Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Gold versus Life:" Jobbing Gangs and the British Caribbean Sugar EconomyIn recent years, historians have explored the wide variety of tasks that "hired-out" slaves were forced to perform in the British Americas.Hired slaves in urban or maritime occupations were generally allowed mobility, an escape from plantation labor, along with the chance to earn small sums, at the expense of close-surveillance by capricious whites.These studies have simultaneously noted that the gangs of slaves laboring in the sugar fields of the British Caribbean were themselves frequently slaves to other masters in so-called "jobbing gangs."As an abolitionist explained in 1830, jobbing gangs were groups of slaves who were hired from "a master who is not the owner of the soil" "chiefly…in the laborious process of holing:" digging holes to plant sugar cane-one of the most backbreaking tasks performed by any slave in the Americas.Jobbing gangs emerged in the early eighteenth century so that planters could grow more sugar without increasing their own permanent labor forces.In the second half of the eighteenth century and particularly in the last quarter, many Caribbean planters, spurred by the rising cost of imported slaves, started to rely on jobbing gangs to dig even more of their cane holes.At their height in the thirty before the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, jobbing gangs were a critically important and ubiquitous component of plantation management.By that period, as many as ten percent of the enslaved population of the British Caribbean may have been forced to work in them. 1 Although scholars know of the existence of jobbing gangs, they have neither fully explored their role in plantation management, nor examined the lives of the tens of thousands of people who 1 For works that stress opportunities, freedoms and social mobility for slaves who were not confined to a plantation, see for example, Howard Johnson, The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783-1933 (Kingston, 1991), 18-23, 33-46; B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834, Revised edition (Mona, 1995), 203-4, 226-259; Jeffrey W. Bolster.Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail.(Cambridge, 1997); Heather Cateau, "The New 'Negro' Business: Hiring in the British West Indies, 1750-1810," in Alvin O. Thompson, ed., In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History & Legacy (Kingston, 2002), 100-120; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, 2003); Pedro L.V. Welch, Slave Society in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680-1834 (Oxford, 2003); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016).James Stephen, The Slavery of the British West India Colonies Delineated… (London, 1830), 23 ("a master").Jobbing gangs have been largely overlooked because the records describing them are fragmentary.No owner of a jobbing gang (known contemporarily as a "jobber") has left papers that describe their business.Neither do we have firsthand testimony from any of the tens of thousands of people-most of them Africans-who jobbers enslaved.Jobbing gangs appear instead across numerous archives: brief remarks in planters' correspondence; expense lines in account books; newspaper advertisements; and the testimony of abolitionists and planters before Parliament.Although jobbing gangs could be found in almost every British Caribbean sugar colony, the sources describing them are also concentrated heavily in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Jamaica.To describe the emergence, growth, operation, and eventual decline of jobbing gangs historians must piece together these myriad fragments while simultaneously reading planter's papers against the grain to recover the experiences of enslaved people.Reconstructing the history of jobbing gangs demonstrates that Caribbean slavery was an insidiously adaptable institution that assumed many forms to meet both specific economic demands and changing visions of the master-slave relationship.The prevalence of jobbing gangs by the late eighteenth century provided a pool of specialized enslaved laborers who could be called upon to resolve inefficiencies in sugar production that came with a largely fixed population of plantation slaves and varying seasonal labor demands.Planters could choose to treat hired slaves as an operating expense to preserve their capital stock the terrible toll that holing took on the bodies of sugar workers-and still receive large crops and revenues.The dual systems of permanent and temporary labor, jobbing gangs and permanent plantation slaves, combined with other innovations to perhaps double plantation productivity per slave throughout the British Caribbean between 1700 and 1790; these productivity gains per slave were particularly strong after 1770-the very period when planters
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2941573133