By Anu Dev
When I was doing my CXC’s and chose to write 16 subjects, many persons thought that there was no point in doing subjects like history, for instance, since I’d already pretty much settled on going into medicine.
But I’d found the subjects interesting and just enjoyed history especially, since it allowed me to get a glimpse of how our societies have become what it has, in the Caribbean.
I also agreed with Marx’s point that the present can only be understood historically: everything is the consequence of something that has preceded it. While that may seem quite obvious, most of us seem to not follow its corollary.
That if we act in the present in ways that we believe to be the better way, we can actually “influence” the future. Sort of like creating the future.
But in my first year in med school, I had to chuckle a bit when I saw that one of the required classes (they’re all “required” incidentally) was “Caribbean Civilisation”. Quite a lot of my new friends found the going quite strenuous and unfamiliar… but to me it was quite familiar territory.
The professor, Dr John Campbell, chose as his foundational text, a book he’d written: Beyond Massa.
This deals with running of the sugar plantation Golden Grove in eastern Jamaica during the years 1770-1834. The setting and timeframe are both significant since at the time, Jamaica was the most profitable British colony in the Caribbean and yet there were pressures developing in England for the abolition of slavery, the “peculiar institution” from which the wealth from sugar was generated.
Most interestingly, Campbell used as his primary source of data the correspondence from the manager of the plantation, Simon Taylor and the absentee owner Chaloner Arcedeckne. These letters are on the web… and they are fascinating. But what made the work interesting was his use of ideas from the contemporary Human Resource Model (HRM) of managing workers.
He placed emphasis on the social interactions between the enslaved and the managers rather than the now conventional historiographical focus on the economic aspects of plantation society.
He emphasises that there was a two-way negotiated space where the enslaved people had more ‘agency’ than previous studies had accredited to them: they were subjects and not just objects.
The study also contended that the differences between the West African form of slavery, from which the slaves were brought and Caribbean chattel slavery were crucial in the new dyadic master-slave relationship.
In the West African form, the slave was still considered a person while under the chattel slavery system; the slave was completely dehumanised and considered “property”. And it is because the enslaved people were accustomed to this more benign concept of slavery that HRM techniques could work. There could be opportunities for bargaining and negotiation. Taking the logic to its denouement, the author posits a third and controversial thesis – that the enslaved people did not want to end slavery itself, they simply “wanted to change the tone of British West Indian slavery”.
The historiography on the institution of West Indian slavery was initially dominated by British writers who focused on the “civilising” mission of the enterprise for the African slaves who were not considered fully human. This is our textbooks.
This perspective was challenged by historians such as Eric Williams, who later became the first PM of TT. He proposed a more Marxian, economic based approach which stressed the role of slavery in laying the material foundation of Britain’s industrial revolution.
We don’t hear much of this. Now Campbell offers another perspective. It’s worth checking out.
Look how I’m running on about that “boring and irrelevant” subject – history.
But trust me; it’s as important to your health (mental) as medicine.