RACE, LABOUR AND THE COLONIAL STATE IN ST. KITTS-NEVIS, 1897-1922

The defining role of race in determining the pattern of labour relations in the Commonwealth Caribbean is an acknowledged but often marginalised subject in the study of the evolution of work cultures and labour relations in the region. Marxist and non-Marxist literature alike has generally portrayed the industrial arena in the Commonwealth Caribbean as a confrontation between opposed classes, slave owners and a servile population of slaves, planters and freed labourers, capitalists and workers. The racial distinction between the two social groups has usually been treated as incidental to the conflict. Lloyd Best, in one of the most incisive discussions of labour and industrial relations in the region, "A Biography of Labour", directly mentions the problem of race only twice, firstly in explaining the success of a relatively small number of whites in successfully maintaining a system of black slavery as "seasoned" labourers of African descent "came to regard blackness and association with their home country as marks of inferior status and rank ...," and, secondly, to quote Eric Williams' description of the colonial government's land policy as a system in which "land ownership was to be retained in white hands and it was to be made as difficult as possible for black people to own land."¹

The significance, if not the primacy of race, has received greater recognition in more recent writing on labour relations in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Kelvin Singh, in the preface to his historical study Race and Class Struggles in a Colonial State: Trinidad 1917-1945, notes that:

the historical experiences of American and Caribbean societies from the time of Columbus’ voyages of discovery has been one or racial conquest of non-Europeans by Europeans and, wherever the indigenous peoples were not practically exterminated, the subsequent institutionalization of White domination ... over native or imported non-White races ... Here the ruling class was also the ruling race.²

The prime agent in the institutionalisation of racial domination by European colonisers has been the Imperial state. At the local level, the colonial state becomes, in itself, the single most important instrument of racial domination, maintaining and regulating the industrial system through which the labour product of non-European labourers is expropriated by European proprietors and enforcing the racial codes which govern colonial society.

The central role of the state in shaping and regulating industrial relations between employers and workers is widely recognised. As Robert Miles expressed it, "the state has a central role in so far as it guarantees the reproduction of those relations of production by intervening in not only political and ideological but also in economic relations."³ But the state is not a neutral observer for it is subject to the preponderant influence of the dominant social groups, principally the employers, whose political power is largely derived from their direct control of the economy.⁴ The role of the state becomes even more pronounced in the colonial setting where the state must first create the conditions for the emergence of a labouring class through the direct alienation of land from potential labourers, though fiscal policies which compel potential labourers to seek cash employment, or by providing the legislative conditions for the direct expropriation not only of the labour product of the labourer but also, in some cases, of the person of the labourer. In the case of the Caribbean, however, the racial difference between employer and labourer made race a significant, in not the leading, determinant in how the system of industrial relations was shaped and regulated by the state.

In the British Caribbean, where plantation slavery had already created a servile labour force, the emancipation of the slaves made the regulation and punishment of the labourers a direct function of the colonial state. This function was exercised regardless of the prevailing resource conditions, partially open as in Jamaica and British Honduras, or closed as in Barbados or St. Kitts-Nevis.⁵

The problem of labour control in the post-emancipation British Caribbean was recognised long before the abolition of slavery. As early as 1832, Henry George Grey, under-secretary of state for the Colonies, surmised that the "great problem to be solved in drawing up any plan for the emancipation of our slaves is to devise some mode of inducing them, when relieved from the fear of the Driver and his whip, to undergo the regular continuous labour which is indispensable in carrying on the production of sugar."⁶

But the debate in Britain over slave emancipation in the British Caribbean was shaped primarily by considerations, not of economics, but of race. The "whip of hunger" was not considered to be either an efficient or a sufficient mechanism to promote industrial discipline among the newly emancipated African populations of the British Caribbean. Grey therefore proposed to give the African labourer a rational incentive to labour by introducing a system of taxation on land owned by small settlers which would compel them to work for wages in order to pay the tax.⁷ Thomas Holt’s magisterial study The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 helps to demonstrate the centrality of race in the British debate over slave abolition. British Colonial Office officials, in devising the system of apprenticeship as a transitional stage between slavery and "full" freedom, were actuated by the fear that Adam Smith’s providential "invisible hand", which dictated that enlightened self-interest would ensure that people work in order to gratify their desires and enrich themselves, did not operate in the case of African workers as it did for Europeans. Henry Taylor, one of the Colonial Office officials who participated in developing the British plan for slave abolition, expressed his belief that, without some method of "compulsion", the countryside in British Caribbean colonies like Jamaica would become:

scenes of savage sloth, unstimulated by the motive of human nature in a cultivated state, unactuated by opinion, the great regulator of civilized societies, and perhaps interrupted only by such broils and acts of violence as idleness and the ardour the Negro temperament might give birth to ...⁸

In the century following emancipation, the ideological framework for the debate on the labour problem in the British Caribbean was shaped by racial perceptions on the capacity of non-European and, in particular, African populations to operate within a modern capitalist industrial system. It is a debate that is well captured in the magnum opus of that highly touted British colonial civil servant, Sir Sidney Olivier, entitled White Capital and Coloured Labour. In a chapter entitled "The Idleness of the African", Sidney Olivier outlines the racial argument against African labour. He writes:

In the first place, the European workman works six days a week, and if his conditions are fortunate, nine hours a day ... not primarily from virtue, but from necessity ... The African, working primarily for precisely the same motives of necessity, and not from industrial virtue, works much less because so much less toil will give him what he wants ... The total output of social utility produced by the civilised worker is very much greater on the average than that of the African, but the latter is not trained nor disposed to the production of surplus value, he does not care to produce, and his circumstances do not compel him to produce much more than is required for his own maintenance.

This argument is further buttressed by the observation, as Olivier points out, that the African labourer, in or outside of Africa, does not have an industrial civilisation or an industrial culture. Olivier continues:

But we have to consider the further fault alleged against the African that when working for wages he has no industrial probity. Just as - because need and the industrial servitude of civilised proletariats have never drilled him into their mechanical habits of labour - he has no instinct of working continuously or automatically, so he has nothing to produce in him the industrial conscience that call on the worker to give "fair" work for "fair" pay.⁹

While not himself sharing all of these common racial prejudices, Olivier does speak of the lack of "industrial probity" of the African worker in the British Caribbean. Noting that the "African is a born trader" he argued that the "joy of getting the best of a bargain was ingrained" in the emancipated African who does as little work as possible for his pay. The end of slavery meant that the African labourer was no longer motivated to work by the two driving mechanisms which he had long become accustomed to, namely "the category of force which he recognised and respected, and the category of affection, particularly family affection, so that the slave regarded himself as a member of his owner’s family."¹⁰ No longer bounded by physical sanction or driven by social and familial obligations, the emancipated African had no reason to be a good worker.

In these circumstances, the colonial state stepped into the breach and became the arbiter of employment relations and the agency which enforced industrial discipline within the ranks of the agricultural proletariat. One of the prime responsibilities of the colonial state in the British Caribbean was to ensure that the recommendations of the infamous "Queen’s Advice" were implemented and that the African labourer was carefully instructed that:

the prosperity of the Labouring Class, as well as of all other Classes, depends ... upon their working for Wages, not uncertainly or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at the times when their labour is wanted and for so long as it is wanted...¹¹

State Institutions and Labour Relations in St. Kitts-Nevis: The Legislature, the Law and the Magistracy

In 1878, in keeping with the constitutional recommendations of the Colonial Office, the planter assemblies of St. Kitts and Nevis voted to be replaced by wholly nominated legislative councils. Both island councils were amalgamated in 1882 when the two islands were united into a single administrative unit or presidency as part of the Leeward Islands Federation. The presidential legislative council consisted of an equal number of official and unofficial nominated members who were all appointed by the colonial governor. The unofficial nominated members of the legislative council were invariably drawn from the predominantly white planter and mercantile classes. The new constitution also provided for an executive council which formed an advisory body for the governor on legislative and administrative matter. The executive council was made up of the most senior government officials and the most important current or former unofficial members of the legislative council.¹² In 1897, the unofficial members of the St. Kitts-Nevis legislative council were Edward G. Todd, the white attorney for the single largest absentee estate holding in St. Kitts; Joseph Briggs, the principal white planter in Nevis; William Napier and C.G. Greaves, white owners of small and medium sized estates in St. Kitts and Nevis respectively; J.R. Gould, George Horne, and Andrew Munro, white merchants in St. Kitts; Thomas Liburd and James Manchester, the leading coloured planters of St. Kitts and Nevis respectively, and S.L. Horsford, a black Antiguan who was one of the principal merchants in St. Kitts. The unofficial members of the Executive council were Joseph Briggs, Edward Todd, Benjamin S. Davis, the head of the most important local white planter family in St. Kitts, and G.J. Evelyn, the head of an old and respected white planter family in Nevis.¹³ Their dominance in the legislature of the presidency ensured that the industrial policy of the state was strongly influenced by the employer class.

Labour relations in St. Kitts and Nevis were regulated by the Masters and Servants Act of 1849. This legislation, which was passed by the colonial assembly of St. Kitts on 9 April 1849, regulated labour relations in the territory until 1922 when it was replaced by an updated Masters and Servants Ordinance. This contract legislation was not repealed until 1938 following the labour disturbances which affected St. Kitts and most of the British Caribbean during the late 1930s. The declared purpose of the original Act as stated in the preamble, was the "securing of the continuous labour" which "greatly tends to the advantage as well of employers of labour as of labourers themselves." The Act applied to all employment relationships and provided that any labourer or employed worker who had entered a contract, signed or unsigned, by commencing work with an employer and who withdrew his or her labour before the termination of the contract would be guilty of a criminal offence. The labourer could be taken before the courts by the employer for "breach of contract" and, if found guilty, would be sentenced to a fine not exceeding 50/- or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding one month. In the absence of a written agreement, the Act deemed all non-agricultural contracts to be one calendar month in duration and six days of nine hours each in the case of agricultural labourers.¹⁴ The law was frequently resorted to by employers. In one four year period, 1916 to 1919, there was an average of 169 cases brought annually by employers with almost a 50% conviction rate. Another 43% of these cases were dismissed for want of prosecution suggesting that the threat of prosecution was considered a sufficient goad in the hands of employers. In the last year of the Act, 1921 the number of cases brought under the Act rose as high as 1009.¹⁵

The enforcement of the law lay in the hands of the district magistrates of the presidency who were appointed by the governor and, by virtue of their judicial position, were nominated as official members of the presidential legislature. The senior district magistrate in St. Kitts in 1897 was Francis Wigley, a native white official whose father had formerly been an administrator of the presidency. The Wigley’s, while not planters themselves, were closely related to the leading planter families on the island including the Davis family. Francis Wigley’s son, William Wigley, succeeded him to the position of senior magistrate. The other district magistrate in St. Kitts, Captain Archibald Roger, was from a white planter family which owned the 2372 acre Wingfield estate, one of the largest in the island. In Nevis, Joseph Briggs, the leading planter, had been the senior magistrate until his replacement by Robert Roden, a European merchant who had been involved in the import trade in St. Kitts since the 1840s.¹⁶ The magistrates, themselves employers of labour or the relatives of employers, saw their role as maintaining order and upholding civic virtue and industrial discipline.

A prime instrument utilised by the colonial government and the legislature to promote industrial discipline was fiscal policy. In St. Kitts-Nevis, as in much of the British West Indies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bulk of government revenue was "derived almost entirely from import duties."¹⁷ Of the total revenue of a little over £49,500 collected by the presidential administration in 1896, £25,074, or around 50%, came from import duties.¹⁸ As late as 1922, the Leeward Islands governor, Sir Eustace Fiennes, urged that a poll tax be levied on the labouring population in the colony arguing that every person between the ages of eighteen and sixty five who had "earning power should pay some form of taxation, as it is an incentive to work and tends to raise the standard of character."¹⁹ Reservations within the ranks of the Colonial Office about the political repercussions of such a plan deterred the introduction of such a tax.

The leading institutions of the state in St. Kitts-Nevis were guided by the concerns and interests of the predominantly white employing class, particularly the planters, who were determined to secure continuous labour from the labouring population and sought to promote among them the practice of working for six days a week as a proper industrial virtue.

The Regulation of Labour Relations

The social and racial perceptions of the leading officials within the colonial state apparatus as well as the official and unofficial members of the colonial legislature was clearly enunciated in relation to the social issues which were of utmost concern to the labouring population; education and land settlement. In relation to the former, the colonial administrator in 1897, T. Risely Griffith, opined:

As to the general question of educating indiscriminately the negro classes ... a preponderating percentage of the negro classes are absolutely spoilt by the smattering of reading and writing which the present system of education involves. The negro child, if a boy, the moment he knows how to read and write is imbued with the opinion that field work is beneath him and that such labour is undignified. He desires to become anything else but a manual agriculturalist. If a female, it grows into the belief ... that field work is utterly beneath them and that even domestic service is humiliating and they attain a position which is untenable from their own view and end in becoming worthless.²⁰

The question of land settlement which was discussed by the legislative council following the labour disturbances in February, 1896, evoked the conclusion that sugar production was indispensable to the well-being of the colony and that nothing should be done which would threaten the survival of the sugar industry. Edward Todd, the chief spokesperson on the legislature for the planting community, proclaimed that: "the chimerical idea ... that small industries will render the labourer independent of estate work should be dismissed from the mind altogether."²¹ Magistrate Francis Wigley, in agreement with his fellow legislator, declared that estate production of sugar was the only suitable industry for St. Kitts and pointed to the impoverishment of the largely peasant society of Nevis.²² The labour policy of the colonial state, reflecting the common belief that the estate sugar production was essential to the well-being of the economy, was directed to guaranteeing a regular and continuous labour supply for the sugar estates.

In keeping with the prevailing doctrine in British labour law and employment practices, colonial labour policy was marked by a steady hostility to any attempt by workers to combine and press their collective demands for improved wages and working conditions. Such efforts were commonly deemed to be in "restraint of trade" or to be evidence of a "criminal conspiracy" against their employers and in violation of the public good. Up to the first three decades of the twentieth century, there was no legislation in the Leeward Islands colony providing for the legal operation of trade unions but this silence of the law did not make trade unions illegal. However, in 1916, in response to the efforts to create a labour union in St. Kitts, the presidential legislature passed the Trades and Labour Unions (Prohibition) Ordinance which received three readings on the same day that it was introduced and was passed into law by a unanimous vote of the legislature. The Ordinance imposed a fine of 50/- or a sentence or six months imprisonment on any person who was involved in the formation of a trade or labour union, received or solicited subscriptions on behalf of such a body, or printed or distributed any communication informing persons about the formation of any union or combination of workers. The possession of books or documents about trade unions was made a criminal offence under the law.²³

The ideological opposition of the colonial government and the employer class to combination by workers was not accompanied by a similar opposition to combinations among employers themselves. On at least three occasions in the post-emancipation history of the islands, the wages of workers were reduced by open collusion between the planters. In 1846, following the passage of the Sugar Duties Act, the collective decision to reduce the wages of male agricultural workers from 1/- to 10d. per day was taken at an open air public meeting of the planters.²⁴ In 1885, another combination of planters publicly decided on increasing the size of tasks to be performed for the current wage rates and in 1895 the rate for cutting a ton of cane was reduced from 8d to 6d at another public meeting of planters. In 1896, following the labour disturbances and riots of that year, an absentee planter and chairman of the St. Kitts-Nevis branch of the West India Committee, E. Luxmore Marshall, instructed the Committee’s local representative, E.G. Todd, to advise the local planting community that:

In view of the organised riots and strikes for higher wages which have recently occurred, it seems desirable that proprietors should organise themselves for mutual protection and resistance to unjust demands on the part of labourers.²⁵

Mr. Benjamin Davis in response to Marshall’s appeal called on the local planters to "form themselves into a Union, and to meet each other once every week."²⁶ Marshall’s proposals were publicly debated in the pages of the local newspapers and formally discussed at a meeting of planters but it was never formally implemented due to opposition to the idea from the smaller estate owners who wanted the flexibility to pay above or below the going rate.

Despite the low wages and the abundance of labour in the presidency, the employing class and the government were opposed to labour emigration when such emigration threatened to increase wage rates. The high levels of working class emigration which marked the last years of the nineteenth century were at first met with a sanguine response. Andrew Munro, a member of the presidential legislature, in his testimony to the Norman Commission attributed the labour disturbance of 1896 to high levels of unemployment and described the unemployed in the island of St. Kitts as "a constant menace to the public peace." He concluded that the labour problem faced in the island was not "one of scarcity but of oversupply" and advocated the introduction of a "system of assisted emigration" in order to "relieve the island of its surplus population."²⁷ Emigration in the second decade of the twentieth century exhibited a sharp rise increasing from 2850 in 1913 to 5519 by 1920.²⁸ The highly visible exodus of labourers created increasing alarm in the ranks of employers. In 1910, the Agricultural and Commercial Society, the main professional body of the planting and mercantile sector, submitted a resolution to the executive council noting the "large scale exodus of the labouring people to Costa Rica" and calling for legislation to regulate emigration. In 1911 the legislature introduced the Emigration Regulations Ordinance which stipulated that workers could only be recruited for emigration by licensed emigration agents who must undertake to pay the return passage of the recruits and pay a deposit of 5/- per head as security for the repatriation of emigrants. The failure of the Ordinance to slow the pace of emigration led for a call by the Agricultural and Commercial Society for the prohibition of emigration to Santo Doming which had now become the main destination of working-class emigrants. Although the legislature failed to heed the calls of the planting body to prohibit emigration, a new restriction in the form of the Maintenance of Children Ordinance was passed in 1919. Under the Ordinance, the mother of a child could apply to the district magistrate for the detention of the "putative father" of a child who was migrating without making proper provision for the maintenance of the child.²⁹

The absence of legal mechanisms for the resolution of industrial disputes between workers and employers, and the attempts to close other avenues for economic advancement of the labouring population created a situation which necessitated the direct and recurrent intervention of the colonial state in industrial conflict through the use of the police and the armed forces in order to preserve labour peace and maintain public order. The labour disturbances of 1896 and 1905 and the labour unrest of 1916 and 1917 called for direct armed intervention by the colonial police force and, subsequently, British imperial naval forces. The failure of the local police to contain the strike and the demonstrations along the rural roads and in the capital town during the 1896 labour disturbances plunged the planters and the white population into a state of panic.³⁰ In April, 1896, after the crushing of the disturbances by marines from a British warship, a memorial from the "estate proprietors, merchants, and property owners" of the island of St. Kitts was sent to Secretary of State Joseph Chamberlain urging the creation of a volunteer defence force as a "paramount necessity for the restoration of confidence in the security of life and property."³¹ The volunteer defence force was created the following year with 174 members drawn principally from the planter and mercantile communities and under the command of Major Walter Boon, an estate proprietor and son-in-law of Captain Roger, the district magistrate.³² After its creation, the defence force became the principal instrument for the maintenance of public order during periods of labour unrest. Commenting on the public order role of the force, one colonial administrator observed that:

The mere existence of such a force, the know presence of a body of citizens ready to devote themselves to the suppression of a riot, is an asset of the highest value in the prevention of internal disturbance.³³

When the white planter members of the volunteer force were drawn up in military formation in front of crowds of demonstrating black labourers, the class and racial dimensions of the social confrontation, and the class and racial role of the colonial state, became inescapable.

Race, the Colonial State and Labour Relations in St. Kitts-Nevis

In St. Kitts and Nevis where the estate proprietors, in 1896, owned 78% and 61.8% of the total land area respectively and where, as in the case of St. Kitts, the proportion of uncultivable land made up 30% of the total land area, the dependence of the black landless labourer on estate work was almost total.³⁴ The extreme nature of the land monopoly exercised by the sugar estate proprietors in St. Kitts and, to a much lesser extent, Nevis raises the question: why the great need for the use of the powers of the colonial state for the extra-economic compulsion of the labouring force? Without access to land and with restrictions placed on the opportunity to migrate, the worker had little choice but to sell his labour to the estate proprietor. One obvious answer is the pressing need to control the cost of production in an industry marked by long periods of price depression. But the resource situation guaranteed that wages could never rise above prescribed levels set by the employers as a group. In 1922, at the height of the mass exodus of labourers from St. Kitts to the U.S. owned plantations in the Dominican Republic, the average daily wage rate for male agricultural labourers still ranged from 1/3 to 1/6, still lower than the 1/8 to 2/0 being received by male agricultural labourers in Barbados.³⁵ Economic forces, left to themselves, would have guaranteed the wage rates that the St. Kitts planters required.

The reasons for the extra-economic compulsion of labourers, already compelled by the whip of economic necessity, appear to have much deeper roots. Much of the literature on extra-economic systems of labour domination in the English-speaking Caribbean have highlighted the economic imperatives facing employers and downplayed, or ignored, the importance of social factors such as race. This economic determinism is partly explained by the Marxist orientation of many of the academics who have studied labour systems in the region. Robert Miles, in a thoughtful discussion on the place of race in labour coercion, observes:

Categories such as "whites" and "blacks" are of little analytical value because the populations to which they refer are invariably distributed across a number of different sites in class relations. Thus it is never "whites" who dominate, but a ruling class, itself composed of various fractions, which may or may not signify a phenotypical characteristic in the process of creating and/or maintaining hegemony. "Whiteness" may become a measure of the assumed ability to rule, and such a belief may sustain practices of exclusion, but all those who share this phenotypical characteristic cannot also occupy those few positions in economic and political relations which allow them to make, for example, investment and legislative decisions which determine the economic and political circumstances of the majority.³⁶

But Robert Miles’ well-reasoned argument does not adequately represent the social and demographic reality of many English-speaking Caribbean territories like St. Kitts. In a community where the white population numbers only 1348 or a mere 5.12% of the total population in 1911, it is possible for all those adult males who share this phenotypical characteristic to occupy those few positions which allow them to make "investment and legislative decisions which determine the economic and political circumstances of the majority."³⁷ While it is true that the upper class is phenotypically diverse, it is preponderantly white and the coloured members of the upper class hold on to European social values and, often, perceive themselves, and are perceived by the black population, as white or near white. The small community of poor "whites" in St. Kitts, or Mooshay men as they were called, were considered black.

The racial perceptions of the predominantly white employing class lay behind their extreme emphasis on maintaining total control over both the labour and the person of the black worker. The predominance of race in the industrial relations of both islands is clearly underlined by the comments of the white members of the colonial state during moments of crisis and labour unrest. James Burns, a presidential official who held the position of Treasurer at the time of the labour disturbances in 1896, wrote in a personal communication to Sidney Olivier:

But for the chance arrival of the H.M.S. Cordelia the town would certainly have been burnt to the ground even if we had escaped with our lives. I have a full knowledge of the nigger and I know that full of rum and excited by plunder the quasi-civilisation of the last fifty years falls from him and leaves him a greater savage than his African ancestors.³⁸

In the midst of the industrial crisis created by the attempt to form a labour union in 1916 and the passage of the Trade Union (Prohibition) Act at the end of that year, Captain Archibald Roger, the district magistrate who was at the time acting as colonial administrator, asserted that the formation of a labour union would only lead to strikes "followed by riots, destruction of property and bloodshed." He continued:

We must further remember that the Black has no love for the White man, and if the time comes when he gets the upper hand, God help the white community.³⁹

Roger’s concerns were well received at the Colonial Office and the Secretary for State of the Colonies, in defence of the introduction of the Act, argued that permitting the formation of trade unions came with the risk of disturbances which would have "taken the form of a colour contest and have placed the white population, with its preponderance of women and children whose menfolk had gone off to war, in grave danger." He added:

If and when disturbances take places in a mixed community, it is not so much the governing classes so much as the misguided natives who pay with their lives.⁴⁰

The writings of acting administrator Archibald Roger and Secretary of State Long confirm that the field of labour relations in St. Kitts-Nevis, and the British Caribbean in general, was seen not only as an arena of class warfare but also, and perhaps primarily, as a racial battleground. It is not surprising therefore that the black labouring population and their leaders, at least in the period of the incipient organisational thrust marked by the formation of the trade union in 1916, saw their solidarity not merely as a class weapon but as an essential tool in the battle of the races. Joseph Nathan, the secretary of the aborted trade union, was recorded as saying at a public meeting held by the union organisers:

It is not today since we have been suffering under the oppression of the whites. The black people must reign ... and the black people are going to reign in St. Kitts.⁴¹

The marginalisation of race as a critical, if not the most critical, determinant in shaping the pattern of labour relations in the Caribbean area has provided an incomplete picture of the single most important process which has moulded Caribbean societies, that of labour exploitation. Whether the racial question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, as C.L.R. James concluded, it is impossible to ignore his dictum that "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental [i]s an error only less grave than to make it fundamental."⁴² The ideological imperatives which have led to a downplaying of the problem of race in the Caribbean have served largely to distort Caribbean reality, a distortion, however well-meaning, which is now being challenged, almost inevitably, by the upsurge of racial consciousness throughout the region. It is this very resurgence of racial identification and solidarity which calls for a reevaluation of the region’s history with a greater focus on the historical role of race and the socio-political consequences of a long history of racial exploitation of black labour by white employers.

Endnotes

¹ Lloyd Best, "A Biography of Labour" in G. Beckford (ed.) Caribbean Economy (Kingston: ISER, 1975) 151 & 153.