Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society

by Matthew C. Reilly

Overview

First book-length archaeological study of a nonelite white population on a Caribbean plantation

Archaeology below the Cliff: Race, Class, and Redlegs in Barbadian Sugar Society is the first archaeological study of the poor whites of Barbados, the descendants of seventeenth-century European indentured servants and small farmers. “Redlegs” is a pejorative to describe the marginalized group who remained after the island transitioned to a sugar monoculture economy dependent on the labor of enslaved Africans. A sizable portion of the “white” minority, the Redlegs largely existed on the peripheries of the plantation landscape in an area called “Below Cliff,” which was deemed unsuitable for profitable agricultural production. Just as the land on which they resided was cast as marginal, so too have the poor whites historically and contemporarily been derided as peripheral and isolated as well as idle, alcoholic, degenerate, inbred, and irrelevant to a functional island society and economy.

Using archaeological, historical, and oral sources, Matthew C. Reilly shows how the precarious existence of the Barbadian Redlegs challenged elite hypercapitalistic notions of economics, race, and class as they were developing in colonial society. Experiencing pronounced economic hardship, similar to that of the enslaved, albeit under very different circumstances, Barbadian Redlegs developed strategies to live in a harsh environment. Reilly’s investigations reveal that what developed in Below Cliff was a moral economy, based on community needs rather than free-market prices.

Reilly extensively excavated households from the tenantry area on the boundaries of the Clifton Hall Plantation, which was abandoned in the 1960s, to explore the daily lives of poor white tenants and investigate their relationships with island economic processes and networks. Despite misconceptions of strict racial isolation, evidence also highlights the importance of poor white encounters and relationships with Afro-Barbadians. Historical data are also incorporated to address how an underrepresented demographic experienced the plantation landscape. Ultimately, Reilly’s narrative situates the Redlegs within island history, privileging inclusion and embeddedness over exclusion and isolation.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817392420
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	09/03/2019
Series:	Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Matthew C. Reilly is assistant professor of anthropology at the City College of New York.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF PLANTATION MODERNITY

The history of the West Indies is governed by two factors, the sugar plantation and Negro slavery. ... Wherever the sugar plantation and slavery existed, they imposed a pattern. It is an original pattern, not European, not African, not a part of the American main, not native in any conceivable sense of that word, but West Indian, sui generis, with no parallel anywhere else. The sugar plantation has been the most civilising as well as the most demoralising influence in West Indian development. When three centuries ago the slaves came to the West Indies, they entered directly into the large-scale agriculture of the sugar plantation, which was a modern system.

— C. L. R. James (1963:391–392).

Plantation agriculture has drastically diminished across the Caribbean over the last century. In fact, on many islands, sugar production, the staple monocrop that long defined the region's economy, has been almost completely abandoned. Sugar production in Barbados, now under the domain of the government, is on its last legs, with only one sugar factory, Portvale, remaining in operation as of 2017. Despite the industry's decline, the plantation infrastructure has left an enduring physical imprint across the landscape in the form of windmills and works in a state of ruin, a mix of dilapidated and restored planter great houses, vast acreage of agricultural fields, and plantation tenantries inhabited by a few remaining agricultural laborers and the descendants of laborers who now look elsewhere to make ends meet. For many Barbadians, their lives, or at least the lives of their ancestors, are inextricably tied to the plantation in one way or another. Individuals relate to the plantation in myriad ways, but its place as a central, if not the central, institution in island history and society is undeniable.

This case study marks an attempt, in a long line of such attempts, to illustrate how a particular group lived their daily lives and understood their place in a plantation society. Of the utmost significance, however, is the fact that those being examined here were free plantation residents racially identified as white during a period when the overwhelming majority of plantation residents were enslaved (until 1834) or free people of African descent (following emancipation). Therefore, the poor whites experienced the contours of the plantation in substantively different ways from enslaved laborers or those identified as Afro-Barbadians. Their class and racial positioning were formative, yet not necessarily defining, features of daily life in a racialized and agro-industrial society. This assessment derives from underlying tensions between the socially, economically, and politically encoded tropes of modernity colonial rule imposed and the resulting alternatives that emerged in seemingly marginal plantation locales.

The Caribbean is an ideal world region in which to investigate the early instantiations of the development of modern industrial systems and ideologies associated with labor. That being stated, this chapter suggests a reimagining of plantation spaces to explore the components of Caribbean modernity and how they were imposed, transformed, and experienced along and in between lines of race and class. Central to this endeavor is an underlying question about Caribbean modernity: What did it mean to be marked as poor and white in a society based on white, plantocratic power and race-based slavery? Necessary for undertaking such a project is an explication of modernity as it relates to the Caribbean region and archaeology, the central methodology of this study, more broadly.

CARIBBEAN MODERNITY

Modernity is a relatively elusive and often haphazardly used term that has been the subject of extensive, diverse, and dense scholarly debate. In her critique of the exceptionalism and cluttered characteristics of modernity, Shannon Dawdy (2010:762) has remarked that "scholars have used modernity as a stand-in for all or part of that inexorable cluster of capitalism, secularism, industrialization, colonialism, the onset of Atlantic slavery, individualism and the divided subject, technological involution, urbanization, global integration, science and rationality, mass literacy, aesthetic modernism, the nation-state, and so-on." The ambiguity of modernity as a theoretical construct has also spawned an onslaught of labels attempting to define and bound the critique, death, acceleration, failure, or nonexistence of modernity; these include postmodernity (Harvey 1990), late capitalism (Jameson 1991), and supermodernity (Augé 1995). In place of an exhaustive review of modernity and its discontents, I instead discuss its direct relationship to historical archaeology in terms of the temporalities and subjects of inquiry as well as its context-specific significance in the Caribbean region.

Still relevant as one of the premier texts in historical archaeology, James Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten defined the field as "the archaeology of the spread of European cultures throughout the world since the fifteenth century, and their impact on and interaction with the cultures of indigenous peoples" (Deetz 1996 [1977]:5). Over the years this definition has been expanded, critiqued, altered, and reaffirmed in a number of fashions. Permutations of this definition nonetheless privilege and mark as exceptional the past 500 years or so, creating an often-cumbersome disciplinary schism between those studying the pre- and post-1492 eras. This divide has been critiqued on a number of levels. For instance, some have lamented the ease with which archaeologists have accepted the nature of the discipline to be synonymous with the study of modernity (for archaeology and modernity, see Thomas 2004; Hamilakis 2007; Dawdy 2010; González-Ruibal 2013). The practices of historical archaeology and anthropology more broadly, Dawdy argues, "remain very much embedded in an eschatology of modern rupture" (2010:763), that is, the schism between premodern and modern.

I make no pretense to resolve these grandiose yet important debates. It is incumbent on archaeological research, however, to consider the localized and regional implications for the study and experience of modernity. In short, modernity is perceived differently across space and time. In addition to this truism, rather than being a static entity or a directional progression, it is never complete, and its associated processes alter and function differently based on local contingencies (see Gaonkar, ed. 2001). How modernity is perceived, (re)constructed, and experienced in the past and present is vastly different and often divergent despite historical and contemporary similarities such as colonialism and its associated imperial formations (Stoler 2013). Rather than using overarching and cumbersome definitions or conceptualizations of global modernity, a more regional and localized approach can situate how the clunky manifestations of modernity played out on particular landscapes, within particular psyches, through localized politics, in socioeconomics, and in the shaping of history.

If historical archaeology, by definition, is somewhat wedded to what might arguably be called the modern period, perhaps it is only fitting that it be a useful discipline for exploring what some have deemed the first modern place. It is here, after all, that Columbus first "discovered" the Americas. Since the groundbreaking 1938 publication of C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, scholars of and from the Caribbean have emphasized the inextricable link between the region and modernity. As Stephan Palmié suggests, due to the early onset of industrializing processes, "the Caribbean might well be regarded as one of the first truly modern localities" (2002:41; see also Benítez-Rojo 1996). David Scott, in explicating James's understanding of Caribbean modernity, argues that the Caribbean was an "inaugural modernity" for two distinct reasons. First, "there were no nonmodern formations in the Caribbean with which the colonial powers had continuously to contend" (2004:125). As Scott notes, James was surely exaggerating this point, and recent historiography has illustrated the depth and severity of European genocide against Caribbean Amerindians (for a review see Beckles 2013). As this case study focuses on Barbados, however, the point is well taken, given that the island is said to have been uninhabited at the time of English settlement in 1627. James's second parameter has been echoed by many scholars who have characterized Caribbean modernity by the onset and rapid expansion and acceleration of agro-industrial production — in most cases, sugar (see Mintz 1974:9–10, 1985; Ortiz 1995).

In this sense, Haitian-born historical anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot's suggestion (2003:36–37) that processes of modernization, or "creation of place," and cultural modernity are not mutually exclusive is paramount to understanding the dramatic transformations enveloping the Caribbean as sugar production spread throughout the region in the mid-seventeenth century. Modernization can be described as the physical, material, and spatial components of settler colonialism and agro-industrial production that expanded throughout the Atlantic world beginning with the Columbian encounter. The implementation and expansion of this system have certainly been important fields of archaeological study (see Woodward 2011; Delle 2014b; Meniketti 2015). Cultural modernity, according to Trouillot, brings the space and place specifics of modernization into a social and temporal framework, thus assisting in defining more abstract cultural attributes associated with a particular time and place. For instance, and of the utmost significance for the purposes of this case study, we might view cultural modernity as the rise of modern notions of race and labor. Modernization and cultural modernity were co-constitutive of each other as local transformations birthed arguably the world's first modern locale, at least in terms of the how modernization is characterized here. The development of Caribbean modernity is therefore tied to the concomitant rise of the plantation complex and the exponential increase in the number of enslaved Africans being sent to the islands. As Scott points out, "Plantation slavery is the fundamental institution through which [the modern] experience is shaped and articulated" (Scott 2004:126; see also Gilroy 1993). Despite ambiguities about the nature of and distinction between bound laborers in seventeenth-century Barbados, given the presence of European and African laborers (see Handler and Reilly 2017; Newman 2013), race-based plantation slavery became indexical of Caribbean modernity. Additionally, industrialized labor found an early home in sweltering sugar factories, capitalism charged into adolescence in the form of joint-stock-company property mortgaging and circum-Atlantic mercantilism (Armstrong and Reilly 2014), and ideologies of racial difference began to crystallize throughout the century (Shaw 2013).

The character of Caribbean modernity described here is a notable departure from other conceptions of modernity that have engaged with the messy ontological and epistemological dimensions of the analytical construct. Temporally, the modernizing processes unfolding in the mid-seventeenth-century Caribbean predate the height of the European Enlightenment by roughly a century. Often associated with the birth of modernity, the Enlightenment marked a turn toward reason, positivism, and secularism (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Such renderings of modernity reveal a Eurocentrism inherent in attributing the advent of enlightened thought to the West, thus divorcing it from any association with colonial encounters (Bogues 2003:2). While colonies may have been seen as "laboratories of modernity" (Cooper and Stoler, eds. 1997:5) where social, economic, and political ideas could be developed and deployed (see Rabinow 1989), the colonial homeland (or at least its representatives) is given primacy for the development of the modern. In short, this suggests that modernity was something that developed in Europe to be transmitted to the colonies. In sharp contrast, it can be argued that in contexts like the Caribbean, modernity was conceived and transformed in unique ways that dramatically affected its character throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. Treating the Caribbean as an inaugural modernity combats such privileging of the metropole, instead demonstrating the heterogeneous nature of colonial/metropole relationships as well as the tensions that transpire in local sites of modernization (Cooper and Stoler 1997; Delle 2014a).

The English visited Barbados in 1625 and officially established it as a colony in 1627. Despite England's relatively late entrée into New World colonial expansion, as compared with Spanish and Portuguese endeavors, the seventeenth century was a formative period in which plantation societies exploded and expanded across the Barbadian and broader-Caribbean landscape. The plantation system, despite significant local variations across space and time, would have an unparalleled impact on Caribbean society, politics, economics, and geography over the next several centuries (for Barbados see Beckles 2007; for the broader Caribbean see Williams 1984; Higman 2011; Thompson 2002). This narrative is, however, a drastic oversimplification of what constitutes the modern period throughout the Caribbean region. There is truth to this macro-history and the tragic realities associated with these overarching processes and events, but at the same time, they can be overdeterminate in how they are remembered, presented, and wielded in the present (Trouillot 1992; Richard 2010:3–4; Hayes 2013; Reilly 2016a).

The broader narrative of Caribbean modernity has largely influenced the way regional history and society are portrayed and perceived in the past and present — the specifics of which will be discussed in more detail. Within the fissures of this historical trajectory, however, exist the alternatives that developed and transformed as a result of the dialectical relationships between individuals and groups thrust into processes of modernization. While such alternatives have been consciously and unconsciously suppressed or ignored (Fischer 2004; Trouillot 1995; Schmidt and Patterson 1995), historical archaeology is well suited to unearth and illuminate localized material manifestations of contexts where and when individuals did not adhere to the prescribed norms of Caribbean modernity. We might therefore look for productive potential in archaeology's fraught relationship with modernity. Whereas Michel-Rolph Trouillot described historicity as "the nightmare of the ethnographer" (1992:33), for those investigating the heterogeneity of the Caribbean, it can also serve as a recurring dream for those willing to embrace the ambiguities, inconsistencies, and dynamic realities of the historical processes that made possible the multiplicity of Caribbean modernity (for archaeological approaches that highlight the intractable nature of colonial and/or modern projects, see Hall 2000; Dawdy 2008).

THE "POOR WHITE PROBLEM"

The sugar revolution that erupted in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century dramatically altered the trajectory of Atlantic-world history, spawning the economic, political, and social structures associated with plantation agro-industry that enveloped much of the Americas. The nuances and permutations of this system have long been the focus of considerable scholarly study. Since the work of Caribbean intellectuals such as C. L. R. James (1963 [1938]) and Eric Williams (1994 [1944]), radical Caribbean scholarship has highlighted the dark legacies and realities of colonialism, capitalism, and slavery (see also Césaire 2000 [1955]; Fanon 2008 [1952], 2004 [1961]; Wynter 2003). While Howard Johnson (1998:ix) has argued that such analyses have had the unintended effect of dismissing the narrative of the white minority's experience, I argue that the experience of wealthy white men loomed large and omnipresent within the very structures and institutions that sought to circumscribe the lives of the enslaved and other exploited colonial subjects (Mills 1997). Although this may be the case for the plantocracy, it presents challenges when considering a poor white minority who coped with economic hardship in a slave society, a largely black postemancipation colony, and, later, an independent nation.

In essence, an investigation of the poor whites of Barbados appears to run against the grain of vindicationist scholarship as espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois. In his formulation, such scholarship sought to "set straight the oft-distorted record of the Black experience and to fill in the lacunae resulting from the conscious or unconscious omission of significant facts about Black people"(Drake 1987, vol. 1:xviii; cited in Foster 1997:2). As Paul Mullins (2008) has articulated, such an approach appeals to historical archaeologists conducting research in settings where individuals and groups are coping with persistent racism and the legacy of slavery in the present (for a compelling reply concerning the nuances of the African diasporic experience, see Armstrong 2008). In conducting research in a twenty-first-century context still characterized by "white over black" consciousness, ideology, structures, and realities that were developing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where does that leave an analysis of impoverished whites in a sugar and slave society?

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Archaeologies of Plantation Modernity

Chapter 2. Redlegs on the Plantation Landscape

Chapter 3. Below Cliff: Excavating and Engaging with a Plantation Community

Chapter 4. Socioeconomic (In)Activity

Chapter 5. “A Numerous Race of Mulattoes”: (De)Constructing Racial Barriers

Chapter 6. Alternative Modernities below the Cliff

Notes

References Cited

Index

Editorial Reviews

Archaeology below the Cliff is a very holistic and strong anthropological approach to Caribbean history and archaeology. The book exemplifies the very best in anthropological methodologies and theoretical approaches.”
—Georgia L. Fox, author of The Archaeology of Smoking and Tobacco


“Archaeology below the Cliff is theoretically sophisticated and breaks new ground by exploring the lives of people who have been ignored in traditional Caribbean history and archaeology. It is a provocative historical anthropological study that blurs disciplinary boundaries of archaeology, history, and anthropology.”
—Frederick H. Smith, author of The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking

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