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Chapter  ‘‘Forced to Labour Beyond Their Natural Strength’’ Labor, Discipline, and Community on Eighteenth-Century Barbadian Plantations Sugar was the gold of the British Caribbean islands, and the precision of the seventeenth-century accounts of sugar cultivation and production by Richard Ligon and Henry Drax reflect the significant value of a commodity produced in a highly skilled and yet remarkably arduous manufacturing process. Barbadian plantation records reveal that by the early eighteenth century white workers, both bound and free, had all but disappeared from the ranks of even the most highly skilled plantation operatives, their places taken by highly qualified and able slaves who became as valuable to planters as their white predecessors. As one early eighteenth-century observer noted, ‘‘A Slave that is excellent in any of these Mechanick Employments, is worth 150 or 200 l. and I have known 400 l. bid for a Boiler, belonging to Sir John Bowdon’s Plantation in Scotland.’’ By way of comparison, an unskilled healthy adult male slave was ‘‘worth from 40 to 50 l. a head,’’ underscoring the financial value of enslaved craftsman who were worth three or four times the value of field workers, while a skilled sugar-maker might be worth ten times as much. By the later eighteenth century, the payment by the manager of the Newton plantation to ‘‘Quashy, belonging to Wilson & Daniel . . . for learning 2 Negroes the Coopers Trade,’’ provided telling evidence that few white craftsmen and artisans remained on the island’s plantations. During the eighteenth century, it was usually enslaved Africans who trained fellow slaves in the craft of sugar and rum production, as well as in such ancillary crafts as carpentry, smithing, and barrel-making.1 ‘‘Forced to Labour Beyond Their Strength’’ 217 If enslaved African workers had come to completely dominate Barbadian plantation labor, they labored in an institution that changed significantly over the course of the eighteenth century. Initially, soil exhaustion and declining sugar prices had combined to worsen conditions for enslaved laborers in Barbados, who worked harder and longer to maximize everdwindling profits. Yet the tiny island remained profitable, in part because of gradual modernization of the whole system of bound labor, as Barbados once again blazed a new trail forward. With profit in mind, Barbadian planters and managers sought to reduce costs, and they did so by a process of what historians have described as amelioration. By the end of the century planters grew more food for their enslaved workers, and also allowed the enslaved to themselves produce a greater amount of what they ate and to develop their own market for trading commodities. At the same time owners sought to encourage the enslaved workforce to reproduce itself, thus lessening dependence upon expensive replacements from Africa, and this meant improved conditions for family formation, especially for enslaved mothers. Planters began developing rewards and incentives for skilled enslaved craftsmen and domestic servants, whose children often replaced their parents, thus creating a hierarchy within the ranks of the enslaved, a ‘‘professional’’ elite who had a vested interest in the maintenance of a somewhat improved status quo. In the first decade of the eighteenth century nearly 46,000 slaves arrived in Barbados from Africa, but such vast numbers were no longer required a century later. Between 1800 and 1807, with the knowledge that the transatlantic slave trade was drawing to a close and that it would soon become illegal and very difficult to procure African slaves, fewer than 8,000 Africans arrived, even though other regions of British America were eagerly purchasing as many Africans as possible before the supply dried up. Barbados was the only British sugar colony in which the enslaved population was increasing naturally before the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This meant that plantation slavery had changed in fundamental ways, becoming a more efficient system not just in the deployment of bound labor but also in the encouragement of enslaved families who were treated well enough for parents and children to live long enough to ensure a natural increase in their population. Slavery in Barbados had changed, and this process of amelioration helped explain the fact that the island did not experience any serious slave conspiracies or uprisings during the eighteenth century.2 E (2024-04-25 07:13 GMT) 218 Plantation Slavery Figure 14. John Augustine Waller, ‘‘Plantation Scene and Slave Houses, Barbados, 1807–1808,’’ from A Voyage in the West Indies, Containing Various Observations Made During...

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