Describe 3 factors that facilitated the development of a Caribbean peasant population and the growth of the free village movement in the Caribbean towards the end of the 19th century.
Answers
Answer:
The West Indian peasant, because of the circumstances of his origin, can-
not be fitted neatly into conventional definitions of the peasant. He has no
long established "ties of tradition and sentiment" to the land which he con-
trols. He cannot be seen as the "rural dimension of old civilizatioris".2 The
West Indian community is a relatively young one and, moreover, no peasan-
try survived the establishment of the plantation and slave labour-based sugar
industry during the seventeenth century. Whatever elements of a peasantry
existed then — the yeoman farmers — quickly disappeared. The small settlers
sought new opportunities in North America as the plantation swallowed their
holdings; and the Negroes who escaped the estates and established settle-
ments in the bush and the mountains were always in danger of extermin-
ation by those who controlled the plantation.3
The only tenuous link, then, that can be established between the present-
day peasantry and the pre-1838 period is in the activity of the slaves as pro-
ducers of most of their own food, and even of surpluses, on land granted them
by their owners.4 In this role the slaves were partly peasant cultivators or,
as Mintz calls them, proto-peasants.5 But of course they neither controlled
the land nor their own time and labour.
Our peasantry then starts at emancipation in 1838. It comprises the ex-
slaves who after 1838 started small farms "on the peripheries of plantation
am n this paper the "West Indies" refers to the former British West Indies. The paper has been slightly revised since presentation at the Conference.
1W. A. Lewis, The Evolution of the Peasantry in the British West Indies, Colonial Office Pamphlet 656, 1936. p. 1.
2R. Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture, Chicago 1956, pp. 27-29.
3See V. T. Harlow, Barbados, 1624-1685, Oxford 1926; H. Merivale, Lectures on Colonies and Colonization, London 1841, pp. 75-6; S. Mintz, "The Question of Caribbean Peasantries: A Comment", Caribbean Studies, Vol. I, No. 3, pp. 32-4.
4See S. Mintz and D. C. Hall, "The Origins of the Jamaican Internal Marketing System",