Conclusion: “My Color Broke Me Down”: Postslavery Violence and Incomplete Freedom in the British Caribbean

This chapter examines Antigua’s 1858 riot within a trajectory of uprisings around the nineteenth-century British Caribbean and the broader imperial world. This trend of resistance reflects the pitfalls of a partial, racially delimited freedom that brought freedpeople economic, social, and political subordination. It also revealed that in colonial settings with a history of racialized slavery, violence was the language of power that all social classes readily understood. These moments of violence represented colonial subjects’ attempts to seize power long denied to them. But the chapter also highlights the distinctions of Antigua’s uprising, in particular with Antiguan rebels first shaping their movement against Barbudans in equal racial and socioeconomic position to them, and then progressing to opposing more-powerful others. The 1858 riot, in light of the preceding struggles, big and small, that unfolded since 1834, proved that freedom in the midst of colonial domination was doomed to devolve into a less expansive, more delimited construct, mitigating the extent to which any aspect of freedom could be truly enjoyed by black working people.