ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

“This country work”: Enslaved people’s water knowledges in nineteenth-century Berbice

• In Event: Water Knowledge and Water Experts II

English Abstract

What do water knowledge and other forms of aquatic expertise mean in a historical context where its possessors were themselves treated as property? In nineteenth-century Berbice, more than nine in ten inhabitants were enslaved people of West African descent. A low-lying riverine colony of empoldered plantations intersected by hundreds of creeks and regularly inundated, knowing how to live with water was essential to survival in Berbice. Enslaved Berbiceans combined African traditions of water knowledge with hard-won experience of the ebb and flow of environmental processes in a slave plantation colony. This paper reconstructs the water knowledge exhibited by enslaved people in their complaints to the Berbice Office of the Fiscal, a body of documentation which preserves the words of enslaved people to an extent unparalleled elsewhere in the archives of the British West Indian colonies. Enslaved complainants deployed knowledge of both tidal systems and plantation hydraulics when they complained about ill-treatment to the fiscal. At times, enslaved workers asserted superior expertise over white overseers who exploited their labour within a coastal landscape constructed by forced work, as when one enslaved man defiantly told the fiscal that the overseer on his estate “knows nothing of this country work” – the arduous and highly-seasonal patterns of labour required to maintain empoldered plantations where enslaved people toiled for the enrichment of others. Reconstructing the water knowledges of enslaved people raises important questions about the possession of expertise and who has profited by it throughout history.

Author

• Frederick Bricknell, University of Hull