C. Green a Recalcitrant Plantation Colony : Dominica, 1880-1946

C. Green A recalcitrant plantation colony : Dominica, 1880-1946 Study of the class and gender dialectics in Dominica during one of its boom-bust cycles of plantation economy. This cycle encompassed the state sponsorship and rise and decline of the lime industry and planter class; the subsequent coming into prominence on the peasantry in Dominica's political economy and in Colonial Office policy; the masculinist recoding of peasant proprietorship and production forms; and shifting roles and agency of women. In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 73 (1999), no: 3/4, Leiden, 43-71 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:00:11PM via free access CECILIA GREEN A RECALCITRANT PLANTATION COLONY: DOMINICA, 1880-1946 INTRODUCTION: DOMINICA'S COUNTER-PLANTATION LEGACY In multiple ways, Dominica was an anomalous British colony in the Caribbean. For one, its indigenous Carib population had successfully defended its territorial sovereignty for more than two centuries after the first contact with Europeans, forcing Britain and France, the main colonial contenders, to sign a series of treaties between 1660 and 1748 declaring Dominica (along with St. Vincent) a "neutral" island. The apparent invinci- bility of Dominica's Carib Indians was based in part on the island's formi- dable and near-impenetrable terrain. This unyielding topography would ensure further that Dominica would never sustain a significant plantation economy and would remain at best a "marginal plantation colony." Indeed, when Dominica was finally claimed and settled as a formal colonial project by the British after 1763, the attempt to establish a "normal" plantation structure and rhythm of life was interrupted over the next fifty years by chronic and unremitting Maroon insurgency against the plantations. Dominica's Maroon force, escapees from earlier French and later British attempts to "plantationize" the island's frontier economy, was second only to Jamaica's among Britain's Caribbean colonies. In 1785 they resolved "to destroy every English estate in the island," and set about trying to do so (Marshall 1976:27). It took the British another thirty years to bring them under control. The British had inherited an economy which not only accommodated a number of counter-plantation features, but whose plantation sector was small, organized around the cultivation of (mainly) coffee, had significant links to local (inter-island) markets, and was presided over by a French creole planter class that was as likely to be colored as white. Dominica's fron- New West Indian Guide I Nienwe West-lndische Gids vol. 73 no. 3&4 (1999): 43-71 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:00:11PM via free access 44 CECILIA GREEN tier colonial economy had evolved incrementally as a place of refuge for those who lived, produced, and traded on the margins and in the interstices of the formal colonial order centered in the major (French) sugar islands. It was a location of secondary European and Creole settlement for those who had been displaced by the monopolistic, racially exclusive, and monocrop sugar plantation regime which consumed the social and spatial landscape of Martinique and Guadeloupe, the nearby mother colonies. Dominica played both a sub-colonial provisioning function with respect to those islands and encompassed its own marginal, semi-feudal plantation sector. By 1763 when the British took over, a relatively diversified agro-export economy, dominated by small to medium-sized French and free colored-owned coffee estates worked by small slave workforces, had been established. These enclaves were also saturated in a culturally and linguistically Afro-French Creole and paternalistic Catholic tradition. The British attempt to impose a classic sugar plantation economy upon this base was doomed from the start. With the British takeover, the island's best lands, situated in the large river valleys, quickly came under the owner- ship of British sugar planters. However, fifty years later, in 1815, Dominica produced only 2,205 tons of sugar, compared to 11,590 tons produced by St. Vincent, another late-developing and minor sugar colony (Knight 1978:240). Coffee-producing Dominica did not become a predominantly sugar colony until the 1840s, and even that experience was shortlived and ended by around 1890 (Trouillot 1988:55-57). During the 1890s it was a less important sugar colony than tiny Montserrat with less than half its population. This denouement was typical of Dominica's ambivalent engagement with plantation economy. Its history was characterized by the cyclical retreat and advance of the plantation export regime, deep hegemonic dis- continuities, the struggle between Maroon or peasant and plantation, and the rise and fall of different export crops. Dominica achieved only brief interludes of plantation ascendancy, huge areas literally reverting back to "bush" in periods of plantation decline. Its sugar ascendancy lasted barely forty years; it was an entirely post-emancipation phenomenon, and was characterized by a hostile co-existence of absentee British sugar planters and their resident representatives, a local Creole "colored" planter and political elite,1 and a tenacious sharecropping, freehold and squatter peasantry. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1988:56) notes that "between 1853 and 1883, sugar, rum, and molasses together accounted for 85 percent of the total value of Dominican exports whereas the second most important crop, 1. Honychurch (1984:98) describes these co-existing elite strata - "[t]he mainly French mulatto families and the white attorneys and government officials" - as "two high societies." Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:00:11PM via free access A RECALCITRANT PLANTATION COLONY: DOMINICA, 1880-1946 45 cocoa, contributed a mere 5 percent of such value." By 1889, sugar and its by-products were in decline, accounting for only 44.3 percent of total exports.2 Coffee and cocoa, peasant and lesser plantation crops, accounted for 26 percent of the value of total exports that year. For a brief while, the economic initiative was passed on to freehold peasants and tenant farmers and the sphere of subsistence production was amplified in the island's accounts. However, it was not long before the estate sector rose to prominence once more, induced by special incentives which brought into being a new crop regime and overseas imperial recruits for a new planter class. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT AND EVENTS FROM 1880 TO 1946 In this paper I investigate (aspects of) the class and gender dialectics of development that unfolded in Dominica over the period 1880-1946, during one of its most critical boom-bust cycles of plantation economy. This cycle encompassed the state sponsorship, rise and decline of the lime industry and planter class, the subsequent coming into prominence of the peasantry in the island's political economy and, belatedly, in Colonial Office policy, the masculinist recoding of peasant proprietorship and production forms, and the shifting roles and agency of women. These processes are all exam- ined here. At the turn of the century, the Colonial Office and its local representatives launched an aggressive program of financial incentives and infra- structural supports to induce the development - from overseas recruits — of a settler class in Dominica. Among the incentives provided were cheap Crown lands, property rights regulation and enforcement highlighted by massive land repossession from squatter and tax-delinquent peasants, ongo- ing agricultural extension and research, the development of markets and marketing institutions, roads and utility services, a labor migration scheme, and the training of "peasant boys" as "field hands" for the new estates. Despite all this, the experiment re-enacted the historic failure of the classic plantation model in Dominica. I argue, more implicitly than explicitly, that this was so because the recruits represented an incongruous transplant into an environment which lacked the other conditions for the creation of a planter class, most notably a wage labor force. The "maroon" proclivities of Dominica's producer classes came out of those conditions which enabled them to sustain themselves, at least in significant ways (materially and ide- ologically), outside of the plantations. This counter-plantation tendency 2. Public Record Office (PRO), London, Colonial Office (CO), Annual Report, Leeward Islands 1889 (no. 9), p. 14. Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 08:00:11PM via free access 46 CECILIA GREEN took three prominent forms: outright rebellion,3 migration to preferred non- plantation regional locations,4 and the rejection of wage labor locally, either by total withdrawal from the estate sector or by forcing the planter class to accept sharecropping arrangements on the spatial and juridical domain of the plantation (Trouillot 1988:84-87). While sharecropping or metayage represented a compromise that had to be accepted, the colonial administra- tion and local planters did everything in their power to deter the growth of a free peasantry (sometimes resorting to brutal repression) and, throughout the nineteenth century, sabotaged the expansion of an autonomous peasant economy in-between cycles of active plantation monopoly. With the demise of the lime industry and the convergence of wider imperial interests by 1930, Colonial Office policy acknowledged and even turned in favor of peasant development, proactively and statutorily recoding the latter in masculinist terms. Women, who had formed the larger proportion of the rural labor force over most of the 1880-1930 period, were now faced with a number of alternatives: accommodating or re-inventing themselves within pro- patriarchal peasant structures; seeking relatively autonomous entrepreneur- ial niches within or outside the rural economy; migrating to urban and overseas centers; and embracing increased educational opportunities provided by the colonial state. Most women appear to have exercised one or a com- bination of these options with a great deal of vigor and self-consciousness. 3. There were major rebellions in Dominica in 1844, 1853, 1893, and 1898.

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