EVOLUTION OF PLANTATION SOCIETY

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, slavery set the stage for the evolution of a political and social system in the Caribbean that was structured principally along race and class lines. However, the racial and class considerations coincided so closely with each other that something closely approximating a caste system developed in early Caribbean history. In this system an exclusive white owner-planter class dominated over darker-skinned races or classes—with the mixed (Mulatto) population just below the whites, and the majority black population (both freed and slaves) occupying the lowest rungs of the racial formation. This was the plantation system, which the Caribbean scholar George Beckford (1972) claimed was a peculiar institution that totally controlled all of economic, political, and social life within it and throughout the region.

Except for Haiti, whose black slave population won its independence from France through a revolutionary uprising (1791–1804), emancipation came earliest to the British Caribbean slaves (in 1834). The post-emancipation period introduced added complexities to the Caribbean racial and class social structures, which significantly altered cultural perspectives and social relationships. During this era, immigrant indentured labor was imported from as far away as Portuguese-controlled Madeira, China, and India, to replace black ex-slaves as manual labor on the plantations. The result was a historical shift from the typical white-black racial confrontation patterns to a persistent conflict situation between ethnicities: from black-Portuguese and black-Chinese confrontations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to an almost pervasive black-East Indian ethnic conflict situation throughout a wide variety of Caribbean territories, including Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, and Jamaica, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

It was also during this post-emancipation, indentured immigration period that the Caribbean middle classes rose to greater prominence. The original light-colored basis of their privileged classification shifted to include less rigid criteria, such as educational, occupational, and economic status. The bankruptcy of many white-owned plantations following the post-emancipation labor crises in the region led to a significant return migration of members of the dominant white classes back to Europe, paving the way for the upward mobility of a mixed group of largely colored and minimally black middle-class elements into the newly vacated seats of political power. By the latter part of the twentieth century, these middle classes (mostly the black and brown educated and professional elite) controlled the leadership positions of political parties and states throughout the region.

But the evolution of the middle-class elite into national leadership positions did not come about without constant, serious, and often deadly struggles, largely characterized by confrontations with the traditional white power structures. Struggles from below for greater democratic participation within a system that was closed to a majority black population, and towards political independence from European colonial control (objectives that were eventually realized only during the latter part of the twentieth century), were only some of the projects necessary to confront or modify the racial and class structures of domination in the Caribbean. But the realization of political power and independence by the national black and brown elite did not necessarily shatter the foundations of white domination throughout the region. Economic power was still in the hands of the expatriate white ownership classes even after political independence was won in the 1960s, and the Caribbean racial formations spawned by slavery and colonialism are still intact.

What makes the racial factor so pervasive and dominating despite persistent popular struggles (including violent revolution) directed against it throughout Caribbean history? The answer would seem to lie in the peculiar configurations of Caribbean social structure and political culture, and in the contradictions involved in the hegemonic power of middle-class political control.