Slave Societies outside of Empire: The Neutral Islands of the Southern Caribbean, 1730–62

How was slavery practiced and policed beyond the boundaries of colonial rule? Focusing on the southern Caribbean islands of St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Dominica, which remained outside the sphere of European control until after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), this paper explores how unfree labor operated in the absence of formal institutions of empire.

Despite lying outside the mercantilist networks that sought to control the trade in enslaved people and the goods they produced, in the middle decades of the eighteenth century the islands developed a slave society that was integral to—yet technically outside the jurisdiction of—the English and French empires.

For the period prior to 1763, the Dubois database of transatlantic slave voyages lists only 273 enslaved Africans as disembarking in the ‘neutral’ islands. Yet by the time that Dominica, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia were incorporated into existing empires, the islands’ small mixed-agriculture plantations were worked by more than 14,000 slaves. Drawing on colonial correspondence, parish registers, and private papers housed in the Caribbean, France, and Great Britain, this paper will trace the origins of this enslaved population and explore its role in the wider economies and societies of early America.

Chattel slavery is often analyzed primarily as an economic or legal institution. Recent scholarship emphasizes the extent to which slavery and sovereignty were mutually constitutive; as enslaved people and slave owners attempted to resolve their individual or collective claims through specific legal regimes, they participated in validating the right of said regime to exercise rule. By studying how individuals—not Crowns—extended the practice of slavery ‘beyond the line’ of European rule, this paper reconsiders slavery as ‘predicament;’ one not always adequately explained with reference to evolving legal regimes.