Sugarcanes and Irish Lumpers: Making Free Labor in the United Kingdom, 1830–50

In 1834, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people in the British empire, primarily in the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape Colony, became free labourers. In Britain, the reform of the Poor Laws, also in 1834, created the first free market in wage labour for agricultural labourers on British and Irish farms, some of the United Kingdom’s poorest workers. This paper analyses the unexamined convergences between labour reform policies in Britain, Ireland, and the Caribbean in an era when the principles of free-market political economy were the foundation of British policy. In both Ireland and the post-emancipation Caribbean, building a market for labour, worked at regular hours for regular wages, was an urgent priority. In Ireland, landless peasant labourers were often paid in pre-fertilized potato patches and often paid their rent in labour, rather than money. In the Caribbean, ‘apprenticeship’ was intended to teach formerly enslaved workers to be wage workers, and to teach former slaveholders to be employers. In the Caribbean, the survival of the sugar industry was paramount. In Britain, the potato was a symbol of Irish economic and cultural backwardness well before the catastrophe of the Irish Famine (1845-1852). Preserving sugarcanes and uprooting potatoes became, for reformers, symbolic and practical objectives for bringing free labour to the British empire.