Valuing labor: Slavery, indenture, and circulating silver in British Guiana, 1830s-1890s

• In Event: Making and Valuing Money in the Americas, 17th – 19th centuries

Abstract

By the 1830s, the provinces of Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice, united as the colony of British Guiana, creaked under a medley of legal and money structures. In Berbice, the last province to be united within British Guiana, a particular kind of paper money circulated, dating back to promissory notes of a former chartered company under Dutch tutelage in the eighteenth century. In Demerara and Essequibo, the Dutch guilder was used but circulated in short supply. Each of these harked back to previous colonial occupations and the ways in which the provinces, and finally united colony, were constructed for the purpose of a plantation and, most importantly, a slavery society. The Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, followed by the transition system of apprenticeship and eventually indentured labor that saw the state-sponsored migration of laborers from India was a cataclysmic shift in the everyday economic life of the colony. At its most fundamental level, suddenly laborers had to paid in currencies that were in short supply. This paper will trace the history and transformation of monetary practices, the very handling of money, what kind, and by whom, in British Guiana as the system of labor changed over the course of the nineteenth century. In doing so, it will explore the materiality of these currencies that underpinned the economic lives of plantation laborers and highlight the ways in which these laborers, through their practices, influenced monetary policies.

Author

• Louise Moschetta