The Caribbean has one defining and unifying element, the fact that the nations of the region share their colonial and economic histories. A variety of studies, as this essay shall reveal, indicate the influence of three major colonial powers in the region, first Spain, then France, and later or simultaneously, Britain. The conquest of the region, the author of this essay further articulates, was related to the potential for massive sugar production that would feed the markets of Europe. Consequently, the region boomed with plantation farming, which, as many would anticipate, came along with the need for free or cheap labor that came from enslaved Africans. This essay notes three major arguments; slavery, gendered roles, and peasantry in relation to the Caribbean, and specifically Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. While there could be differences (relative to the analyst), this paper finds and argues that the three countries share a history in the sense of the three aspects that it analyzes. Most of the analysis, as revealed, relates to the institution and development of slavery that attracted racial, gender, and class divisions.
Colonial Rule: Slavery
Only so much exists in comparing and contrasting Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico in terms of their colonial rule. In fact, any differences are forcefully stated, especially when one considers that Spain first administered the three countries, later France and England, all of which significantly established and bolstered the institution of slavery because of the need for labor for the sugar industry of the time. The Caribbean, along with a host of other colonies, was England’s central overseas empire (Mintz, 2012). However, Columbus claimed most of the Islands, including Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico for Spain earlier than the rest of the colonialists. For a significant part of the 16 th century, literature reports that Spain controlled the region. Importantly, for over a century after 1942, the Caribbean region remained a largely Spanish dominated sea (Mintz, 2012, p. 132).
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Nevertheless, other European powers, especially England and France, started showing their interests in the region. In a strict sense of argument, it is implausible to consider Britain until after 1707, following the union of Scotland and England (Stinchcombe, 1995). Britain settled in Montserrat, Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, and St Kitts. The French developed their colonies in Guadeloupe and Martinique at around the same time that the British settled in the region. The Caribbean came under the control of European nations to join Spain, which literary discovered the region, and formed the idea of the West Indies (Mintz, 2012).
The Europeans moved to Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rica, as they did to the rest of the Caribbean in search of wealth. Mintz (2012) argues, “For Europeans bent on investing in the New World plantations, sugar seemed like an inexhaustible source of great wealth” (p. 46). According to Handler (1997), the foreign powers attempted to grow a variety of crops that they would sell in their homelands. One of the most important crop, one that defines the history of Caribbean colonization, is sugarcane. Sugarcane, a foreign crop to the three countries, would be used in the manufacture of rum and other products that were in high demand in Europe. Because of its importance, the crop stimulated the growth of other products, including the fact that it was a sweetener for other products, made it one of the most important crops of the time. While the sugar was alien to the region, the Caribbean, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Haiti, in this case, was the most valuable for its production, which is why many rivals were attracted considering that most of the powers in Europe were concerned with the improvement of their economies.
The sudden rise in the demand for the growth of sugarcane resulted in the growth of the demand for labor, and the colonialists in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Haiti, resorted to cheap labor, which they would obtain almost easily from West Africa. European powers, first Spain, and later others had moved to the region mainly because each of them wanted to compete for political supremacy. The planters of the region became significantly reliant on the enslaved Africans and their descents, which at the time was an inferior race around the world. In Haiti, for example, Mintz argues, “…plantation societies like Saint Domingue, built on massed slave labor, lacked many of the institutions that grow around the activities of free people,” (p. 97). The cited quote pinpoints the fact that planters in the region were disinterested in setting slaves free, and that they focused on using their free and cheap labor. In each of the nations in the context of this paper, the slaves were subject to significant harsh treatments, which is now considered inhumane on the principle that keeps ringing in the ears of race enthusiasts that Africans, regardless of their continental origin, were inferior. The reliance of the sugar industry in the three countries resulted in a significant change in the demographics of the region—the populations changed to include a surge in the rise of Africans, which to date, are the majority race in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico (Handler, 1997). In the immediacy of slavery, as read from the history of the countries, it ‘forged’ a reputation of Africans as ‘strong’ people, adaptable to different climatic conditions.
Colonial lines in the three countries did not follow different discourse, especially because they shared colonial masters in the name of Britain, Spain, and France. It is important to also note that, as discussed, colonialism led to the rise of class differentiations in the three nations, which treated the Black race at the bottom of a three-class tire that gave most of the power to the Whites and a group of other races at the bottom (Handler, 1997).
Women: Markets
Gendered roles in the Caribbean can best be understood in the context of slavery and the sugar industry. The story of women in the three countries can never be separated since the colonial masters in them did not have a distinctive treatment of women and slaves. As did men, the women in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Haiti were subjected to hard laboring on sugar plantations. For example, Mintz (2012) states that, “… though slavery meant abusive treatment on both male and female victims…it was equally understood that men were physically stronger than women. It was equally understood that women would be assaulted sexually and be made to serve as concubines,” (pp. 56—57). The cited quote indicates that while women were treated the same as men in many aspects, at times, they were excused from other forms of hard labor because they compensated such preferential treatment through sexual exploitation. In relation to the sugar industry, however, according to Dubois (2005), women were required to weed or pick grass from the cane farms, and they were forced to ensure that they completed their daily chores. In the event that they did not finish what they were supposed to handle each day, the women were forced to work under the moon, and at times, they were harassed through beating, raping, and other forms of mistreatment. Apart from weeding, enslaved women conducted manure carrying and cane-holding tasks on the cane farms—the tasks required significant energy levels, and the managers of the farms used whips to stimulate hard work from the women.
Manual labor was not the only task that women were supposed to do on the cane farms in the Caribbean, especially in the three countries under study in this paper. One notes from a critical review of literature that while men farmed, women were actively involved in marketing the agricultural produce (Dubois, 2005). Markets and marketing, were a notable element of life in the three nations, and women in Haiti, for example, engaged in marketing activities in Port-au-Prince. While the colonialists focused on foreign trade-the production of commercial crops for sale back in their motherlands, women dealt a great deal with internal trade (Mintz, 2012). The women engaged in wholesaling and retailing, which has evolved to include some small volumes of imported products in recent years. Women in the three countries mainly involved in the sale of food and alcoholic produce while they left the trade in other products, such as crafts, livestock, and coffee to the men.
One point worth special recognition and reference is the fact that women engaged in marketing activities both within rural and urban places in the three countries. They sold their products in mini-shops and along roads (Stinchcombe, 1995). The women were forced to travel long distances on foot and sometimes on carts depending on the volume of products that they wished to sell or buy as well as their financial capacity. Most importantly, the class divisions that slavery had created meant that some of the women engaged in better trade than others did. Some of the women bought and stocked agricultural products in anticipation of a rise in the market prices. However, most of them were concerned with selling their products as soon as possible so that they could adequately generate capital and related monies to pay their suppliers—this practice had origins in West Africa, and Mintz terms it as Gold Coasting (Mintz, 2012 p.131).
Women survived in the markets because of their ability to establish long-standing relationships with their customers, especially because new customers did not get the best deals at least when compared to the regular ones. The women of the three countries spoke, and they still do, a great deal of creole with very limited abilities in other languages because they were mostly illiterate. The educational accomplishments of women in the region did not deter them from understanding the profit and cost mechanism of trade, which is why they strived to control the costs of their businesses (Stinchcombe, 1995). Moreover, women often attempted to introduce their daughters into the trade by bringing them to the marketplaces. The women found their engagement in the markets one of the ways through which they could relieve of domestic engagement and slavery.
Peasantry: Race
The peasantry in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico cannot be separated from slavery, and the treatment of Africans by the White colonialists—a distinctive explanation of the discourse would be interesting. Slavery, as reported earlier in this essay, created racial classes in the three countries with the Blacks at the bottom of the class continuum. Slaves in the three nations were not free to engage in beneficial agriculture, and that they were only allowed to do once they were free from their masters (Stinchcombe, 1995). While it was never easy for the Whites to free their slaves, the few who managed to break away from enslavement embarked on the peasantry, where they mainly practiced subsistence agriculture.
There is nothing in literature that sets apart the history of peasantry in Haiti, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Notably, peasantry cannot be compared with the plantation farming that the colonialists practiced in the three countries. While some of the peasants engaged in small-scale commercial agriculture, most of them did not have the luxury of doing so majorly because they owned small portions of land and applied poor methods of farming, which could not compare with that of the colonialists. Furthermore, it can be established from Mintz (2012), that the peasants were majorly affected by their racial and socioeconomic status because they were originally slaves. The cultural backgrounds of the peasants in the three nations may differ primarily because of the differences in their colonial backgrounds, but they are similar in the sense that they involved the low-class ex-slaves.
References
Dubois, P. (2005). Avengers of the new world . Harvard University Press.
Handler, J. S. (1997). Escaping slavery in a Caribbean plantation society: marronage in Barbados, 1650s-1830s. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids , 71 (3-4), 183-225.
Mintz, S. W. (2012). Three ancient colonies: Caribbean themes and variations (Vol. 8). Harvard University Press.
Safa, H. (2005). The matrifocal family and patriarchal ideology in Cuba and the Caribbean. Journal of Latin American Anthropology , 10 (2), 314-338.
Stinchcombe, A. L. (1995). Sugar island slavery in the age of enlightenment: the political economy of the Caribbean world . Princeton University Press.
