Building the Bridge: Labor and Colonial Governance in Seventeenth-Century Bridgetown
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Title Page Building the Bridge: Labor and Colonial Governance in Seventeenth-Century Bridgetown, Barbados by Jacob Eliezer Pomerantz Bachelor of Arts, Wheaton College, MA (2012) Master of Arts, University of Pittsburgh (2015) Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2021 Committee Membership Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Jacob Eliezer Pomerantz It was defended on March 8, 2021 and approved by Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor Department of History Niklas Frykman, Assistant Professor, Department of History Edda Fields-Black, Associate Professor, Department of History (Carnegie Mellon University) Dissertation Director: Molly Warsh, Associate Professor, Department of History ii Copyright © by Jacob Eliezer Pomerantz 2021 iii Abstract Title Page Building the Bridge: Labor and Colonial Governance in Seventeenth-Century Bridgetown, Barbados Jacob Eliezer Pomerantz, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2021 For much of the seventeenth-century, Bridgetown, Barbados was one of England’s principal ports in the early modern Caribbean and wider Atlantic world. It was a dynamic center of colonial trade; the product of its location at the heart of an immensely wealth and vastly unequal sugar plantation slave society on Barbados. Despite the port’s value and vital place in the history of England’s first commercial empire in the Americas, Bridgetown’s seventeenth-century social history remains relatively under-studied. This dissertation examines the ways its inhabitants, free and enslaved, navigated the maritime landscapes of the early modern Caribbean. A consideration of Bridgetown’s seventeenth-century history reveals an unstable and fractious social, economic, political, and cultural landscape, the product of a shifting array of actors, institutions, and circumstances rather than seamless colonial development and imperial integration. Local struggles on Barbados, shaped by the fluid and feverish uncertainty of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, informed the actions of Bridgetown’s inhabitants as they worked to carve out an urban space of mobility in a maritime world revolutionized by the dramatic expansion of sugar plantations, a vastly expanded transatlantic slave trade, and the rise of global capitalism in the early modern Caribbean. As English settlers grappled with the problems of imposing social and economic control over rapidly urbanizing spaces like Bridgetown, they relied on fragmented systems of colonial power. In fits and starts, English settlers acted through multiple institutions to govern iv Bridgetown’s fragmented social, cultural, and economic landscapes producing a system of governance that persisted into the eighteenth century as a central component in the colony’s slave society. The realities of colonial power and governance in ports like Bridgetown were complicated by the divergent interests of colonists themselves, the aspirations of transient sailors and settlers, and the struggles of enslaved people to shape the cities and towns they lived in. By recovering these histories, this dissertation argues that the fragmented nature of colonial power systems, evident in Bridgetown’s early history, enabled the creation and expansion of remarkably durable and adaptive, if not violent and repressive, Caribbean slave societies. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii 1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 The Caribbean Context .................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Bridgetown, Barbados, and the Plantation Complex .................................................. 9 1.3 Labor and Colonial Government ................................................................................ 15 2.0 Making Bridgetown English: The Port and Colonial Governance in Early Seventeenth-Century Barbados ............................................................................................ 18 2.1 Atlantic Merchants and the Commodity Boom ......................................................... 27 2.2 Sugar and the Making of an Atlantic Market............................................................ 33 2.3 Bridgetown and the Navigation Acts .......................................................................... 44 2.4 Bridgetown, Plantation Labor, and the Western Design .......................................... 48 2.5 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 61 3.0 Strangers to the Plantation: Sailors, Quakers, Sephardim, and Poor Whites ................ 64 3.1 The Cage ........................................................................................................................ 68 3.2 Commerce, Conflict, and Maritime Labor on the Waterfront ................................ 76 3.3 “Nothing Tending to ye Disturbance of the Peace”: Barbados’s Quakers and Sephardim ........................................................................................................................... 80 3.4 “Seeming Mad Men”: Settler Poverty, Vagrancy and the Port ............................... 84 3.5 Crisis of the Mid-1670s ................................................................................................ 94 3.6 The Persistence of Religious Diversity ...................................................................... 105 vi 3.7 “The Fewer the Better”: Civic Improvement and the Decline of Indentured Servitude ............................................................................................................................ 111 3.8 Building Bridgetown’s “Middle” From Below ........................................................ 117 3.9 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 122 4.0 The Geographies of Slavery and Urban Governance, 1690-1710................................... 123 4.1 Disease and Disorder .................................................................................................. 126 4.2 Barbados Crisis of the Late-Seventeenth Century .................................................. 135 4.3 The 1692 Conspiracy: Mapping the Social Geographies of Slavery and Resistance in Bridgetown .................................................................................................................... 143 4.4 Policing Bridgetown ................................................................................................... 152 4.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 164 5.0 Bridgetown’s Builders: The Parish, Merchants, Planters and Barbados’s Building Industry ................................................................................................................................. 166 5.1 A Parish Problem and the Colony’s Concern .......................................................... 169 5.2 Building for the Parish ............................................................................................... 182 5.3 Building in Their Own Right: Merchants Turned Builder .................................... 191 5.4 Xmas Gang and the Building Industry Transformed ............................................. 206 6.0 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 211 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 218 vii Acknowledgements Completing this dissertation in a year of pandemic and the total disruption of “normal” life has made me profoundly grateful for the many people who have helped make this work possible. I would like to thank Molly Warsh, Marcus Rediker, Niklas Frykman, and Edda Fields- Black. The members of my committee have been generous with their time, knowledge, and patience as I have worked through completing this dissertation. None of this work would have been possible without their guidance. Molly Warsh has been critical in helping me navigate the challenges of writing and thinking about the early modern Caribbean. Her encouragement, good humor, and intellectual rigor have been constant sources of inspiration. No one has been more formative to this project and my scholarly development than Marcus Rediker. Without his early guidance and support this project would not have taken shape. Back when we still worked in Posvar Hall, Niklas Frykman always had his door open to let me thresh out my latest ideas and provide useful insight. I’m grateful for Edda Fields-Black for serving on my committee and providing key feedback on this project in its early stages. The support of the following institutions made this dissertation possible. At the University of Pittsburgh, the World History Center, European Studies Center, Social Science Doctoral Dissertation, and Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Summer Research fellowships allowed me to conduct the research necessary for this project. The last six months participating in