Where emancipation in Hati was slave-led and violent, emancipation in the British Empire was bourgeois-led and peaceful; this led to a fundamentally different constellation of forces. And because the territory in question was an archipelago, it also allows us to appreciate the role of an extrasocial factor – that of land-population ratios.

The recently freed, as in Haiti, wanted in the main to become peasant smallholders. Besides the additional link in this context between landholding and suffrage, there is not much to add to their aims. We may add that the ideological core of the abolitionist movement, as distinct from the government which had carried out their policy aims, lent no small amount of assistance to them in this. Their power, like their aims, lied almost entirely in “exit” rather than “voice,” and in the strength of their solidarity. On islands with a more even gender ratio, they were more successful in their quest; and it is not unreasonable to surmise that the greater rates of household formation probably associated with that led to denser solidaristic ties.

The aim of the metropole was to make those emancipated into classical proletarians, that is, those who own and own only their labor power, and must work for wages to survive. Having assisted them in losing their chains, it sought to ensure that they had nothing else to lose either. Nor was this a betrayal of the principles upon which they had carried out their emancipation program – they were willing to carry it out holding as they did the belief that free labor could be as or more efficient, as well as being more moral, than unfree labor, given the continued existence of compulsions in an economic rather than political form.

The planters did not want proletarians; they wanted slaves. They were more familiar with the economic advantages of slavery; they also appreciated their social role as masters, the chance to extort sexual and other forms of unproductive labor, and management techniques built around direct coercion. But the metropole restricted them from imposing such direct coercion when it could, which was usually so (though competition between the two groups for control of local government was ongoing.) So they were willing to settle for proletarians. Aligned too with the planters were the dispossessed white population of the islands, organized into militias, to put down riots and often incidentally prone to forming spontaneous mobs themselves.

Thus the class alliances and aims were not unduly complicated; what were complicated were the means through which this could be pursued. The British wanted to preserve the planting class (or some equivalent) but was not willing to legally oblige masses to work for them. This resulted in a fundamental problem, relating to what has been dubbed in the literature the “Nieboer-Domar hypothesis.” Domar himself summarizes it thus [1]:

A simple economic model may sharpen the argument… and help to develop it further. Assume that labor and land are the only factors of production… and that land of uniform quality and location is ubiquitous. No diminishing returns in the application of labor to land appear; both the average and the marginal productivities of labor are constant and equal, and if competition among employers raises wages to that level (as would be expected), no rent from land can arise… In the absence of specific governmental action to the contrary… the country will consist of family-size farms because hired labor, in any form, will be either unavailable or unprofitable: the wage of a hired man or the income of a tenant will have to be at least equal to what he can make on his own farm; if he receives that much, no surplus (rent) will be left for his employer…. Suppose now that the government decides to create, or at least to facilitate the creation of, a non-working class of agricultural owners. As a first step, it gives the members of this class the sole right of ownership of the land… The next and final step to be taken by the government still pursuing its objective is the abolition of the peasants’ right to move. With labor tied to land or to the owner, competition among employers ceases… To recapitulate, the strong version of this hypothesis… asserts that of the three elements of an agricultural structure relevant here – free land, free peasants, and non-working landowners – any two elements but never all three can exist simultaneously. The combination to be found in reality will depend on the behavior of political factors – governmental measures – treated here as an exogenous variable.

Or as a prominent pro-slavery ideologist, looking back in disgust at the popular victories (where they were achieved), put it a little more coarsely [2]:

The West Indies, it appears, are  short of labor, as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a black man, by working about half an hour a day (such is the calculation), can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! Supply and demand, which science says should be brought to bear on him, have an uphill task of it with such a man. Strong sun supplies itself gratis, rich soil in those unpeopled, or half-peopled regions almost gratis; these are his “supply,” and half an hour a day, directed upon these, will produce pumpkin, which is his “demand.” The fortunate black man, very swiftly does he settle his account with supply and demand ; not so swiftly the less fortunate white man of those tropical localities. A bad case his, just now. He himself cannot work;[3] and his black neighbor, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help him. Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at his ease in the creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man’s “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane-crop cannot wait; still higher, till no conceivable opulence of cane-crop will cover such wages. In Demerara, as I read in the blue book of last year, the cane-crop, far and wide, stands rotting; the fortunate black gentlemen, strong in their pumpkins, having all struck till the “demand” rise a little.

The central agenda for the ruling class, then, was to resolve the trilemma by removing the possibility of free land, or by compromising the degree to which the freed could move easily. They pursued several methods of doing so: raising the prices of land or otherwise discouraging its purchase, targeted taxation, restricting emigration, and encouraging mass immigration, the latter of which was most successful.

These methods were not necessary everywhere, as some of the islands were more settled than others; indeed, some were almost completely settled, and some were as far as were amenable for sugar and coffee.  On the old-settlement islands, for whom change in sugar production over time cannot be attributed to extensional growth, the relationship between land availability and the health of plantation agriculture was relatively straightforward: Barbados, Antigua, and St. Kitts, which were abundant in labor, held steady; Nevis, Montserrat, and Jamaica, abundant in land, had their production cut 40% or more.[4]

Jamaica’s geography has been not merely quantitatively but qualitatively cited as a factor in the emergence of its peasantry, on account of its highlands; and on the various islands, peasant agriculture took root most strongly at higher elevations. This accords with theories emphasizing the “friction of distance” – hills being more frictional than lowlands – in determining the geographic distribution of non-dominated peoples and available opportunities to become them – see most prominently James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. Scott’s theory is meant to explain patterns existing prior to the modern state, however, so there is some frictional theoretical distance here as well.

if you’re thinking “this looks like a great place to get away from the world,” you’d be in good company

Where land existed to be taken, effort was made to restrict the ability to do so. The Colonial Office took steps to raise the price of Crown land, and planter-dominated colonial legislatures took steps to restrict the sale of property to the propertyless. These measures, however, were limited in their effects by the fall in land prices that had occurred in the preceding decade as the effects of the end of the slave trade began to have their effect on planter solvency, and by the willingness of dissenting churches, especially the Baptists, to purchase land for planned communities of the freed.

Governments also laid taxes upon land ownership to discourage smallholding, but the purpose of taxation could be a bit more subtle as well. If the laborer had a safety cushion, affording her the chance to risk unemployment, in terms of some land or high seasonal wages, taxation could reduce her again to the level of subsistence.Furthermore, if the smallholder was taxed in cash, she could be induced into the cash economy. Governor Grey of Jamaica outlined the reasons and aims of British policy thus[5]:

To make people work for wages… taxation should be so designed as to stimulate the indolent. Imports should not be taxed, nor should tax fall heavily on the well-to-do and prosperous, but rather on those living above bare subsistence.

Migration between the islands, no small amount of it seasonal, was a threat to planting interests on the higher-density isles. Attempts to restrict migration, either directly or by requiring year-long contracts, were not particularly successful, however, and generally cancelled out by the inducements that island of lighter population offered.[6]

Mass migration from other regions was sought out; initially from Africa, or indirectly so through the dumping of the cargo of captured slaving vessels onto Caribbean soil. Most of these workers left to return to Africa, however. What followed was mass recruitment of indentured servants from India to the islands with the greatest remaining potential for sugar cultivation, such as Trinidad. However, while this allowed for continued extensional growth, and may have been able to crowd out peasantification on some of the islands, it did not do so on the islands for which land was available, but not for sugar cultivation. So on at least some of the islands, such as Jamaica, “reconstituted peasantries” took root in considerable numbers.

[1] pp. 70-72 in Evsey Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” pp. 69-83 in Palmer, ed., The Worlds of Unfree Labor: From Indentured Servitude to Slavery. VT: Ashgate Publishing Company.
[2] Thomas Carlyle, the Nigger Question (so… yeah.)
[3] lol
[4] Stanley Engerman, “Economic Adjustments to the End of Slavery in the United States and British West Indies.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8(2)191-220. Comparison is annual production of sugar 1824-33 vs. 1839-46.
[5] quoted on p. 34 of Michaeline Critchlow, Negotiating Caribbean Freedom.
[6] See Dawn Marshall, Migration Within the Eastern Caribbean, 1835-1980 for extensive treatment of internal migration patterns during this period.