Chinese Labourers, Free Blacks, and Social Engineering in the Post-Emancipation British West Indies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4163203 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christopher Bischof (University of Richmond, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 231 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 129-168 |
| Publication date | 2016-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gtw015 |
| OpenAlex | W2472312001 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Emancipation, Samuel Hibbent complained in an 1843 letter to the Colonial Office, 1 had been disastrous for the British West Indies. Two members of his family, ‘both practical Planters of long experience’, had paid £130,000 for a plantation on the eve of the end of the slave trade in 1807. Following emancipation in 1838, they had to sell the plantation for just £18,000. Though they had received £23,000 as their share of the £20,000,000 that Parliament had voted for the compensation of slave-owners, the loss was still devastating. Hibbent attributed the massive drop in the plantation’s value to the fact that not enough labour could be obtained to work it and was writing to the Colonial Office to ask that he and his fellow planters be allowed to import indentured labourers. 2 Though stories such as this were carefully constructed exaggerations and simplifications, they helped to establish the idea of a labour crisis that was devastating the West Indian economy. 3 This ‘flight from the estates’ cast the compatibility of modern capitalism and humanitarianism — a foundational tenet of Victorian liberalism, both at home and abroad — into serious doubt. 4 It left planters, abolitionists and imperial policy makers alike scrambling to find a response.
Capitalism · Colonialism · Economic history · Emancipation · Ethnology · Parliament · Political science · Politics · West indies · Australian History and Society · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
| Citations per year | 0.71 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Highly cited | No |