4 - The Problems of Apprenticeship

Summary

The chapter provides a study of how the apprenticeship implemented through much of the emancipated British West Indies posed problems for the free labor defense of the experiment, as it sought to maintain the structures of slavery — in deed if not in name. None understood this better than former slaves, who viewed the repression doled out by magistrates and planters as a subversion of both labor and freedom. Through testimonies and acts of resistance, I illustrate how freedpeople forced an end to the apprenticeship even as American abolitionists sought to use their laboring potential as a defense of the experiment.