Colour, class: Change in post-Emancipation Tobago

Dr Rita Pemberton

THE SOCIAL face of pre-Emancipation Tobago was dominated by the island’s white population, which formed the ruling class, but, as the century wore on, significant changes occurred in the class structure.

The main factors which determined the class to which a person in post-Emancipation Tobago belonged were colour, control of the means of production and sale of goods and services which created wealth.

This means that invariably, the dominant class in Tobago’s society was composed of white people who, since the era of British possession, controlled the largest portions of the land resources. By virtue of this, they also controlled the main aspects of commercial activity, which was based on the production and sale of sugar, which remained the main export crop, and the control of shipping and the import-export trade, which was closely tied to the sugar industry.

This meant the African population, which constituted the largest segment, was relegated to the base of the society.

It must be indicated that while planters and large merchants dominated the society and economy, their control did not remain absolute, because of the changes that were consequent to Emancipation.

The growth of settlements of freed Africans during the post-Emancipation period and the need for the services formerly provided to the estates by the enslaved population facilitated the emergence of opportunities for some members of the freed African community to become involved in business activity.

Hence, there was a gradation of the activities of those engaged in the import-export business, from owners of estate shops to small shopkeepers, market vendors, hucksters and a range of other vendors.

Enterprise in these areas was fuelled by the desires of the freed African population to find alternative employment to estate labour as a resistance strategy to planter control efforts as they sought to elevate themselves from the social base of the society.

The next activity that facilitated wealth creation was the sale of goods and services provided by professionals and technicians; from the non-white community, lower-level activities included those of skilled artisans, gardeners, grooms, domestic workers and laundresses.

Despite the fact that the sugar industry was on the decline, the planters remained the dominant class in the society because of their control of the arms of the administration – the council and assembly, the members of which were also planters. This allowed the implementation of policies sympathetic to and supportive of the interests of sugar planters.

This class was buttressed by the British merchant houses which supplied its members with credit facilities. In the process, some estates became so heavily indebted that some merchant houses became landowners of the properties of their debtors.

A planter/merchant alliance, which did not remain exclusively white, developed on the island. An emerging upper class of coloured individuals, the offspring of mixed marriages between white males and educated coloured women, became managers of estates, and, in addition, there was a presence of black lessees as estate managers.

However, this did not mean there was an easy acceptance of non-whites into the upper echelons of the island’s society, for the white population sought to preserve its position at the top of the social ladder by excluding others. The coloureds whose ambitions were geared towards white society expected to be able to operate on the same social level as the whites. They were dismayed by white insistence on maintaining social distance between the two groups.

Because of the challenges faced by Tobago’s sugar industry during the post-Emancipation years, there was an increase in the numbers of absentee owners of property. Some estates were put up for sale, failing which they were left in the hands of attorneys and managers or were leased to residents of the island.

This development led to the opening of the land market to white professionals and attorneys who leased estates from their owners who lived in the UK, and permitted the control of large portions of land by professionals who served as lessees of estates.

As a result, there was a growing number of estate attorneys who were lessees of other estates and became estate owners themselves. This increase in white accessibility to landowning and landholding permitted some individuals to generate income while the sugar industry was in the throes of its demise and the island was unable to generate revenue to meet the costs of its administration; but it also permitted an increase in the number of black and coloured people who took advantage of favourable prices to become landowners. By 1884, out of the 80 operating estates in Tobago, 20 were owned and 12 leased by blacks and coloureds.

The bankruptcies of planters and merchants caused closure of the shops they ran, the contents of which were sold, creating windows of business opportunity for resident estate managers, attorneys or lessees who bought these items and established estate shops, in which the hated truck system was maintained, and which continued on the island up to the 1860s.

The truck system was an exploitative control system used by estate owners and administrators to manipulate the labour of their workers. The items sold in these shops were usually cheap and poor quality, and sold at exorbitant prices. Plantation workers were offered the facility of taking the items they needed on credit, under an arrangement that they would pay the outstanding sums when they received their wages.

The system was so arranged that the wages were never sufficient to meet the outstanding sums owed to the shop, and as a result the workers were in continual debt.

Thus, the freed Africans were forced to continue to give their labour to the estates and accept unsatisfactory remuneration in a vain attempt to meet their debt obligations. Naturally, this scenario provided another bone of contention between planters and workers in post-Emancipation Tobago.

These conflicts emphasised the cleavages in society, but it was these very cracks which helped to loosen the hold of the dominant class, reducing traditional white social control and allowing other groups upward social movement. Thus the cracks ultimately forced the social change the dominant class tried to avoid.