The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

2. Turbulent and Dangerous Spirits: Irish Servitude in Barbados

I first visited Barbados in the summer of 2004 to attend the initial meeting of the newly formed Caribbean Philosophical Association. While a few friends and I were exploring the city of Bridgetown on a steamy May afternoon , we turned a corner and came upon a large church. Of course, churches are quite common on the island, but what struck me at the time about this particular church was the large Celtic cross on its brilliant green roof, and the windows lining the sides of the building in the shape of traditional Celtic knots. As we neared the building, I could see on a nearby sign that it was St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. I have since learned that this should not in the least have struck me as odd or extraordinary, but at the time it most certainly did. It was the sort of edifice I might have expected to find in any number of cities with large Irish populations (the undoubtedly lengthy list of which in North America would certainly include my own home of Milwaukee), but I did not expect at the time to see such a thing in the Caribbean. What was an Irish Catholic Cathedral doing in Barbados? My curiosity aroused, I began researching the Irish presence in the Caribbean almost immediately upon my return home from the conference. I subsequently learned that, though there had been a large Irish population in Barbados in the colony’s earliest days, the construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral did not begin until 1840, at which time the original Irish population 2 Turbulent and Dangerous Spirits: Irish Servitude in Barbados of indentured servants and poor laborers had largely vanished,1 to be replaced much later by a significant population of Irish soldiery garrisoned on the island , for whom the island’s first Catholic church had been built. Thus, while there had been a significant Irish Catholic population on the island during the early colonial era, it was not until the nineteenth century that British anti-Catholic sentiment had cooled sufficiently that the English colonists would allow a Roman Catholic church to function openly in Barbados (interestingly , that was nearly two hundred years after the first synagogue in Bridgetown).The Irish were, in fact, a substantial segment of the populations of colonial Barbados, Jamaica, Montserrat, and St. Kitts from the seventeenth through mid-eighteenth centuries. However, as white indentured labor was replaced increasingly with West African slave labor in the sugar colonies of the Anglophone Caribbean, freed white indentures typically either returned to Europe or continued west to the British Colonies in North America. What most interests me about the history of the Irish in the colonial Caribbean is their impact upon, and place within, the emerging racial landscape of the time. As they did later in North America, the Irish in the early colonial Caribbean occupied a very ambiguous position in the racial hierarchy , and one that, again as would be the case in the United States, changed substantially over the course of a generation or two. Aside from any number of important historical and sociological issues raised by this phenomenon, it also points toward crucial philosophical questions regarding the ontology of race, the workings of racial oppression, and the relation between the two. In exploring this historical moment, which is different from, but in significant ways analogous to, those moments explored in the work of Ignatiev, Roediger, Allen, and Jacobson, I will be focusing upon these important philosophical questions. This particular historical example is sufficiently analogous to the situation described by the new abolitionists to be familiar to readers conversant in that literature, but different enough to allow sufficient interpretive elbow room to explore the philosophical questions that motivate this book. What was the racial status of these early Irish servants? How did that status change over time? How did their presence condition the racial structures in which they found themselves? In short, a close examination of the early period of the Irish presence in Barbados will help to illuminate the central themes and problems with which this book contends. This chapter offers a brief sketch of this historical period, and draws out some of these 52 Turbulent and Dangerous Spirits: Irish Servitude in Barbados significant dilemmas and puzzles, which will in turn be taken up in subsequent chapters. My ultimate purpose in this book is...