Reform and Coercion in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Trinidad

After abolition in the British Caribbean, officials, freedpeople, and newly arriving migrant workers struggled over the legal meaning of freedom. New laws defined “free labor” while new institutions—ranging from special magistrates to vagrancy prisons—simultaneously represented and disciplined workers. Scholars typically study this post-emancipation legal history apart from the formal law of slavery it replaced. But were there meaningful continuities across the divide of abolition? Did the law of slavery shape the subsequent law of freedom? This paper addresses these questions from the perspective of colonial Trinidad, which was an important site for early nineteenth-century efforts to reform the law of slavery (known as “amelioration”) and post-slavery labor experimentation involving both freedpeople and indentured immigrants. Across these two periods, the paper will trace long-term continuities in the use of state power to protect and coerce. In particular, the paper will argue that efforts to reform the law of slavery separated physical violence from broader questions of economic power, and that that conceptual division shaped the development and legal meaning of free labor after abolition. In so doing, the paper will also reflect on ways of integrating global and local histories of slavery and emancipation by connecting Trinidad’s Spanish law of slavery to the colony’s British laws of amelioration and post-slavery free labor. After taking Trinidad during the Napoleonic wars, British officials adapted (rather than simply replacing) Spanish legal institutions. This was particularly the case during the 1820s, and it was the key reason the colony then became a model for the project of amelioration. In illuminating these connections, the paper will tell an inter-imperial story that is nonetheless rooted in place.