The chapter provides a transnational perspective on how the apprenticeship’s end caused new challenges for the free labor experiment, as British West Indian colonial economies faltered in the 1840s and former slaves asserted their rights as working people. In their pursuit of expanded liberty, black West Indians forced American antislavery to examine the limitations of a strict free labor ideology, and to envision the experiment’s success on other terms, as the issue of slavery moved to the center of national politics.

This chapter examines how free labor was adapted as a compelling argument in the antislavery Anglo-Atlantic. For English antislavery these strategies developed out of a need to show emancipation’s imperial commercial advantages, as parliamentary debates questioned whether former slaves would work upon emancipation. In the United States, free labor antislavery emerged from a burgeoning ideology that imbued labor with moral characteristics. Through the industriousness of black West Indians, abolitionists on either side of the Atlantic hoped to prove the moral rightness of emancipation, the capability of former slaves within democratic capitalism, and the benefits of free labor.

The chapter traces the project of reforming the Anglo-West Indies from early missionary efforts through the post-emancipation. Abolitionists’ assessments of moral reform in the British colonies served as a compelling argument of the experiment’s success. In the United States, influenced by the Great Awakening, morality, religious instruction, education, and spiritual uplift were appealing indicators on the success or failure of emancipation. Some American reformers journeyed to the West Indies to take part in this “civilizing mission.” But as I argue, freedpeople had their own perceptions of moral behavior, challenging the expectations of reformers in both England and America.

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.

Chapter 4 analyses the banishment and penal transportation of enslaved people in the British Caribbean. The first part of the chapter shows the links between punitive mobility and the management of colonial labour. Magistrates sentenced and resold enslaved runaways, rebels, and lawbreakers to colonies like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and St Thomas. They also instigated mass banishments and transportations following so-called conspiracies and plots, and revolts, including to British settlements and colonies in Honduras, Sierra Leone and Australia. Such sentencing became a key element of the larger question of legal reform, following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the reform of the ‘Bloody Code’ in England in the 1820s, and the amelioration of enslavement (c. 1823-38). The second part of the chapter constructs a detailed narrative of the penal transportation of a group of over one hundred enslaved rebels following the Barbados Rebellion of 1816, via Honduras to their final destination, Sierra Leone. It views their journey as an allegory for a slave voyage in reverse, analysing the layers of connection between and the multi-directional circulations associated with enslavement, imperial governmentality, penal transportation, and other forms of colonial bondage and repression.

This chapter focuses on the relationality been enslavement, punishment, and convict mobility in the French, Spanish and British empires in the Caribbean, into the 1870s, arguing for an interconnected approach to punitive European geopolitics. Following the Haitian Revolution and the closure of Spanish colonies to enslaved convicts from other polities, British judicial process used penal transportation to the distant colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. During the 1830s, however, they were closed off following the development of anti-transportation sentiments. At this time, Britain’s West Indian colonies had for some years been interested in the establishment of a penal colony in the Caribbean region. Anti-transportation ideas reignited these debates, and British Guiana and Trinidad each established remote, inland penal settlements, but only for locally convicted felons. The chapter notes that in discussions about the abolition of the slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century, pro-slavery campaigners justified it through the comparison of judicial enslavement and penal transportation. This provides important background for understanding the use of the language of enslavement more generally as a rhetorical device in broader debates about the abolition of transportation and its aftermath in the Caribbean.