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8 / the emigration debate and postemancipation politics In September 1840, during a speech at a dinner in his honor, Samuel Jackman Prescod asked those in attendance to reflect on an issue that had been central to the Afro-Barbadian civil rights struggle. “Why should it be called liberality, and so much credit assumed for the act,” he asked, “when a black or coloured man [is] appointed to fill a public situation[?]”1 Prescod’s bitterness reflected the reality that, within a few years of the end of apprenticeship, the colonial regime, which for so long had been loath to appoint people of color to official posts, was now successfully using such appointments to undermine the tenuous and fleeting political solidarity that Afro-Barbadian civil rights campaigners had forged during apprenticeship. Men of color who previously had been allies turned against each other in public fashion, the divisions between them carefully nurtured by the government . The source of the crisis in Afro-Barbadian politics was much deeper than a problem of official meddling. Their disagreements arose from fundamentally different ideological views of the meaning of freedom after slavery, as they took opposite sides in the debate over how to resolve the widespread labor unrest of the early postapprenticeship years. Between 1838 and the early 1840s, the Barbadian countryside hemorrhaged people, as rural laborers fled before planters’ increasingly draconian labor policies. Estate workers did not just leave the countryside— many left the island altogether, taking advantage of labor shortages in neighboring Caribbean territories to escape the repressive atmosphere of Barbados. Movement had always been one of the key ways in which Afro-Barbadians exercised freedom and demonstrated their opposition to state and planter authorities. The early postslavery wave of emigration posed a serious threat to planters’ cherished control over a captive labor force and to their political and economic power. The debate over emigration in the postemancipation British Caribbean divided the forces of reform in the British Empire at all levels. In Britain, the issue 1. Liberal, 19 September 1840. 226 the children of africa in the colonies proved devastating for the antislavery movement, already in decline in the face of rising antiblack sentiment. In Barbados, the issue of emigration fatally undermined the already fractious Afro-Barbadian civil rights struggle. In the end, the losers in this battle were not the elite, most of whom would see their hopes for political influence fulfilled, but the majority of working-class Afro-Barbadians who had hoped emancipation would lead to meaningful political and economic change. the crisis in caribbean agriculture The abolition of slavery contributed to one of the worst economic crises in the history of British Caribbean plantation agriculture. By the 1820s the price of sugar from the British West Indies had gone into a seemingly irreversible decline. Saint Domingue, the greatest eighteenth-century threat to the British Caribbean sugar industry, had been replaced by even more daunting competition from Cuba and Brazil.2 A similar crisis struck other important West Indian export crops, such as coffee and cotton, the latter a crop vital for the survival of small landholders.3 After the long cycle of declining prices and political controversy over slavery, creditors lost confidence in British West Indian agriculture and demanded loan repayments while refusing to extend further credit.4 Planters also faced a new challenge from the advocates of free trade in Britain, who supported popular demands for the end of tariff protection for agricultural products such as sugar and corn, which, free traders argued, kept prices for these necessary items artificially high.5 2. Between 1820 and 1860 Cuba’s annual sugar exports rose from 43,119 tons to 447,000, while Brazil’s grew from 75,000 to 82,000 between 1820 and 1839 but afterward tended to fluctuate a great deal from year to year. See Deerr, History of Sugar, 1:131. See also Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship , 337 and 368–369; Watts, West Indies, 300. 3. Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship, 23–24; Richard Lobdell, “Patterns of Investment and Sources of Credit in the British West Indian Sugar Industry, 1838–1897,” in Beckles and Shepherd, ed., Caribbean Freedom, 319. 4. Lobdell, “Patterns of Investment,” 320–321; Butler, Economics of Emancipation, 64–68; Richard Pares, A West India Fortune (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), 261. 5. Beginning in 1663, sugar entering Britain from its Caribbean colonies was taxed at a lower rate than sugar from elsewhere. Since the 1790s there had...

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