
How do people bound by the chains
of slavery become free? The students in the Fall 2001 edition of History
300: Caribbean History, investigated that question. The diverse slave
plantation colonies of the Caribbean basin all experienced emancipation
between the 1790s and the 1880s. Enslaved people overthrew the murderous
planter regime of St.-Domingue in the Haitian Revolution. The rise of
reform movements helped lead to state-imposed emancipation in British
colonies like Jamaica and Barbados during the 1830s. Meanwhile, the
search for freedom from Spain, plus changing technologies helped to
bring about the gradual freeing of Cuban slaves between the 1860s and
the 1880s.
The people of
the Caribbean islands, survivors of brutal slave regimes (a previous
class created a website [http://scholar.library.miami.edu/slaves/]
that dealt with resistance to slavery in the Caribbean,) had to carve
out new economic, political, and personal identities for themselves.
Often they did so under the hostile eyes of former slaveowners and metropolitan
whites ready to see every bump in the road as evidence of black "inferiority."
When they sought "too much" freedom, as outsiders or as oppressive
internal elites saw it, ex-slaves often faced new limits on their achievements,
as in Jamaica during the time of Morant Bay, in Haiti, and elsewhere.
By the end of the century, economic troubles, conflicts, and other problems
gave already racist outside observers excuses to claim that freedom
had failed.
And yet Caribbean people would have disagreed. They were still in the
middle of defining what freedom meant. They forged their own cultures,
their own communities, and their own ways to survive in a hostile world.
Forward in their generations, they moved triumphantly. The student essays
and web pages of this site present part of that story.