacing class awareness in colonial British American plantation society. Echoing Morgan, for example, Trevor Burnard notes that in eighteenth-century Jamaica, “the first rule [of society] was a presumption of white egalitarianism.”2 Careful analysis of the debate over the “French lands,” however, clarifies how eighteenth-century English West Indian colonists (like the New Yorkers described in Simon Middleton’s chapter in this book) defined themselves and others according to their positions within the social and economic structures of their communities. In the process, this definition influenced the lives of these communities. By the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), France relinquished all of the land it held in the Leeward island of St. Kitts (or, as it was then called, St. Christopher’s), bringing the entire island under British control for the first time in its history as a European colony. The cession of these lands was a source of delight to the metropole. For nearly a century, Britain and France had uneasily shared the island. The colony’s origin myth, or at least that deployed by its European inhabitants, held that the first French and English settlers had arrived on the island in 1625 on the very same day. Lacking “any awareness of their [joint] arrivals,” this “would cause between them a terrible dispute, and a process which could not end otherwise, because the Island would be divided between the two nations, and hunting, fishing, the volcano, the salt ponds, and the meres would be held jointly.”3 The resulting pattern of division, by which the English occupied the center of the island while the French...