2 Everyday resistance: enslavement in the Caribbean

The plantation system was designed to ensure compliance through intense supervision, violent discipline, and the creation of internal hierarchies. Enslaved people were able to find ways to subvert the absolute exercise of power through ‘everyday resistance’.

But what does this concept mean? It was theorised by anthropologist James C. Scott in relation to class struggle as an integral tool of dissent for relatively powerless groups. He gave some examples: ‘foot-dragging, dissimulations, false compliance, feigned ignorance, desertion, pilfering, smuggling, poaching, arson, slander, sabotage, surreptitious assault and murder, anonymous threats’ (Scott, 1985, p. 34). He stated that these are ‘the techniques of “first resort” in those common historical circumstances in which open defiance is impossible or entails mortal danger’.

Figure 3 Plate 17 in Richard Bridgens, West India Scenery...from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in ... Trinidad (London, 1836). Stocks were kept on plantations as punishment for less serious infractions of discipline such as being late for work or not finishing a task. Visible in the background is a metal mask which was used for punishments such as insubordination.

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A black and white image depicting two enslaved African men with their feet in the stocks. One man is awake and staring angrily with his hands bound behind his back. The other man is asleep under a blanket with his hands unbound. A metal mask is visible on the wall in the background.

Figure 3 Plate 17 in Richard Bridgens, West India Scenery...from sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence of seven years in ... ...

Enslaved people engaged in acts which enabled them to undermine the system of labour and the ideas that underpinned it. These activities allowed them to exercise some limited forms of autonomy. Working slowly, losing or breaking tools, arriving late, completing tasks poorly or sabotaging them were all ways that enslaved people could exert some influence on the labour regime.

For enslaved domestic workers there were many ways they could discomfort their captors whilst performing service. Frequently in accounts written by slave-owners they described enslaved people as lazy, clumsy, or artful. In 1770, when Thomas Thistlewood flogged an enslaved man Jimmy for setting fire to the piazza, he recorded in his diary his anger at Jimmy’s ‘impudence, laziness, carelessness, lying’. Slave-owners suspected that enslaved people performed inadequately but their own ideological insistence on Black people as inferior meant that they could be tricked by their own beliefs. One area of concern for slave-owners was the preparation of food. Accusations of poisoning were common in the Caribbean and were sometimes linked to the practice of Obeah. The degree to which these fears were founded is uncertain given the lack of evidence which criminal convictions rested upon.

What evidence do we have for the kinds of ‘everyday resistance’ that Scott outlined? One set of records that sheds light on these practices come from Berbice (in what is now Guyana). In 1826 it introduced its own slave code which created the position of ‘protector of slaves’. This individual was tasked with collecting and analysing the legally mandated forms filled out by slave-owners which documented any punishments meted out on the plantations. Failure to cooperate resulted in a fine. This created a bureaucratic record of the subversive activities of enslaved people and the response from slave-owners. We do not know how complete or accurate these records were, and they cannot tell us everything we might want to know about the motivations of enslaved people, but they do offer a partial view into these behaviours.