This study of the evolution of British Guiana’s ethnically divided labor force from 1881 to the riots of 1905, analyzes negative environmental factors and dependent articulation into an international capitalist economy (in deep structural crisis at the end of the nineteenth century) as major constraints upon working-class welfare.
Planter hegemony, formalized in control of the legislature (through a limited franchise) and constitutionally unchallenged until the 1890s by an emergent professional and commercial class (chap. 5), ensured the rise of the law as a restraining (and retaliatory) instrument on and against former slaves’ access to land, and as a perpetuating tool of plantation bondage.
The very tendency of planters to reduce wages or expand task work, however, stimulated the resistance of the emancipated labor force to the vexations of the “free labor” system by strikes, riots, and the search for alternatives outside the plantation. The consequent differentiation of the labor force into plantation workers, independent cultivators, and a third group who were both, ensured that African labor was not “forthcoming on conditions judged essential for the realization of surplus value” (p. 46), and resulted in the importation of indentured—primarily Indian— labor to guarantee planter control over the labor process.
Therefore, “the extent to which an alteration of legal status (Emancipation) was transformed into substantial social change was determined by the class struggle in the post-Emancipation era” (p. 31), while planter hegemony guaranteed that the “class struggle at the point of production would be conditioned primarily by legal sanctions rather than the operation of market forces as such” (p. 33).
Internalization by Indians and Africans of negative European stereotypes (Sammy and Quashie), and planter manipulation of ethnic and cultural differences—including the use of the races to police each other— could only partly conceal the existence of two semiautonomous sets of working-class movements against domination by capital. For the “dialectic of accommodation and resistance is in many ways most perceptible within the history of the East Indian immigrant population” (p. 151), whose sporadic acts of violent protest against “many specific and local grievances” (p. 153) belies the myth of universal Indian docility.
The author disagrees with those who interpret Guyanese history as the inevitable unfolding of racial conflict between the two major ethnic groups. While admitting that Africans and Indians developed competing interests, and that differences in culture constituted obstacles to working-class unity across racial lines, he emphasizes that “the evidence of this early period does not sustain the picture of acute and absolute cultural differences coincident with race” (p. 179).
This scholarly work, elaborately and extensively researched, carefully and compassionately written, is a valuable addition to studies on postemancipation labor history in the Americas, to studies on race and class, and is a valuable, convincing contribution to Guyanese and Caribbean historiography in general.
