The apprenticeship system was designed to ease the transition from slavery to freedom by forcing the ex-slaves to remain on their plantations for a period of six years. Its main purpose was to prevent the immediate large-scale abandonment of estates by the workers, although, with cruel irony, it was the masters and not the slaves who were awarded compensation for the loss of their "property."
In Barbados apprenticeship was implemented in a particularly cruel fashion. The 12-year tenure of labor contracts there was the longest in the British Caribbean. Black and colored laborers were paid just 9 to 11 pence per day, the lowest wages of all indentured workers in the region; were charged exorbitant rents; and were barred from participating in the island's educational systems. Great Britain repealed apprenticeship in 1838, but in 1838 and 1840 the Masters and Servant Act, also known as the Contract Law, institutionalized discrimination against black and colored workers in Barbados. Little changed over the next 60 years. Black and colored workers were confined to laboring on sugar plantations, and few earned enough to purchase their own land.
The system proved too cumbersome to administer and was prematurely terminated in 1838. Barbados and Antigua abolished slavery without an apprenticeship system in 1834.
To mitigate labor difficulties, the local assemblies were encouraged to import nominally free laborers from India, China, and Africa under contracts of indenture. Apart from the condition that they had a legally defined term of service and were guaranteed a set wage, these Asian indentured laborers were treated like the African slaves they partially replaced in the fields and factories. Between 1838 and 1917, nearly half a million East Indians (from British India) came to work on the British West Indian sugar plantations, the majority going to the new sugar producers with fertile lands. Trinidad imported 145,000; Jamaica, 21,500; Grenada, 2,570; St. Vincent, 1,820; and St. Lucia, 1,550. Between 1853 and 1879, British Guiana imported more than 14,000 Chinese workers, with a few going to some of the other colonies. Between 1841 and 1867, about 32,000 indentured Africans arrived in the British West Indies, with the greater number going to Jamaica and British Guiana. With important British politicians such as Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) owning sugar estates in British Guiana, that colony, directly administered by the crown, assumed great importance in the Caribbean.
Indentured labor did not resolve the problems of the plantations and the local governments in the Caribbean during the nineteenth century, but it enabled the sugar plantations to weather the difficulties of the transition from slave labor.
The East Indians introduced rice and boosted the local production of cacao (the bean from which cocoa is derived) and ground provisions (tubers, fruits, and vegetables). Although some East Indians eventually converted to Christianity and intermarried with other ethnic groups, the majority remained faithful to their original Hindu and Muslim beliefs, adding temples and mosques to the religious architecture of the territories.
The Chinese moved into local commerce, and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the corner Chinese grocery store and the Chinese restaurant had become commonplace in all the colonies.
THE COLONIAL CARIBBEAN
Despite the formal abolition of slavery, colonial rule in the Caribbean ensured that economic activity and social relationships remained very similar on a day to day level. Most of the former slaves not occupied in domestic service or legally bound to the sugar estates, cultivated small plots of land to supply their own needs and began fostering the internal market which had begun to form even during slavery. But the economy was largely geared to supplying an external market, and every aspect of life echoed the hierarchy of slavery, with local or expatriate Britons firmly in control.
In any case many former slaves refused to work on the estates which had been the site of their servitude, and it was obvious that a more reliable source of labour was needed. From 1845 onwards, hundreds of thousands of indentured immigrants from India arrived at the request of the planters in the British colonies - Trinidad, Jamaica, Grenada, Guyana and St. Vincent.
FREE VILLAGES
Emancipation of the slaves provided the catalyst for the rise of an energetic, dynamic peasantry throughout the Caribbean. A large proportion of the ex-slaves settled in free villages, often forming cooperatives to buy bankrupt or abandoned sugar estates. Where they lacked the capital, they simply squatted on vacant lands and continued the cultivation of many of the food crops that the planters and the colonial government had exported during the days of slavery.
The villages, although largely independent, provided a potential labor pool that could be attracted to the plantations. The growth of these free villages immediately after the emancipation of the slaves was astonishing. In Jamaica, black freeholders increased from 2,014 in 1838 to more than 7,800 in 1840 and more than 50,000 in 1859. In Barbados, where land was scarcer and prices higher, freeholders of less than 2 hectares each increased from 1,110 in 1844 to 3,537 in 1859. In St. Vincent, about 8,209 persons built their own homes and bought and brought under cultivation over 5,000 hectares between 1838 and 1857. In Antigua, 67 free villages with 5,187 houses and 15,644 inhabitants were established between 1833 and 1858. The free villages produced new crops such as coconuts, rice, bananas, arrowroot, honey, and beeswax, as well as the familiar plantation crops of sugarcane, tobacco, coffee, cacao, citrus limes, and ground provisions.
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