I

The idea of the slave as peasant was rooted in part in eighteenth-century programs for the “amelioration” of slavery. The related idea of “improvement” was important to British imperial ambitions in the eighteenth century, particularly after the Seven Years’ War. In its original sense among political economists, to “improve” land meant to increase its profitability. However, “improvement” was a flexible and promiscuous concept, and British officials soon came to see people, particularly colonized people, as open to “improvement.”Footnote ²⁷ Antislavery activists portrayed slave owners as backward and philistine, but many West Indian planters considered themselves enlightened men. Planters joined agricultural societies, eagerly adopted new technologies for sugar planting, and introduced new cultivars of sugarcane.Footnote ²⁸ “Improvement” shaded into the related idea that slavery could be “ameliorated,” that slave labor was compatible with scientific farming.Footnote ²⁹

Amelioration-minded planters intended to prove that their business was modern and productive. They wished to counteract, for example, demographic data promoted by abolitionists showing that the population of Britain's slave colonies was only barely increasing, despite the arrival of huge numbers of enslaved people from West Africa.Footnote ³⁰ The work of remaking slavery in the image of enlightened modernity often fell back on classical allusion. As Britain's empire grew, many Britons compared it, explicitly and implicitly, with ancient Rome. In Essay upon Plantership, an early guide to plantation management, Samuel Martin compared a sugar planter to a Roman dictator, “resigning, with pleasure, all the pomp of a triumph to till his little farm; as if Agriculture was the only genuine parent of ease, innocence, temperance, health, wisdom and fortitude.”Footnote ³¹ Imperial noblesse required slave owners to consider amelioration. Or, as Martin put it, “Every man who then wishes to grow rich with ease, must be a good oeconomist; must feed his negroes the most wholesome food.” He recommended that enslaved people have access to provision grounds, to lower the cost of importing foodstuffs.Footnote ³²

Colonial plantations, as Sidney Mintz expressed it, were “an unusual combination of agricultural and industrial forms,” of sugarcane fields worked by enslaved laborers organized into highly regimented “gangs” and revolved around on the proto-industrial grinders, boiling houses, and distilleries that produced sugar and rum.Footnote ³³ And yet amelioration-minded planters emphasized the rural over the industrial. The Sugar-Cane (1764), a long pastoral poem by James Grainger, was a deliberate attempt to paint sugar planting in Georgic aesthetics.Footnote ³⁴ However, the poem tells on itself. It exposes the tension between the industrial scale of sugar production and planters’ stylized rural idyll. Across four books, Grainger apostrophizes Roman gods and leading European agriculturalists and offers advice on every aspect of plantation management, from cane cleaning to boiling syrup and controlling enslaved workers. Grainger argues for amelioration, urging planters to offer enslaved workers access to medical care, food, provision grounds, adequate rest, and labor-saving technology. “Might not the plough that rolls on rapid wheels,” Grainger rhapsodizes, “Save no small labour to the hoe-arm'd gang?”Footnote ³⁵ Claire Midgley argues that this pastoral vision of plantation slavery was intended to reconcile eighteenth-century ideas about commerce as a force for “progress, culture and civilization” with the violence of slave ownership.Footnote ³⁶ It did even more than that; the rural aesthetic promoted by planters placed enslaved people between the past and future, classical peasants working in gruelingly modern conditions.

In his History of Jamaica, perhaps the most widely read eighteenth-century book about the colony, Edward Long looked with envy at the “improved” colonies of the French empire. “The French,” he wrote, “are such formidable competitors, and our own colonies so ill regulated in many respects.”Footnote ³⁷ Long hoped to imitate the scientific experimentation and adoption of new technologies among French planters. He was a member of several agricultural societies and an active proponent of “grounding this science [of agriculture] upon actual experiment.”Footnote ³⁸ Long also admired France's slave empire for its legal code, the code noir, which provided enslaved people with limited legal rights, and—in theory—some protection from abuse. Early promoters of antislavery, including James Ramsay and Beilby Porteus, as well as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, also admired the French code noir. The office of the procurador, an official in Spain's slave colonies with a mandate to hear the complaints of the enslaved against slave owners, also appealed to many proponents of amelioration. Finally, the earliest British plans for emancipation, proposed in the era of the American Revolution, drew inspiration from another Spanish colonial custom, coartación, which permitted enslaved people to earn money in order to purchase their own manumission.Footnote ³⁹ Britain's annexation of Trinidad in 1802 made the island a kind of natural experiment in legal amelioration in the three decades before emancipation; the office of the procurador became the office of the Protector of Slaves, and the island became the focus of attention from policy makers hoping to prove the worth of amelioration policies.Footnote ⁴⁰

Amelioration policies presumed that enslaved people would respond to improved working conditions with more, and more reliable, labor. But another thread in Enlightenment political economy, the origins and limits of the human motivation to work, worried both slave owners and abolitionists. Northern Europeans, in particular, wondered why they worked so much “harder” than did everybody else. In chapter 14 of the Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu speculates that people from colder climates are larger and more vigorous than are people from warmer climates. This, he argues, is because cold temperatures delay the action of nerves. He tested his theory by examining a sheep's tongue before and after freezing, observing that cold seemed to cause to nerve fibers to retract. “In cold countries,” he concluded, “the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths … consequently they have not such lively sensations.”Footnote ⁴¹ People in cold countries, Montesquieu concluded, work harder to be satisfied and are less sensitive to pleasure and pain, while people from warmer climates can work less to achieve the same degree of happiness. They are also more acutely averse to the pain associated with physical labor.

Concomitant with the variable effects of climate on the capacity for work was the idea that northern bodies were unsuitable for labor in hot climates. Skin tone was reimagined as geographic destiny. These two ideas, that climate shaped the capacity for labor and that darker-skinned people were better adapted to working in the tropics, dovetailed neatly with the expansion of African slavery in the Caribbean. Moreover, as Justin Roberts shows, in the eighteenth century, many Anglo-American reformers asserted the “need for discipline and even coerced labor to inculcate habits of industry among the able-bodied poor, slaves, and criminals.”Footnote ⁴² No leading British abolitionist seriously considered the possibility that the end of slavery would mean the end of some system of coercion, because without one, emancipated people might not work at all.Footnote ⁴³

As planters offered a stylized, pseudo-classical vision of “improved” slavery and abolitionists searched for legal models for gradual emancipation, other Enlightenment intellectuals turned their attention to the Irish, the largest body of peasant cultivators in the British archipelago. The prominent agriculturist Arthur Young was perhaps the most influential eighteenth-century ethnographer of the Irish peasantry, a people he characterized as charitable and friendly, hospitable and talkative, “lazy to an excess at work, but so spiritedly active at play.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Young's published Tour in Ireland was also clear-eyed about the reality of coercion and power even among nominally free people. Young was struck by the impunity and arbitrary power of the Roman Catholic Church and of Irish landlords, both Catholic and Protestant. “To discover what the liberty of the people is,” Young wrote, “we must live among them, and not look for it in the statutes of the realm: the language of written law may be that of liberty, but the situation of the poor may speak no language but that of slavery.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Young was repelled by the power of landlords to beat their tenants, demand sex with their wives, and seize their livestock and goods without consequence. He did not, however, object in principle to the basic structure of landholding in Ireland. He objected not to coercion, but to arbitrary coercion. The bred-in-the-bone laziness of Irish workers, Young believed, required some form of imperial legal control, even in a cold climate.

The Enlightened pursuit of amelioration, enforced through rigid legal sanctions and informed by respect for science and progress, shaped the earliest written plans for emancipation in the British world.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the wake of the American Revolution, James Ramsay, an Anglican clergyman whose time in Saint Kitts turned him against slavery and the slave trade, made an explicit argument for amelioration as a path to emancipation in his Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves (1784). The book ends with a plan to promote marriage and protect family life, standardize the distribution of provision grounds, food, and clothing, add legal protections for enslaved people, and create an office for an official “protector or judge.” These “slow and sure steps,” Ramsay argued, would lead to enslaved people enjoying “the full participation of every social privilege.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In the meantime, he imagined that the slave trade itself could become a pipeline to the improved West Indies, “ultimately a blessing to thousands of wretches, who, left in their native country, would have dragged out a life of miserable ignorance.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The idea that the slave trade could be a force for amelioration was thus carried over into defenses of slavery as well. Bryan Edwards, after Edward Long perhaps the most prominent writer on the British West Indies, claimed that slaves were primarily recruited from among criminals, who would otherwise be executed. As Africa was “not only one hundred, but perhaps one thousand time larger and more populous than Great Britain,” Edwards wrote, the slave trade represented “just so many lives saved.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In the 1790s and early 1800s, the achievement of emancipation seemed practically impossible to most prominent British abolitionists. As the French Revolution accelerated, and as revolutionary war erupted in Saint-Domingue, culminating in Haitian independence in 1804, gradual emancipation solidified as the consensus among the leaders of parliamentary and public antislavery. Ending the slave trade, however, could be framed as a way of forcing West Indian planters to treat enslaved people with more “humanity” and as a way of rescuing African “fellow creatures” from the physical torment of the Middle Passage. By design, the 1807 Slave Trade Act harnessed the naval war effort by offering incentives to Royal Navy officers to capture slave ships.Footnote ⁵⁰ The West Indian colonies coped with the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 by encouraging “improvement” schemes for sugar planting, experimenting with new ways of coercing more labor out of enslaved people, promoting childbearing among enslaved women, and introducing nominal protection for expectant mothers and mothers of young children—and, presumably, by taking opportunities to purchase enslaved people from smugglers.Footnote ⁵¹

In the 1820s, as the British antislavery movement regained momentum, the rural aesthetic of amelioration reemerged in beautifully illustrated books like James Hakewill's Picturesque Tour of the Island of Jamaica. Hakewill's illustrations portrayed plantation slavery as rural and rooted in an organic social order.Footnote ⁵² Slave labor was made picturesque. The tropes of the picturesque, Jeffrey Auerbach argues, “smoothed over the often hostile and monotonous aspects of imperial landscapes” with honeyed light, homogenizing imperial subjects and promoting imperial rule.Footnote ⁵³ The art historian Sarah Thomas has shown that planters patronized artists like the Anglo-Italian Agostino Brunias, whose paintings summoned “a vision of contented and well-appointed slaves dancing, selling produce at market, leisurely washing clothes in luxuriant tropical landscapes.” Thomas argues that this aesthetic appealed to early antislavery leaders nearly as much as to planters, and affirms that by the turn of the nineteenth century, “amelioration was not only being advocated by planters but by leading abolitionists too.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The fundamental difference between slaveholding and antislavery amelioration was the expected outcome of amelioration policies: for antislavery writers, amelioration would lead to gradual emancipation. For slave owners, it would preserve slavery, perhaps indefinitely.

By the late eighteenth century, preventing bodily harm had become a preoccupation of the movement to end the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson's Summary View of the Slave Trade, a widely read pamphlet summarizing the case for abolition, emphasized the physical cruelties of the Middle Passage, the wasted potential of West Africa as a market for British goods or as a new source of sugar, cotton, and other tropical commodities, and the unfairness of Africans being falsely accused of crimes and condemned to slavery.Footnote ⁵⁵ In response to lobbying by the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Lords’ Committee of the Privy Council produced a report examining the state of the trade. The planters and managers interviewed by the committee agreed that slave labor was necessary for growing sugar. The Council and Assembly of Montserrat, for example, averred, “no European Constitution could subsist under the Labour necessary” for sugar planting in the West Indies; “neither could it be done by Free Negroes.” Free white laborers were climactically incapable, and free black laborers were of “an idle Habit and Disposition.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Other West Indian officials were more circumspect. The agent for Barbados told the committee that freedom for enslaved people in the colony “would not alter the Condition of the Negroes … until they are brought to have artificial Wants … they would not, were they left to themselves, work for Pay, but be idle and vicious.” He did, however, recommend that the “Rigours of Slavery” be softened.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ideas of amelioration, passed between slave owners and abolitionists, presumed that whether slavery persisted or ended, people of African descent would need coercion to keep them bound to the sugar industry. The concept of slave as peasant came to embody this tension.

II

Amelioration gave slaveholders a space to style themselves as humane, scientific, and progressive; they could appeal to amelioration to justify slave ownership. Meanwhile, abolitionists argued that amelioration was a safe path to emancipation. Amelioration also invited comparisons between enslaved workers and poor British workers. In part, the aesthetic of planter amelioration relied on the idea of the oppressed white free worker to conjure the happy “peasant” enslaved worker. Grainger's Sugar-Cane, for example apostrophized an enslaved worker and asked, “How far more pleasant is thy rural task … / Hath the afflicted muse, in Scotia, seen / The miners rack'd, who toil for fatal lead? / … Yet white men these!”Footnote ⁵⁸ Bryan Edwards went further at the outset of the nineteenth century, mooting the idea of binding enslaved workers to the land, like peasants living under serfdom: “Let the negroes be attached to the land and sold with it. The good effect of a similar regulation in the system of ancient villanage has been pointed out and illustrated.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Throughout his History, Edwards stressed that enslaved people lived under better conditions than most wage workers. “On the whole,” he wrote, “if human life, in its best state, is a combination of happiness and misery, and we are to consider that condition of political society as relatively good, in which, notwithstanding many disadvantages, the lower classes are easily supplied with the means of healthy subsistence,” then slave societies were actually more morally upright than free-labor societies.Footnote ⁶⁰ Amelioration policies had emphasized improving the material conditions of slavery; the logical next step was to compare those conditions to those of British workers. Enslaved people, Edwards wrote, did not need to worry about the future. “They well know,” Edward wrote, “that moderate labour, unaccompanied with that wretched anxiety to which the poor of England are subject in making provision for the day that is passing over them, is a state of comparative felicity.”Footnote ⁶¹

As abolitionists denied that the lot of wage workers could be compared unfavorably to that of slaves, the beginning of the wars with Revolutionary France and news of the uprising in the Vendée drew attention to the British “peasantry.” Radical organizations devoted to expanding the franchise, like the London Corresponding Society, traded pamphlets with Tory stalwarts like Hannah More, whose Cheap Repository Tracts sold close to two million copies between 1792 and 1796.Footnote ⁶² George Crabbe's poem The Village, a mock-pastoral poem that contrasts with the earnest Sugar-Cane, evoked the pangs of rural poverty in classical meter. In Crabbe's verse, an old cottager “journeys to his grave in pain” while “alternate masters now their slave command, / And urge the efforts of his feeble hand.” Footnote ⁶³ During the last decade of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the next, scores of pamphlets, books, and parliamentary papers were published on what was often called “agricultural distress.” An 1807 tract summarized one way of thinking about the problem: “The welfare of the Peasant,” James Brewer wrote, “is the object ever nearest the heart of the Patriot. If the natural wealth of a country consist in the produce of its soil, its natural strength equally rests on those who cultivate its bosom.” But the English peasant was in decline. Where “in the times of the preceding generation,” English peasants had been “blest with content and manly independence,” now they pushed onto the parish rolls and into the streets.Footnote ⁶⁴ The British virtue of “independence” was under threat. As one clergyman and poet, Robert Montgomery, wrote, “Behold our peasantry! Britannia's pride … / A pittance from the tyrant of the soil / Is all that pays him for his dismal toil; / Then home he wanders to a cheerless shed, / With discontented heart and aching head.”Footnote ⁶⁵

The decline of the English peasantry in the age of revolutions did not deter British slave owners in the West Indies from invoking British peasants as a model for enslaved people. In 1808 in Demerara, the Dutch sugar colony on the Caribbean coast of South America (formally ceded to Britain in 1815), a British visitor noted that British-owned enslaved workers seemed to be taking on some of the characteristics of their putative owners. “A certain erect carriage in John Bull imperceptibly introduces itself into the address of the English negroes,” he wrote, and their influence “may in the course of time bring the slaves in the West Indies on a level with the English peasantry of the day.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Historians have noticed the deep connections between ideas of poverty and ideas of slavery.Footnote ⁶⁷ As Edmund Morgan argued in American Slavery, American Freedom, Thomas Jefferson's conscience-stricken desire to end slavery in Virginia was checked by his fear that enslaved people would be set free into landless vagrancy.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indeed, Edward Long defended slavery as a solution to poverty, as a way of keeping people safely in place. “The rich are the natural enemies of the poor; and the poor, of the rich,” Long wrote; “like the ingredients of a boiling cauldron, they seem to be in perpetual warfare … yet, if both parties could compose themselves, the faeces would remain peaceably at the bottom.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Antislavery writers in Britain were also uncomfortable with the poor. In his didactic novel of the conversion of a British-educated sugar planter to Christianity and patriarchal humanitarianism, John Riland's West Indian narrator comments on the impecuniousness of working-class weavers in Lancashire: “Families which to-day might be seen gnawing a decayed cabbage-stalk to sustain life, would tomorrow be drenched in their former sins; provided tomorrow brought them the means of renewed sensuality.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Paupers were dangerous; “peasants” seemed less so.

As David Brion Davis put it, abolitionists weakened their position with “constant comparisons … between the agony of black slaves and the smiling, contented life of English husbandmen.”Footnote ⁷¹ Every starving and houseless free worker and every enslaved laborer with adequate food and housing became an argument for preserving plantation slavery. Leading British abolitionists were less anxious about the consistency of their position than they were about accusations of radicalism or Jacobitism. By invoking a harmonious world of free labor in Britain and emphasizing the physical pain endured by enslaved workers, antislavery activists hoped they could be on the side of both “humanity” and the conservative, landed, and wealthy British political class. Antislavery writers who made this rhetorical move had tacitly accepted the idea framed by Bryan Edwards in defense of slavery that the measure of a society could be taken based on the material conditions of life of its lowest classes.

Appeals to physical suffering were not the only abolitionist arguments, but they were the most visible. The two most famous British antislavery images, the 1788 print of the slave ship Brookes crammed with people, and the famous cameo, manufactured in Josiah Wedgwood's potteries, of an enslaved man, kneeling in chains, asking “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?,” emphasized the physical discomforts and humiliations of the slave trade and enslavement.Footnote ⁷² Saidiya Hartman identifies the preoccupations of white antislavery with the spectacle of violence against the enslaved. Abolitionists, she shows, often contested slavery by casting enslaved people as idealized victims, grateful for rescue and relief from physical pain. The focus on physical suffering foreclosed upon the possibility that the enslaved might have a political stake in shaping their own emancipation.Footnote ⁷³ Slaveholders emphasized another implication of abolitionist appeals to antislavery as a balm for physical pain: if it could be claimed that slavery was less painful than industrial work, then it might be possible to argue that enslaved labor in relatively comfortable material conditions might even be less immoral than exploitative free labor. Throughout the 1790s, as the slave trade was scrutinized more carefully in Parliament and as British readers worried about the state of British agricultural laborers, slave owners reached for the high ground of amelioration. They latched onto the comparison between white poverty and black slavery as a way of framing antislavery as hypocrisy. Wrote one pamphleteer, “Let the legislature look if there be no slaves of their own religion, and colour in England.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Antislavery reformers struck back against comparisons between poor wage workers and enslaved, not with appeals to improve the conditions of wage labor but by emphasizing the ineffable difference between freedom and slavery. As Thomas Clarkson insisted in an 1823 essay, he could not allow “that soft lodging, or good eating and drinking, or fine clothing, form the principal enjoyments of a human being … Indeed what is it that constitutes the best part of a man's happiness? It is liberty.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Henry Whiteley also accentuated the bright line between slavery and wage work in his 1833 pamphlet Three Months in Jamaica, written on the eve of emancipation to expose the barbarity of slave owners toward both enslaved people and missionaries. (Antislavery campaigners printed and distributed 200,000 copies of the pamphlet in just two weeks.)Footnote ⁷⁶ “The condition of the factory children is certainly very deplorable, and calls loudly for amelioration,” Whiteley wrote, urging cooperation between the antislavery campaign and the movement for factory reform. However, in comparison with slavery, “the former,” the condition of factory children, he wrote, “is very bad: the latter is INFINITELY WORSE.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Advocates for factory reform, like Richard Oastler, observed that “Slaveholders in the West Indies declare their Slaves are the best clothed, best fed, the most cheerful and contented peasantry in the world,” and urged readers to be skeptical of factory owners making similar claims about “not only content but cheerful” child laborers.Footnote ⁷⁸

By highlighting the differences between British rural poverty and colonial slavery, antislavery reformers seem to have only reinforced the comparison. “Emancipation” proved to be as promiscuous an idea in the liberal 1830s as “amelioration” and “improvement” had been in the Enlightened 1780s and 1790s. In 1834, reformers framed the New Poor Law as the “emancipation” of the British poor from the “false charity” of the Elizabethan poor rolls and the 1795 Speenhamland system of guaranteed income.Footnote ⁷⁹ After 1834, American arguments for the preservation of slavery also sometimes called on comparisons between American enslaved people and British wage workers. In 1836, the proslavery writer James Paulding insisted, “Among the slaves of the United States are neither paupers or beggars … and of all the laboring men of this world, they are the most free from the besetting evils of laborious poverty.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Amelioration policies focused on the relief of physical suffering made it harder to claim that the argument over slavery had not, in some sense, been framed as a comparison between the lives of wage workers and those of enslaved workers.

The end of the slave trade opened space for antislavery activists to press their attack on slavery by demanding the registration of all enslaved people in British colonies and by imposing more regulations on slave ownership. Slave owners fell back again on the alleged “comfort” of enslaved people, reviving the image of the enslaved person as a happy peasant in order to stall emancipation. Gradual emancipation policies laid out in Parliament by George Canning in 1823 compromised between a slave-owning class that remained politically powerful and an antislavery movement that was fearful of the consequences of immediate emancipation. In the 1820s, Henry Coleridge rejected the idea of parity between enslaved people and English peasants: “I scorn with an English scorn the creole thought that the West Indian slaves are better off than the poor peasantry of Britain.” However, he admitted, “It is nevertheless a certain truth that the slaves in general do labor much less, do eat and drink much more, have much more ready money, dress much more gaily, and are treated with more kindness and attention, when sick, than nine-tenths of all the people of Great Britain under the condition of tradesmen, farmers and domestic servants.”Footnote ⁸¹ The English poor were free and unhappy, willing to work for their keep no matter the circumstances. “We must bring the motives which induce an English rustic to labor to bear upon the negro,” Coleridge continued, concluding that “when the negro peasant will work regularly like the white peasant, then he ought to be as free.”Footnote ⁸² In memoirs of his time visiting his plantations in Jamaica, the absentee slave owner and popular novelist Matthew Gregory Lewis described a village of enslaved people in Jamaica and commented, “I believe their condition to be much more comfortable than that of the labourers of Great Britain; and, after all, slavery, in their case, is but another name for servitude.”Footnote ⁸³

Writing in 1826 in supported of a revivified British antislavery movement, William Wilberforce regretted not including provisions for eventual emancipation in the legislation that abolished the slave trade in 1807. He wrote that he had always imagined that the end of the slave trade would set the slave colonies on a path to emancipation. Without a reliable supply of enslaved labor, Wilberforce had imagined, planters would be forced to treat enslaved people with more consideration, introducing religious instruction and eliminating arbitrary corporal punishment. In due course, “the slaves would have become qualified for the enjoyment of liberty,” which would have been a “blessed transmutation … of a degraded slave population into a free and industrious peasantry.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The entanglement of slavery with poverty and peasantry was thus a feature of British antislavery thought as well as a cynical defense of slavery itself.

III

Historians of the post-emancipation agricultural life of the British West Indies, particularly in Jamaica, have considered whether or not enslaved people could be considered “proto-peasants.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In this debate, the institution of the “provision ground” is central. In larger plantation societies, provision grounds in the vast backcountry of sugar-producing regions may have opened a “peasant breach,” a space of genuine economic independence for enslaved and free people of African descent.Footnote ⁸⁶ The historical geography of provision grounds is obscure, but according to Bryan Edwards, fully one-third of all the arable land in Jamaica was devoted either to pasture or to provision grounds.Footnote ⁸⁷ Jamaica is mountainous and relatively large compared with Britain's other former sugar islands (although not in comparison with Cuba or Hispaniola). From early in the colony's history, enslaved people were assigned plots of land in areas unsuitable for sugar cultivation, on which to grow provisions to feed themselves, supplemented by rations of salt-fish and other foods. Over time, provision grounds came to feed not only enslaved people but also white overseers and planters, as well as people living in the larger towns. Provision grounds were also a feature of plantation management in the newer, less-cultivated colonies like British Guiana and Trinidad, ceded to Britain during the wars of the age of revolution. Even heavily cultivated colonies like Barbados relied to a certain extent on crops grown by enslaved people and sold in public markets by market women.Footnote ⁸⁸ Historians and anthropologists interested in provision grounds argue that they laid the groundwork for the emergence of a genuinely free peasantry, what the geographer Tony Weis identifies as “the foundation of most Caribbean societies,” at least until the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment policies in the 1980s.Footnote ⁸⁹

However, slave owners also used provision grounds as evidence that enslaved people were already the contented peasantry that abolitionists wanted them to become. Provision grounds are difficult to trace in the archives; they were essential to the operation of plantations but were generally outside the remit of plantation overseers. As one plantation manager told a parliamentary inquiry when asked about what he knew about provision grounds, “It is difficult to have a minute knowledge of what they do.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The Jamaica Assembly occasionally passed laws demanding that enslaved people devote more of their grounds to “ground provisions”—low-lying crops that were more hurricane-resistant than fruit trees or tall plantain or banana plants, but it is not clear how, or whether, these laws were enforced.

The mysteries of the provision grounds allowed planters to fantasize about their spectacular fertility and productivity. Bryan Edwards insisted in 1806, “The most industrious of the Negroes do not, I believe, employ more than sixteen hours in a month in the cultivation of their own provision-gardens (leaving all further care of them to the beneficence of nature).”Footnote ⁹¹ This statistic, an invention or hearsay, became a commonplace for both slave owners and abolitionists. Early in his career as a writer and statesman, Henry Brougham offered an extended commentary on the colonial policies of France and Spain, prompted by the Haitian Revolution and by Britain's acquisition of Trinidad. Brougham concluded that, although it pained him, slavery seemed to be have been necessary for the European colonization of the tropics. He cited Edwards (while shaving an hour off of Edwards's account of labor on provision grounds), writing, “Out of the six days per month … which are allowed them in Jamaica … the more industrious [enslaved people] do not allot above fifteen hours to this employment.”Footnote ⁹² The statistic whispered down the alley, and “hours per week” changed into “days per year.” After emancipation, a jurist appointed to manage the relationship between former slaves and former slave owners commented, “It is well known that a negro in 16 days will plant as much provisions as will do for himself and family for a year.”Footnote ⁹³ The alleged bounty of provision grounds allowed both slave owners and abolitionists to make at least two conclusions about the future of black labor in Britain's sugar colonies. First, provision grounds seemed to prove that black laborers—enslaved or free—needed to be compelled to work, since the soil provided too much food with too little work to make the threat of starvation a motivating force. Second, provision grounds seemed to prove that black workers ought to be available for work on sugar plantations in slavery or freedom, since their own farms required virtually no cultivation.

Edwards also praised provision grounds as providing “a happy coalition of interests between the master and the slave.” An enslaved worker “who has acquired by his own labour a property in his master's land, has much to lose,” he argued. “He earns a little money, by which he is enabled to indulge himself in fine clothes on holydays, and gratify his palate with salted meats and other provisions that otherwise he could not obtain … it saves the proprietor the cost of feeding him.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The slave owner William Beckford used provision grounds to “season” enslaved people—preparing new arrivals on his plantation for the rigors of sugar planting.Footnote ⁹⁵

For slave owners, provision grounds had both a practical and a symbolic use. They were necessary to feed colonists, enslaved and free, but they were also secret Edens, places of ease, abundance and natural splendor. Matthew Gregory Lewis remarked that every Sunday and every second Saturday, the days he allotted to the people he claimed to own, were more than enough for them to work their grounds. In fact Sundays were more than enough, he argued, and the additional days made labor on the provision grounds “almost … into an amusement; and the frequent visiting their grounds makes them grow habitually as much attached to them as they are to their houses and gardens.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Slave owners like Lewis lauded the provision grounds, slivers of quasi-independence and privacy for enslaved people from plantation society, as evidence that plantation slavery was organic and harmonious.

Brougham, drawing on a century of Enlightenment reflection on the nexus of labor, climate, and political economy, remarked that a person from the tropics had fewer wants, and that without compulsion, “the powers of his mind become languid and feeble; his corporeal strength decays; and he regards as the greatest of all evils any occupation that calls for mental exertion.”Footnote ⁹⁷ At the same time, he was convinced that people of African descent were essential to the sugar islands and the hard work of sugar production: “They excel all the other races of mankind in hardiness, agility, and strength of limbs; in the capacity of sustaining the most galling fatigue and pain.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The idea that enslaved people would not work without compulsion troubled other Britons who were sympathetic to antislavery. As James Ramsay wrote, “In a free country, a peasant in general executes twice the work of a slave in the sugar colonies.” Peasants, he argued, received better food and clothing than enslaved laborers, but “not in proportion to the difference in value of their labour, perhaps not exceeding greatly the insurance, and other incidental charges of slavery.”Footnote ⁹⁹

By the late 1820s, the idea of slaves as peasants flourished among slave owners and their defenders. Brougham was impressed with the state of enslaved people in colonies belonging to Spain, who seemed to live in conditions similar to European peasants under feudalism in late-antique and medieval Europe. “In many parts,” he wrote, “the negroes are precisely in the situation of the coloni partiarii, or metayers, of the feudal times … all the overplus of his industry belongs to himself.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Self-consciously “enlightened” slave owners shared Brougham's admiration for the creation of a pseudo-feudal interstitial state between slavery and freedom. The broad-acred Barbados sugar planter Joshua Steele, who corresponded with Thomas Clarkson, proposed mitigating slavery by reviving old English legal statuses of villeinage, making the most obedient enslaved workers “copy-holders,” with access to provision-ground-like “little tenements of land … raising whatever they might think most advantageous towards their support” and reducing the less obedient to the landless status of “villain in gross.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ An official in Saint Kitts even proposed to replace the terminology of “slave” and “slavery” with “vassal” and “vassalage” in colonial law and policy.Footnote ¹⁰²

The aesthetic of obedience and order that Steele promoted to prolong slavery appealed to opponents of slavery as well. Frederick Bayley, who supported antislavery, described in his memoirs of the West Indies enslaved people living in contentment, with generations “protected by the same master and nurtured on the same estate” and cottage, garden, and “little stock of domestic animals” all held securely, while religion and education gradually and incrementally lay the groundwork for a distant freedom.Footnote ¹⁰³ Gradual emancipation would both promote civilization and preserve the sugar industry. “If, by some hasty and inconsiderate measure, the slaves in our colonies receive their emancipation suddenly,” Bayley wrote, “they will proceed in their ignorance to commit the same follies as their brethren in St. Domingo.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Bryan Edwards boasted that slave owners never intruded on provision grounds or seized the profits that enslaved people earned by bringing their surplus to market. Customary land and its proceeds were “their peculium,” Edwards argued, and enslaved people could even “dispose at their deaths of what little property they possess … bequeath their grounds or gardens to such of their fellow-slaves as they think proper.” Edwards's use of peculium—like Brougham's use of coloni partiarii—was pretentious, but also substantive and symbolic. Many British writers, for and against slavery, placed the enslaved in a different temporality from wage workers. Enslaved workers, Edwards argued, held in their provision grounds something like the peculia—money or land held by enslaved people in the Roman Empire, with the consent of slaveholders. Brougham argued that enslaved people were more like Roman or medieval sharecroppers, coloni partiarii, who owed a portion of their produce to their landlords and kept the surplus for themselves. In these analogies, Britain was Rome, the inheritor of global empire. And yet, although Britons themselves seemed to have progressed far beyond Roman precedents, for both slaveholders and abolitionists, enslaved people remained in the past. For slaveholders, that was enough; it was flattering to imagine sugar plantations as Roman senatorial retreats and enslaved people as their enslaved-peasant workers. For abolitionists, emancipation would require laws that pushed freedpeople, imagined as out-of-time and indolent, toward steady, low-wage work. It would also require civilizing mission to bring freedpeople from the “past” of slavery into the wage-earning present.

But when Edwards boasted about the peculia held by enslaved people in the British empire, he was also using the classical allusion to make a comparison between the West Indies and Ireland. Invoking Arthur Young's account of the rapacity of Irish landlords, Edwards compared the cottages and grounds of enslaved people to the homes and possessions of the impoverished rural Irish.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Free peasants in Ireland, he argued, enjoyed nothing close to the comfort or security of property of enslaved “peasants.” Poverty in rural Ireland became another touchstone for defenders of slavery. In Parliament, Francis Burdett lamented, “The comfort and happiness of the English people, their old love of independence, their unexampled industry, their patience under sufferings, their great care and foresight, all could not save them from the competition of the Irish peasantry, who were fast degrading the English peasantry.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In the sugar colonies, the imagined ultra-fertility of the soil was used by slaveholders to justify slavery. In Ireland, the impressive yields of potato crops in Ireland were identified by landlords as the cause of Irish poverty. “The other necessaries of life, such as clothing and habitation, do not keep pace with the abundance of the subsistence,” wrote Gilbert Blane, a Scots physician and reformer of the Royal Navy's medical service; “neither have the peasantry the means of giving their children that share of education which is necessary to civilize them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ When British slaveholders compared enslaved “peasants” to Irish rural laborers, they were implying that slavery, rather than free labor, might be a better system for managing the British Empire's colonized agricultural workers.

A parliamentary committee hastily established in the early 1830s to consider emancipation asked a group of planters, missionaries, and merchants about the capacity to work, the religious education, and the economic predilections of enslaved people in the Caribbean colonies. The traditions of both amelioration and of comparison between British and Irish “peasants” and enslaved workers were prominent in the committee's cross-examinations. One witness, the plantation attorney William Taylor, was pressed to compare the Scots, Irish, and English “peasantries” to enslaved people. Taylor was confident that “the negroes are like the peasantry of England, Ireland and Scotland” in their overall capacity to work, adding, however, “the Scottish peasantry are more addicted to drinking than the negroes are generally speaking.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Intrigued, the committee pressed Taylor to judge whether slaves or peasants worked harder. He replied, “If the question is with respect to the quantum of work, the Scottish peasant does more,” although he admitted that the rigors of “crop time” on sugar plantations meant that enslaved workers probably worked more on average.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Wiltshire Stanton Austin, the son of a slave owner who had been born in Barbados and had worked for his father in Suriname and Demerara, was asked what would happen if the family's creditors foreclosed upon his father's estates after emancipation. “My father,” he replied, “would remove immediately with his 200 slaves, whom he has attached by kind treatment, and they would be his peasantry”—leaving the mortgagees of the estate without a labor force.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Meanwhile, colonial newspapers in Jamaica inveighed against the antislavery movement for “thrusting into carnage and destruction the peaceable and hitherto contented peasantry of our once happy island.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The Duke of Wellington, skeptical of abolition, referred to the “negro peasantry” of a sugar estate that he judged to be especially productive, and especially threatened by a disorganized emancipation.Footnote ¹¹² All the while, planters doubled down on appeals to the pastoral fantasy of slavery. As a proslavery speaker told an audience in London, enslaved people did not need to fear “the Militia ballot, the tax-gatherer, the heartless bailiff, and the brutal press-gang,” or seeing “aged parents dragging out a miserable existence in the parish poor-house … There is not a peasant in the world that walks abroad with a more contented countenance.”Footnote ¹¹³

From 1834 to 1838, British officials struggled to manage the transition from slavery to “apprenticeship.” Under the 1833 Act, and consistent with the consensus in Parliament that gradual emancipation was necessary, enslaved people were declared to be “apprentices” to the people who once claimed to own them and were bound to between four and six years of further labor without wages. Skilled workers were to be apprenticed for four years of constant service, while cane-fields workers “owed” forty-five hours of labor a week to the plantations where they lived and were encouraged to sell the rest of their “free time.” Meanwhile, slave owners were given access to a £20 million fund as compensation for their lost “property.” And yet, because the period of apprenticeship was so chaotic, and because the system collapsed definitively in 1838, historians have tended to look past it to the post-1838 period, and particularly to the era of free trade in sugar, ushered in by the 1846 Sugar Duties Act.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, the enormous, underexplored archives of apprenticeship show the workings of British antislavery in clear detail.

Other provisions of the Emancipation Act, moreover, show some of the consequences of the idea of enslaved people as peasants that had passed back and forth between slave owners and abolitionists in the forty years before 1833. A group of jurists, called “special” or “stipendiary” magistrates, were charged with resolving disputes between former slaves and former slave owners. The special magistrates were also instructed by the Colonial Office to enter and inspect provision grounds.

As the legendary productivity imputed to provision grounds in the era of slavery might suggest, many special magistrates were concerned that continued access to grounds for apprentices might jeopardize the transition from slave labor to wage labor. One special magistrate complained that apprentices did not bother taking wages because of “the vicinity to their houses and productiveness of their provision grounds.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Another complained that no apprentices would work for hire on the “great gang” of a sugar plantation, weeding and trimming cane in the growing season and cutting and hauling it during “crop,” since they seemed to be able to earn six times as much by growing produce for the market.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The slave-as-peasant was supposed to be open to improvement and amelioration and just self-sufficient enough to begin the path to full autonomy; apprentices proved more stubborn.

Edward Baynes, another special magistrate, became skeptical of the equivalence between apprentices and European peasants real or imagined. “There are doubtlessly among them individuals not inferior for intelligence and acquirement to the European peasant,” he wrote, “but the proportion is by no means large … At home, in the negro villages, he is as licentious and unrestrained as ever.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ In a further letter, Baynes admitted that “it would be equally difficult, in a country of such unbounded fertility, to persuade even the German or British peasant that his interests would lead him to give that time and exertion to a master.” He worried that the lives of former slaves were too comfortable, that their lives were “vastly superior to that of the peasantry in the most favoured part of Great Britain. Some have large sums of money hoarded; many possess several horses, and not a few indulge in wine.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The police officers assigned to the various magisterial districts in Jamaica also routinely referred to former slaves as “peasants”: “No agitation among the peasantry at present … the peasantry have assumed their work, and all is quiet … the peasantry, generally speaking, are attentive to their employment, but prefer employing their leisure time in cultivating provisions for themselves.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ And yet the apprentices were not “peasants” in the sense that political economists used the term. Rather than independence, continued subservience and labor in the sugar industry was an intended condition of their freedom.

Under the system of hours created by the 1833 Act, one of the principal punishments available to special magistrates was to award more unpaid labor from apprentices to masters (and, conversely, to remove access to free labor from masters, although as Diana Paton shows, most special magistrates sided with planters as a matter of course).Footnote ¹²⁰ This punishment, measured in hours, was time that could have been spent earning wages or working on provision grounds. By 1836, the colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, was satisfied that apprenticeship would not ruin the sugar industry, but he still worried about freedom and its relationship to land. He wrote in a circular dispatch, “During Slavery, labour could be compelled to go wherever it promised most profit to the employer. Under the new system it will find its way wherever it promises most profit to the labourer.” He worried that this tendency could threaten the staple crops of the Caribbean colonies if land were too cheap. He urged colonial governors to set the base price of Crown land as high as possible, to concentrate the population, and make them “more open to civilizing influences, more directly under the control of Government, more full of the activity which is inspired by common wants, and the strength which is derived from the division of labour.”Footnote ¹²¹

While visiting Barbados on a tour of the post-emancipation Caribbean, the antislavery leaders Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey were pleased to hear local planters report that the costs of production of sugar had dropped by as much as one-fifth after the end of slavery. Sturge and Harvey rejected the idea that the apprenticeship system was a continuation of slavery and maintained that the rising price of lands and of housing was evidence of progress. They happily reported, “estates which were over populated have largely benefited by the dismission [sic] of their superfluous numbers.” Eviction from provision grounds and houses was a positive development, they argued, because a “purchasing as well as consuming population has been formed.”Footnote ¹²² But people who had been enslaved had previously, at the very least, had a place to live. Now the shock of freedom allowed planters who had owned few slaves to profit “by availing themselves of the labour thus thrown into the market.”Footnote ¹²³ Paradoxically, Sturge and Harvey did not expect freedpeople to move far in search of higher wages: “Their strong attachment to the place of their birth, to their houses, gardens, to the graves of their parents and kindred, exceeding what has been recorded of any other people,” would keep freedpeople tied to both their own land and the land where they worked for sugar planters.Footnote ¹²⁴ The idea that enslaved people had some near-mystical connection to the soil, some element of peasantry about them, carried over into the post-emancipation era.

Sturge and Harvey were forthright. Of Jamaica, they claimed that “the island can never realise the full benefits of the new system, till there are such [independent] villages, which would be to the planters as “reservoirs of surplus labor,” enabling them to employ many or few hands, according to their actual wants.”Footnote ¹²⁵ After 1838, however, many planters refused to sell land to freed slaves. Some antislavery activists, particularly members of the very active Baptist Missionary Society, thus advocated for the founding of “free villages” independent of the plantations, established for freedpeople on land purchased—often secretly—from planters. As Catherine Hall has shown, these villages became the incubators of a British missionary project of remaking black Jamaican society in the image of bourgeois Britain.Footnote ¹²⁶ Arguing for the end of apprenticeship in the House of Lords, Henry Brougham, now Lord Brougham and Vaux, declared, “The slave has shown … that he is as fit for his freedom as any English peasant.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The slave-as-peasant seemed now to have come of age. James Phillippo, a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, was quick to praise the people he called a “newly emancipated peasantry” on 1 August 1838, the day when apprenticeship came to an early end. “There was no crowding, no vulgar familiarity … no dancing, no noisy mirth, no carousing, no gambling, or any of the rude pastimes and sports which often disgrace seasons of public rejoicing in England.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Emancipated people, in Phillippo's view, had the virtues and none of the vices of the lost British—or starving Irish—“peasantry.”

The collapse of apprenticeship and the massive importation of indentured Asian labor to the West Indies, particularly to Trinidad and Guiana, as well as to the Indian Ocean sugar island of Mauritius, muted the attention of Britons to concerns about the productivity of free black labor.Footnote ¹²⁹ However, in the forty years before emancipation, slave owners and antislavery activists, writers, and legislators had all staked claims to the idea of enslaved people and emancipated people as a peasantry, as either enslaved people living in comfort or as freedpeople on the first step of the long road to civilization. Neither model of “peasantry” had much to do with the material reality of rural agricultural labor in either the British Isles or in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Instead, the concept reflected a emergent social imaginary shared by slave owners and many abolitionists—particularly by the well-to-do, elite leaders of British antislavery—that there were parts of the world where black labor belonged. There were, moreover, certain kinds of industries that were the destiny of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “that dark and vast sea of human labor … spawning the world's raw material and luxury—cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil … transformed and transported at fabulous gain.”Footnote ¹³⁰

It did not take long for recrudescent racism to rewrite the history of emancipation in early Victorian Britain. In the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle cast Ireland and Jamaica as twin symbols of the apocalypse of industrialization. “Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland,” he wrote, “between these two extremes of lazy refusal to work, and of famishing inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it.” Carlyle's racism is coarse, but his essays capture a feature of the history of slavery in the British Empire that it took historians another hundred years clearly to grasp. Emancipation and industrialization were connected to one another; the fires in Kent and Saint James Parish burned the same fuel. “Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle, Time will mend it,” Carlyle wrote, until “British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral.”Footnote ¹³¹ In the 1850s, George Fitzhugh, an American political economist and fervent defender of slavery, quoted Carlyle's essays widely in his book Cannibals All and explicitly tied a defense of slavery and a critique of industrial capitalism back to the putatively comfortable material circumstances of enslaved people. “The negro slaves of the South,” Fitzhugh wrote, “are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”Footnote ¹³² After all, they were “peasants.”