Notes on Mintz: Slavery, Forced Labor and the Plantation System

Nearly all Caribbean slaves were allocated for needs of large-scale agriculture, especially for production of subtropical commodities: sugar, coffee, and spices. Slavery was totally bound up in the spread of European military and colonial power. For the slave, the past provided symbolic and material resources to draw upon, and this creative process had a two-way character, which was especially manifest in music. According to Ralph Ellison: “American culture was, even before the official founding of the nation, pluralistic; and it was the African’s origin in cultures in which art was highly functional which gave him an edge in shaping the music and dance of the nation.” “When speaking of African-American cultures, we speak of disturbed pasts; the glory of African-Americana inheres in the durable fiber of humanity.” (Mintz)

A wide range of racial dialogues can be found across the 50 islands of the Antilles. Perception of race differences by the majority, as seen in the United States, has not functioned the same way in the Caribbean, where problems of race have been embedded in wider questions about colonial exploitation.

Three crudest yet most important ways in which Caribbean politics differ from North America: 1) colonialism of region 2) smallness of its societies 3) predominance of nonwhites

The smallness of these societies and the distance between them have always mitigated against an integrated economic or political development, even in the face of commonly felt needs.

Their frontiers is the islands were carefully closed to free men whenever possible, to prevent ‘uncontrolled development.’ Spain saw no effective challenge to its dominance in the Caribbean until 1625. The fallout of this first unchecked Spanish phase of colonialism was an almost complete destruction of the native population and the establishment of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The metropolises on the Caribbean islands were not only ports of trade, but centers of a particular form of agro-industrial enterprise.  

Mintz notes several important facts of Caribbean slavery:

1)    Caribbean slavery shared much with other parts of the colonial New World, but much less with other forms of slavery. Primary function was to be manual laborers engaged in production in excess of consumption, various market commodities.

2)    Slavery was an answer to a felt need for labor. There was abundant land and a severe labor scarcity

3)    There were many periods where slavery and other forms of labor coercion were scarcely distinguishable

4)    Caribbean history is mostly African but also yellow, red, brown and white history

5)    Servile resistance took many forms

Bibliography

Eltis, D. & Richardson, D., 2010. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Yale University Press.

Mintz, S.W., 1988. Caribbean Transformations, Columbia University Press.