“Property of This Description Had Always Been Held Sacred”: Provision Grounds and the Politics of Amelioration in British Caribbean Slavery

Scholarship on the “amelioration” of slavery in British North America and the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has usually focused on the degree to which planters and managers attempted to “improve” the overall treatment of slaves in the decades before and after the abolition of the slave trade. More recently, historians have begun to explore how amelioration fit into a broader political project on the part of metropolitan and colonial governments to more carefully oversee and regulate the physical conditions and reproduction of enslaved populations. This paper contributes to our understanding of how amelioration reforms were crafted and contested on both sides of the Atlantic by examining a series of seemingly unrelated protests carried out by enslaved women and men for greater control over subsistence cultivation in Dominica (1791), Tobago (1807), and Jamaica, Trinidad, and Demerara (1823). Each one of these protests had been triggered by rumors among slave communities that the British Crown had granted them three days per week in which to cultivate subsistence crops for their own benefit outside of their masters’ control. By focusing on the origins and repercussions of the protests in Tobago in 1807, I will argue that planters’ initial rationale for investing slaves with property in provision grounds was aimed at bolstering social stability in the island in the wake of frequent revolts and marronage. Slaves’ subsequent development of kin-based cultivation in their grounds and the informal marketing of their crops, in turn, provided them with an economic base for agitating for greater customary rights on the margins of plantation spaces. I will conclude by tracing how slaves’ collective actions for subsistence rights shaped colonial and imperial regulations on informal marketing, property ownership, and gradual emancipation.