Justin Roberts

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Justin Roberts | Notes and Documents: Working between the Lines: Labor and Agriculture on Two Barbadian Sugar Plantations, 1796–97 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.3 | The History Cooperative

Notes and Documents

Working between the Lines: Labor and Agriculture on Two Barbadian Sugar Plantations, 1796–97

SUGAR plantations have dominated the historiography of the preemancipation Caribbean. According to the stereotype, sugar planters brought slaves from Africa in mass numbers and drove them to death in highly regimented gang labor in pursuit of a single cash crop. The major emphasis is usually on the harvest. This focus on reaping canes evokes images of wealth and death. Sugar plantations are often described as "factories in the field" or as "sugar-production machines" that transformed more and more of the islands' fields into cane land to pump out cash crops. Supposedly, no land was wasted on food; provisions were increasingly imported from North America or raised by the islands' small farmers. Some islands in particular were essentially one vast sugar complex. Planters not only drove their slaves beyond endurance but also destroyed the soil in pursuit of riches.¹

Elements of this image of sugar production are accurate for certain places and points in time but, like most stereotypes, it can become a caricature. As specialists such as J. R. Ward, B. W. Higman, and David Eltis have demonstrated, the details of cane cultivation and processing, the attention paid by planters to soil maintenance, and the extent to which an island or a plantation practiced a sugar monoculture varied significantly across time and landscape. Recognizing the overemphasis on sugar in the Caribbean, historians are now producing and calling for studies of coffee, cotton, tobacco, and indigo plantations, as well as livestock pens.² This burgeoning emphasis on the diversity of Caribbean production will undoubtedly build a better understanding of slavery, but to date only a few scholars have conducted close examinations of the variety of labor and production on sugar plantations themselves. Sugar slaves were not always growing sugar. To avoid generalizations about factories in the fields and about monoculture, scholars need to pay close attention to the daily details of labor and production and rethink the question, What did slaves do on sugar plantations?

Figure I

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