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“A Modified Form of Slavery”: The Credit and Truck Systems in the Bahamas in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Howard Johnson
Howard Johnson
Affiliation:
Nassau, Bahamas
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Extract

In historical writing on the British West Indies, discussion of the transition from slavery to other forms of labour control after emancipation has been largely confined to the plantation colonies. It is usually argued that planters were most successful in controlling former slaves in colonies where they were able to limit the freedman's access to land and thus create a dependent wage-earning proletariat. Such an analysis cannot, however, be readily applied to the Bahamas, where the plantation system based on cotton production had collapsed before emancipation and where the sea provided an important source of subsistence and employment. This article examines the control mechanisms which enabled a white mercantile minority to consolidate its position as a ruling elite in the postemancipation period. Rather than a monopoly of land, the important elements in this elite's economic and social control were a monopoly of the credit available to the majority of the population and the operation of a system of payment in truck. The credit and truck systems frequently left the lower classes in debt and, as a governor of the colony in the late nineteenth century remarked, in a position of “practical slavery. ”

Type
Slavery and Class
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1986 , pp. 729 - 753
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

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23 For a parallel situation in the southern United States after the civil war, see Higgs, Robert. Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (New York, 1977), 55. Sir Ambrose Shea, governor of the colony between 1887 and 1895, recognized that the reliance on credit was largely due to the absence of regular wages. He commented in 1894 after visiting the sisal plantation in Andros owned by the Chamberlain family, “Credit is rigidly refused on this estate and is easily dispensed with when wages are paid weekly.” Sir Ambrose Shea to Marquis of Ripon, no. 63, 24 April 1894, PRO, CO 23/239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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