Let's see if I get any comments on this

This is the first draft of the introduction to a monograph on Creole nationalism. I'd love comments.

The celebrated formulation of Lord Harris, governor of Trinidad in the mid-nineteenth century, that ‘a race has been freed but a society has not been formed’ summarises the dilemma in which the colonised people of the British West Indies found themselves in the period between the abolition of slavery in 1834 and the labour rebellions of a century later which ushered in the era of decolonization.[1] Undoubtedly, the abolition of slavery meant that persons who had previously been property became individuals with rights, obligations, and opportunities. Equally, the colonies that constituted the geographical region called the British West Indies had never been intended as the home of a nation or nations.

Yet the residents of Britain’s West Indian colonies had common languages, shared histories, shared geographical spaces, all those things that would seem to be constitutive of common societies, and, consequently, of nations and peoples. Lord Harris, who had so pompously declared that the formerly enslaved population had not yet jelled into a society, was one of the administrators responsible for overseeing the complication of British West Indian social arrangements through the importation of large numbers of indentured labourers from India.

During the era of slavery, from the 1620s to the 1830s, British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean had come to be made up predominantly of people from two distinct geographical regions: Europe and West Africa. Europeans constituted the ruling class, but were also to be found in subordinate social categories. Africans constituted the ruled, enslaved population, though some, from the earliest period of colonization on, had escaped slavery either through manumission or marronage. Nine months after the first African slave woman arrived in the Caribbean, the first mulatto was born, beginning the development of an intermediate caste, derived from master and slave, and, unsurprisingly, largely identifying with the former rather than the latter.

After slavery was abolished, in some colonies such as Jamaica, the former slaves rapidly indicated a desire to work on their own accounts rather than on the plantations which were the sites of their enslavement, while in others, such as British Guiana and Trinidad, the existence of large undeveloped areas suitable for the cultivation of sugar cane meant that a tied labour force was seen as necessary for development. In response to these needs of the ruling class, workers were imported from Europe, Madeira, China, and, overwhelmingly, India.[2] Of course, this diversification of populations did not occur equally in all colonies. In most, the population did not change much. In a few – notably in Trinidad and British Guiana – East Indians were to become sizable parts of the population.

The question, from the beginning, was simply did that population constitute a people? This was followed by the subordinate question: what kind of nation was it? The answers to these questions continue to preoccupy us today.

But we could also approach these questions from another angle. Slavery and colonization put human beings of diverse origins into a common geographic space. Their interactions created all the elements of a shared culture, deriving from the communities from which these people were drawn. As a fact of that shared culture, all but a few of these subject people were subordinates or subalterns, defined and controlled by an outside power. Or, to use the language of the passage from Machiavelli’s Prince quoted at the head of this chapter, under the “barbarian domination” of that power.[3] Did that domination convert the subjects into a nation? And, if so, what kind of nation?

Asked in this way, answering these questions require that we investigate how the colonised people of the British West Indies came to define themselves, their place in the world, and how and by whom power should be exercised over them. Obviously, given a multiplicity of experiences, and a social structure that while unequal and inequitable was not simply bipolar, there were to be a variety of definitions.

We should begin, properly, with the point of view of the coloniser. From the perspective of the British, the West Indian colonies after slavery were little more than backwaters of empire. While they had been of central importance during the eighteenth century, over the course of the nineteenth century they were overshadowed by the much more lucrative empire of India and the expansion of colonial rule into Africa. Furthermore, the bulk of the population consisted of persons of African descent, and the burgeoning racism of nineteenth century British imperialists meant that such people were going to be considered inherently inferior. Marginal the West Indian colonies might be, but the fact that they were populated by persons of wholly or partially African origin meant that they could not simply be let go.

Nineteenth century white attitudes towards the black subject populations of the Caribbean and the Americas more generally, furthermore, were conditioned by one major event of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: the Haitian Revolution. The successful uprising of the slaves of St Domingue, and their achievement of independence as the nation of Haiti, accompanied by a thorough and proper vengeance taken on their quondam owners, made white slave-owners nervous about their necks. They were aware of the barbarity of their dominance over the enslaved population and aware that the slaves, however docile they might appear, were not happy at their condition.

From the perspective of the slaves, they lived in a world in which they were subject to arbitrary control by people who used their obvious physical differences as a means of controlling them. We can examine the history of the British West Indies in a number of ways, but few are better than consideration of the means by which the enslaved population resisted, fled from, and fought against their enslavement. Slave resistance, marronage, and outright revolt were fundamental elements of the processes by which West Indian societies came to be formed. So too were the ways in which slaves and their owners adapted to each other, a process which involved significant acculturation on both sides.

The fact that master and slave shared a common language, and developed a common culture, however, should not blind us to the fact that the social, economic, and political structure of the British West Indies was one of racial domination by persons of European descent over persons of African descent. The intermediate, Afro-European, caste oscillated between identification with the European masters and identification with the African oppressed.

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[1] Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago; New York: A & B Publishers Group, 2002 [1962], 96.

[2] In the case of Trinidad, even before the abolition of slavery labour was sought from sources other than Africa (including black slaves from other colonies); the first Chinese were imported into the island in 1807. (Williams 2002, 74-76.)

[3] We might also translate Machiavelli’s phrase “barbaro dominio” as “barbarous dominion”, and no better summary of the relation between slave-owner and slave in the Caribbean exists.