ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Internal Economies, Policing, and Food Scarcity under Slavery in eighteenth-Century Jamaica, 1776-1789

• In Event: Food, Scarcity and Knowledge in Colonial and Atlantic Worlds (1500-1800). Panel N. 2

English Abstract

In 1788, the Jamaica Assembly passed an updated code regulating the governance of enslaved people. Among its provisions, it required all enslavers to preserve plantation land to allow enslaved people to cultivate their own provision grounds. This new provision formalized patterns of subsistence that had become central to Jamaican life decades earlier. During a period of intense food scarcity engendered by naval blockades during the American Revolution and volatile hurricanes, island inhabitants turned more and more to crops that enslaved people cultivated themselves on provision grounds, which they customarily possessed on many plantations. As a consequence, Jamaica’s internal economy, in which enslaved people bought, sold, and exchanged these provisions amongst themselves and with others in markets and on plantations, grew ever more important to the daily survival of all people in Jamaica. This paper will explore how the crises of the late 1770s and 1780s intensified enslaved people’s relationship to the internal economy as it simultaneously prompted enslavers to regulate it more closely through an evolving policing regime that drew inspiration from elsewhere in the British imperium. In doing so, this paper will ultimately show how the pressures placed on different Caribbean foodways fostered new forms of surveillance as well as new opportunities for enslaved people to carve out autonomy for themselves under slavery.

Author

• Rachel Tils, University of Chicago