Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:37:41.123Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“A Modified Form of Slavery”: The Credit and Truck Systems in the Bahamas in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Howard Johnson
Howard Johnson
Affiliation:
Nassau, Bahamas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Type
Slavery and Class
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 729 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 For a useful review of the historical literature on forms of labour control in the plantation colonies of the British West Indies after slavery, see Bolland, O. Nigel, “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:4 (10 1981), 593–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 For a similar argument relating to a different context, see Cardoso, Ciro F. S., “The Formation of the Coffee Estate in Nineteenth-century Costa Rica,” in Land and Labour in Latin America: Essays in the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Duncan, Kenneth and Rutledge, Ian, eds. (Cambridge, 1977), 196.Google Scholar

3 Blake, Henry to the Earl of Derby, no. 108, 12 August 1844, Public Record Office, Colonial Office (cited hereafter PRO, CO) 23/224. Blake was governor of the colony between 1884 and 1887. The credit and truck systems are being dealt with separately here although most contemporary commentators did not distinguish between them and referred to them simply as the truck system.Google Scholar

4 Bolland, , “Systems of Domination,” 593–600Google Scholar. In the Bahamas in 1834, for example, there were only 1.8 slaves per square mile as compared with Barbados, which had 500.9; Trinidad, 11.1; and Jamaica, 70.5. Higman, B. W., Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 41.Google Scholar

5 Department of Archives, “The Loyalist Bi-Centennial” (Nassau, Bahamas, 1983), 5.Google Scholar

6 Peters, Thelma, “The American Loyalists in the Bahama Islands: Who They Were,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 40:3 (1962), 227.Google Scholar

7 Smyth, James Carmichael to the Earl of Bathurst, 25 January 1832, PRO, CO 23/86.Google Scholar

8 Colebrooke, William to Lord Glenelg, no. 10, 3 February 1836, PRO, CO 23/96.Google Scholar

9 Albury, Paul, The Story of the Bahamas (London, 1975) 129.Google Scholar

10 Berlin, Ira, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1975; rpt. New York, 1981), 227.Google Scholar

11 Official Report on the State and Condition of the Liberated Africans in the Bahamas,” 10 October 1828, enclosure no. 7 in Lewis Grant to Sir Geo. Murray, no. 19, 10 October 1828, PRO, CO 23/79. My thanks to Patrice Williams of the Department of Archives, Nassau, Bahamas, who brought these references on the liberated Africans to my attention.

12 Grant, to Murray, , no. 23, 11 November 1828, PRO, CO 23/80.Google Scholar

13 Grant, to Goderich, Viscount, no. 9, 26 September 1827, PRO, CO 23/76.Google Scholar

14 Royal Gazette, 24 June 1837.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 29 July 1837.

16 Nesbitt, C. R. to Stanley, Lord, no. 18, 12 July 1842, PRO, CO 23/113.Google Scholar

17 Mathew, George to Stanley, , no. 135, 10 November 1845Google Scholar, PRO, CO 23/120. See also enclosure in Nesbitt to Grey, Earl, no. 40, 2 October 1847, PRO, CO 23/126.Google Scholar

18 Smyth, Carmichael to Goderich, no. 178, 17 September 1832, PROGoogle Scholar, CO 23/86. Smyth, Carmichael had observed, “Pine-apples to a very large extent have lately been cultivated; but they only answer in particular situations, & in a particular soil.”Google Scholar

19 Enclosure in Nesbitt to Grey, no. 36. 7 September 1847, PRO, CO 23/126. In this period Cat Island was called San Salvador.

20 “Statistical Summary for the half year ending 30th June 1847,” Table C, enclosure in Nesbitt to Grey, no. 36, 7 September 1847, PRO, CO 23/126.

21 Colebrooke to Glenelg, no. 79, 8 August 1835, PRO, CO 23/94.

22 Minutes of evidence taken before Commissioners of Crown Lands and Woods on 6 August 1835, reprinted in Bahamas Argus, 22 August 1835.

23 For a parallel situation in the southern United States after the civil war, see Higgs, Robert. Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (New York, 1977), 55. Sir Ambrose Shea, governor of the colony between 1887 and 1895, recognized that the reliance on credit was largely due to the absence of regular wages. He commented in 1894 after visiting the sisal plantation in Andros owned by the Chamberlain family, “Credit is rigidly refused on this estate and is easily dispensed with when wages are paid weekly.” Sir Ambrose Shea to Marquis of Ripon, no. 63, 24 April 1894, PRO, CO 23/239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, Social Classes in Agrarian Societies (paperback, ed., Garden City, New York, 1975), 147.Google Scholar

25 Enclosure, in Nesbitt, to Grey, , no. 36, 7 September 1847, PRO, CO 23/126.Google Scholar

26 For an excellent discussion of nineteenth-century metropolitan perceptions of what constituted work in British Africa and the British West Indies, see Cooper, Frederick, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, 1980)Google Scholar, ch. 2. See also Davidson, Basil, Africa in Modern History (London, 1978), 108.Google Scholar

27 Charles Bayley to Labouchere, Henry, no. 57, 23 September 1857, PRO, CO 23/154.Google Scholar

28 Ibid.

29 For a brief discussion of the official policy on the devolution of Crown lands in the Bahamas, see Craton, Michael, A History of the Bahamas (rev. ed., London, 1968), 208–10Google Scholar. It is most likely that the freeholders to whom Bayley referred were mainly squatters. See Blake, to Stanley, , no. 89, 27 August 1885, PRO, CO 23/226.Google Scholar

30 For a discussion of the importance of the pineapple and sponge industries in the late nineteenth century, see Craton, . History of the Bahamas, 248–53.Google Scholar

31 Blake to Derby, no. 108, 12 August 1884, PRO, CO 23/224. A system of advances was used as a method of labour recruitment in South Africa and Nigeria. See Bundy, Colin, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London, 1978), 130Google Scholar; Sheraton, R. W. and Lennihan, Louise, “Capital and Class: Peasant Differentiation in Northern Nigeria,” Journal of Peasant Studies, 9:1(1981), 56–62Google Scholar. For a general discussion, see Kloosterboer, W., Involuntary Labour since the Abolition of Slavery (Leiden, 1960), 199.Google Scholar

32 Cockburn, Francis to Russell, Lord John, no. 20, 6 April 1840, PRO, CO 23/107.Google Scholar

33 Cokbum, to Stanley, , no. 18, 19 May 1843, PRO, CO 23/115.Google Scholar

34 Enclosure, in Nesbitt, to Grey, , no. 36, 7 September 1847, PRO, CO 23/126.Google Scholar

35 Nassau Guardian, 27 April and 8 May 1889.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., 27 April 1889. For a description of the truck system as it operated in England, see Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, Barbara, The Town Labourer (new ed., London, 1978), 45–50Google Scholar. The truck system was also used in Russia in the late nineteenth century. See Crisp, Olga, “Labour and Industrialization in Russia,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Mathias, Peter and Postan, M. M., eds. (Cambridge, 1978), VII, pt. 2, 380Google Scholar. For an excellent discussion of the operation of the truck system in the colonial context, see Graves, Adrian, “Truck and Gifts: Melanesian Immigrants and the Trade Box System in Colonial Queensland,” Past and Present, no. 101 (November 1983), 87–124.Google Scholar

37 Nassau Guardian, 8 May 1889.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., 7 January 1882.

39 Balfour, Blayney to Spring Rice, no. 39. 15 January 1835, PRO, CO 23/93.Google Scholar

40 Gregory, John to Grey, , no. 3, 7 January 1852, PRO, CO 23/140.Google Scholar For the labour problems of the salt islands, see Harvey, Thomas C., Official Reports of the Out Islands of the Bahamas (Nassau, 1858), 44–47.Google Scholar

41 Nassau Guardian, 20 March 1880.Google Scholar

42 Albury, , Story of the Bahamas, 198.Google Scholar

43 Powles, L. D., The Land of the Pink Pearl (London, 1888), 86. Powles served as stipendiary and circuit magistrate for the Bahamas in the mid-1880s. He alienated the white establishment by his outspoken views and was subsequently dismissed.Google Scholar

44 Blake, to the Earl of Granville, , no. 32, 20 March 1886Google Scholar, PRO, CO 23/228. See also Sir Smith, William F. Haynes to Chamberlain, Joseph, no. 76, 7 July 1896. PRO, CO 23/244.Google Scholar

45 Smith, Haynes to Chamberlain, no. 76, 7 July 1896, PRO, CO 23/244.Google Scholar

46 Bell, Hesketh, Colonial Annual Report: Bahamas 1897, no. 238 (London, 1898)Google Scholar, 10. For similarities to the credit system in the American south after the civil war, see Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1977), eh. 7Google Scholar; Mandle, Jay, The Roots of Black Poverty: The Southern Plantation Economy after the Civil War (Durham, N.C., 1978)Google Scholar; Donald, Henderson H., The Negro Freedman (New York, 1971), 17–19Google Scholar; Higgs, , Competition and Coercion, 55–57.Google Scholar

47 Smith, Haynes to Chamberlain, , no. 76, 7 July 1896, PRO, CO 23/244.Google Scholar

48 “Report on the Parish of San Salvador for 1885 by Rev. F. B. Matthews,” Nassau Quarterly Mission Paper. (1 September 1886), 56Google Scholar. Indebtedness was a problem faced primarily by tenants, but it also occurred among the peasant proprietors of the Out Islands. See, for example, “Report on Rock Sound, Eleuthera for 1886,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (3 March-6 May 1887), 38–39Google Scholar. It should be noted that freeholders in New Providence were also often in debt to the Nassau merchants. John Gardiner, who was in 1886 scientific advisor to the Board of Agriculture of the Bahamas, wrote, “It is difficult to find a cultivator who is even free from debt to the Nassau tradesmen.” Letter by Gardiner, John in Nassau Guardian, 6 10 1886Google Scholar; Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 97Google Scholar. See also “Report on Long Island for 1885,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (23 February-26 May 1886), 27.Google Scholar

49 Blake, to Derby, , no. 108, 12 August 1884, PRO, CO 23/224.Google Scholar

50 “Report on Rock Sound, Eleuthera for 1882,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (6 February-5 May 1883), 89.Google Scholar

51 Nassau Guardian, 16 May 1894. Sands owned properties at Kemp's Bay, Mount Pleasant, Rainbow Harbour, Mutton Fish Point, and Hatchet Bay.Google Scholar

52 Letter by Sands, C. Tyldesley of 30 July 1898, Nassau Guardian, 3 August 1898.Google Scholar

53 Nassau Guardian, 8 September 1906Google Scholar. This system of tokens was also used in the sponging industry in the early years of the twentieth century. See Sir Grey-Wilson, William to the Earl of Crewe, Conf., 31 August 1908, PRO, CO 23–263Google Scholar. Cf. Fernández, Manuel, “British Nitrate Companies and the Emergence of Chile's Proletariat, 1880–1914,” in Proletarianisation in the Third World, Munslow, B. and Finch, H., eds. (London, 1984), 54–55.Google Scholar

54 Report of speech by Sir William Grey-Wilson on the closing of the session of the legislature, , Nassau Guardian, 10 July 1907. Grey-Wilson was governor between 1904 and 1911.Google Scholar

55 An Act for the protection of workmen in the Colony, 7 Edw. VII, c.4 (1907).

56 The American consul in the Bahamas had commented in 1891, “The sponge industry is still the most valuable one in the Colony giving steady employment to 500 or 600 vessels of small size and to one-eighth of the entire population of the islands.” “Report by Consul McLain on Trade and Industries of the Bahamas, 10 March 1891,” reprinted in Nassau Guardian, 24 October 1891.Google Scholar

57 Letter by Pritchard, W. E. of 29 March 1892Google Scholar, Nassau Guardian, 30 March 1892.Google Scholar

58 Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 88.Google Scholar

59 Letter by Brown, Joseph, Nassau Guardian, 7 January 1885.Google Scholar

60 Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 88.Google Scholar

61 Letter by the Matthews, Reverend F. B., Nassau Guardian, 20 April 1898.Google Scholar

62 Blake, to Sir Holland, Henry, no. 49, 30 April 1887, PRO, CO 23/229.Google Scholar

63 Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 90–91.Google Scholar

64 Blake, to Holland, , no. 49, 30 April 1887, PRO, CO 23/229.Google Scholar

65 Blake, to Holland, , no. 49, 40 April 1887, PRO, CO 23/229.Google Scholar

66 An Act to regulate the mode of fitting out vessels engaged in the Sponge and Turtle Fishery; the sale of the Sponge and Turtle Shell gathered on such voyages, and for other purposes, 49 Vict., c. 19 (1886).

67 Minute by Wingfield, Edward, 22 June 1892Google Scholar, on Shea, to Knutsford, , no. 72, 12 May 1892Google Scholar, and Minute by Edward, Wingfield, 20 August 1892Google Scholar, on Shea, to Kuntsford, , no. 113, 28 July 1892, PRO, CO 23/234. See An Act to consolidate and amend the law relating to the Sponge and Turtle Fishery, 4 & 5 Edw. VII, c. 18 (1905).Google Scholar

68 See “Report on Andros for 1904,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (II January-18 April 1905), 34. It was not unusual for an outfitter in the 1920s to charge 12.5 percent on a loan for a three-month period. This is equivalent to an annual interest rate of 60 percent. Interview with Mr. Thomas Armaly of Nassau. Bahamas, 17 March 1983.Google Scholar

69 Shedden, Roscow, Ups and Downs in a West Indian Diocese (London, 1927), 111–12.Google Scholar

70 The Matthews, Reverend F. B. noted in a letter to the Nassau Guardian in 1898Google Scholar. “Notwithstanding that the compulsory Education Act is in force, boys from 9 to 12 years old are now being sent to sea in shiploads.” Nassau Guardian, 19 March 1898Google Scholar. See also “Report on Mangrove Cay, Andros for 1912,” Bahamas Public Record Office, Nassau (cited hereafter as BPRO).

71 “Report on Nicoll's Town, Andros for 1907,” BPRO.

72 Letter by Pritchard, W. E. of 29 March 1892Google Scholar, Nassau Guardian, 30 March 1892Google Scholar. For a comparable situation, see Mandle, , Roots of Black Poverty, 50.Google Scholar

73 See, for example, “Report on Nicoll's Town, Andros for 1918,” and “Report on Mangrove Cay, Andros for 1919,” SPRO.

74 “Report on Mangrove Cay, Andros for 1922,” SPRO.

75 Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 98.Google Scholar

76 Haynes Smith to Chamberlain, , no. 76, 7 July 1896, PRO, CO 23/224.Google Scholar

77 Powles, , Land of the Pink Pearl, 59.Google Scholar

78 “Report on the Biminis for 1897,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (15 March-26 August 1898), 52.Google Scholar

74 Nassau Guardian, 1 1 February 1882, 18 March 1882.Google Scholar

80 Ibid., 20 March 1880.

81 “Report on Long Cay District for 1884,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (24 February-22 August 1885), 17. An earlier example of a foreign company using the truck system in the Bahamas is the American firm that had the monopoly for the export of guano in the early 1870s. As Governor William Robinson remarked in 1875, “The [guano] trade has certainly been the means of putting rather more money into circulation and thus it indirectly benefits to a small extent the Colonial Revenue. The benefit would probably be greater if it was not the practice to pay a large proportion of the wages in kind, that is, in that class of food consumed by the natives which is not liable to import duties.” Robinson to the Earl of Carnarvon, no. 73, 9 April 1875, PRO, CO 23/213.Google Scholar

82 “Report on Long Cay for 1897,” in appendix to Votes of the House of Assembly (15 March-26 August 1898), 62Google Scholar. See also Smith, Haynes to Chamberlain, no. 76, 7 July 1896, PRO, CO 23/244.Google Scholar

83 “Report on certain questions that have arisen between the Government and Messrs. Cohen ” by Bertram, Anton, Attorney General, 12 June 1906Google Scholar, enclosure in Grey-Wilson, to the Earl of Elgin, no. 62, 11 June 1906, PRO, CO 22/261.Google Scholar

84 Grey-Wilson, to Elgin, no. 70, 17 July 1907, PRO, CO 23/262.Google Scholar

85 Grey-Wilson, to Elgin, no. 62, 11 June 1906, PRO, CO 23/261.Google Scholar

86 An Act for the protection of Emigrant Labourers, 7 Edw. VII, c.3 (1907).

87 Grey-Wilson, to Lewis Harcourt, no. 94, 7 June 1911, PRO, CO 23/267.Google Scholar

88 The phrase is from Gordon Lewis, K., The Growth of the Modern West Indies (paperback, ed., New York, 1968), 312.Google Scholar

89 Bolland, , “Systems of Domination,” 611.Google Scholar

90 Green, William A., “The Perils of Comparative History: Belize and the British Sugar Colonies after Slavery,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:11 (01 1984), 114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91 Adamson, Alan H., Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (New Haven, 1972), 123.Google Scholar

93 San Fernando Gazette, 8 May 1875.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., 1 May 1875.

94 Ibid., 4 May 1878.

95 Williams, Eric, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago (London, 1964), 124.Google Scholar

96 San Fernando Gazette, 9 February 1889.Google Scholar

97 Hall, Douglas, Free Jutnaica, 1838–1865 (New Haven, 1959), 208–9Google Scholar. Cf. Nwulia, Moses D. E., The History of Slavery iii Mauritius and the Seychelles. 1810–1875 (Rutherford, N.J., 1981), 191.Google Scholar

98 Bolland, O. Nigel, “Reply to William A. Green's ‘The Perils of Comparative History’.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (01 1984), 122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

99 The phrase is from Roseberry, William, Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin, 1983), 109.Google Scholar