Tobago 1838-1900: Labour woes, immigration dreams

Dr Rita Pemberton

THE SUGAR planters of Tobago gave very strong indications of their opposition to emancipation during the apprenticeship system from 1834-1838, which was a part of their negotiated compensation package.

Although it was verbalised as a period of preparation of the enslaved population for the responsibilities of freedom, it was in fact a guarantee of labour to the plantations before the onset of full emancipation. This imposition was onerous on the enslaved Africans who were made to bear a part of the cost of their emancipation.

During the years 1834-1838, the plantation owners and their mouthpiece, the Tobago Assembly, made their opposition to emancipation very clear by making every effort to maintain the operation of the slave system to which they had become accustomed on the island. This set the stage for an ongoing conflict between planters and workers, which endured into the 20th century.

During the post-emancipation years, citing what they described as an unwillingness of the resident workers to give their labour to the estates, the lament of the plantation owners was that they suffered from a shortage of labour. This was a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation which developed on the island.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, amid the turbulence caused by French occupation, some estates experienced financial problems. The situation worsened with the termination of the trade in captive Africans in 1808. At this time planters argued that the cost of labour had become extremely high, making plantations operations challenging.

From this period onwards, the consistent planter assessment of the situation was that the sugar industry suffered from a serious shortage of labour, which had to be corrected to make sugar cultivation viable in Tobago. While blame was put squarely on to the shoulders of the workers, there were two major issues which were not included in the planter perception of the equation.

The first issue was that the termination of the trade in captive Africans and the institution of emancipation coincided with a decline in profitability of the sugar industry in some colonies, Tobago being one of them. From the start of the 19th century a pattern of changing land ownership was evident on the island and as the century wore on, estates changed hands with increasing intensity.

The international sugar market situation had changed with the presence of new providers, whose production levels were higher than that of colonies like Tobago. They used modern methods of production while planters in Tobago stuck to the antiquated methods – which they used from the mid-18th century – and these new producers could afford to sell at lower prices. But the major factor was the loss of investor interest in the Tobago sugar industry.

Planters had no access to capital to modernise the industry, so they continued to try to squeeze profits out of a declining industry, selling the lowest quality sugar, which attracted the cheapest prices on the market. In addition, they faced competition from other British colonies – Guyana and Trinidad – and from foreign producers of beet sugar.

The second issue was the nature of the planter/worker relationship that was developed on the island. After 1838, relationships were tense, with each seeing the other as an impediment to its progress. Planter obsession with maintaining an outdated system of labour led to the attempt to operate a system of enslavement during the era of freedom.

This stimulated the resistance of the workers upon whose labour the crumbling sugar empire depended. Because of the shortage of cash and their lack of capital, planters did not have the means to pay wages during freedom, resulting in the widespread implementation of the metayage system. The resident workers were able to wring benefits for themselves with the metayage system, much to the chagrin of the plantation owners.

In the charged atmosphere that existed, planters felt trapped in a system that was proving to be more beneficial to workers than they expected, so they examined other options. Insisting that the problems which they encountered were due to a shortage on labour on the island, their solution was the acquisition of additional labour, pinning their hopes on the introduction of immigrants. But this was not supported by the imperial government, who argued that the island’s revenue could not support immigration schemes.

Planters continued to dream of being able to obtain immigrants to support the sugar industry, which they hoped would give confidence to capital to enter and develop estates to increase their value. But they also wanted to reduce their dependence on the “insubordinate” Africans who refused to work on Saturdays as the planters demanded.

Planters turned to private immigration schemes. Several estates in Windward Tobago started to abandon the metayage system and imported time-expired indentured workers from Trinidad.

Attention was turned to Barbadians who they claimed would be attracted to the possibility of owning land in Tobago, which was not possible in Barbados as access to land was restricted. This venture was not successful because those who came were described as behaving like the Tobago workers.

Another Barbadian scheme brought boys from Dodds Reformatory who were housed and trained for estate labour. The boys absconded from estate work and the accommodation that was provided for them, integrating into the Tobago society. Having received two groups in 1851 and 1863, the assembly unsuccessfully sought to obtain more liberated Africans.

ED Ewen, part owner of Hermitage Estate, looked further afield. He claimed to know that workers in the Azores were glad to migrate, so he wrote to the American consulate asking for assistance to get labourers under the same terms as independent Indian workers. His letter was considered by a committee in the consulate, which reported that even if the wage offered was three times what was on offer, they would not get a single worker to accept. That option was immediately killed.

Without imperial financial support, planter strategy was to raise money internally using taxation to fund immigration schemes. The 1852 Land Tax Act, which applied to owners, tenants, metayers and all users of land, imposed a tax of four shillings an acre on cultivated land and six pence per acre on occupied or unoccupied uncultivated land. That was followed by an another act from which half of the revenue it generated was intended to fund immigration. This law pushed planter/worker relations to an all-time low and stimulated a riot in Scarborough in November 1852.

The Supply Act introduced new personal and income taxes on carts for hire, which fell heavily on the freed Africans. In addition, planters pursued a policy which discriminated between the two contending groups to the disadvantage of the workers.

In 1859, while the export duty on sugar and its by-products was reduced, taxation on the metayers was increased. The revenue it generated was intended to fund immigration. In 1870 the assembly wanted to pass an act to increase the duty on exports and apply two-thirds of the funds to immigration, and provide the remaining one-third from general revenue, which was disallowed.

In desperation, to prevent the growth of a black landowning class, planters began to appropriate large tracts of unused land in proximity to their estates to deprive access to the sea, which provided an important means of alternative employment for the labouring class.

The Tobago planters never abandoned either their conviction that their problems were stimulated by the labour shortage or their hopes of its resolution by importing labour. Neither were their labour woes resolved nor their immigration dreams realised when the crash of the Tobago sugar industry occurred in 1884, increasing opportunities for the emergence of a black landowning class in Tobago and giving reality to their greatest fear.