CHAPTER III

HISTORY: BRITISH RULE UP TO 1928

THE assumption of British control marked no great change in the life of the colonies.  Existing constitutional arrangements were continued and the supreme control that had been exercised by the States-General through the Governeur passed to the British Crown and the British Governor.  The Court of Policy remained the legislative and executive body controlled by the official majority through the Governor’s casting vote.  The joint body of the Court of Policy sitting with the Financial Representatives was named the Combined Court and it continued to sit for the approval of tax measures.  Gradually the administration of the three colonies was centralized; the legal and administrative unification of Demerara and Essequibo was effected, in 1812, and finally the colony of British Guiana was created in 1831 when Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice were all combined and their administration conducted from Georgetown, the city which had grown around the original Stabroek.

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC SYSTEM BASED ON SLAVERY

The extension of cultivation and the influx of colonists and capital that had been fostered by Storm van ‘s Gravesande continued and was in fact accelerated with the assumption of control by the British.  Cultivation was extended, roads and bridges were improved, there was an increase in the volume of slave importations, and the town of Stabroek rapidly grew into a commercial centre.  The institution of chattel slavery was the cornerstone of the whole edifice of colonial society.  The large-scale importation of labour made possible the construction of the sea-defence, drainage, and irrigation systems without which the fertile coastlands could not be worked.  This was no simple matter of a powerful ruling group utilizing the services of an abject and fearfully oppressed slave army.  The whole question of how a handful of whites controlled a vast slave population is an important one and leads to an examination of the complexities of the developing social system.

There can be no doubt of the importance of the power of coercion which the whites were able to command.  The outcome of the great Berbice slave rebellion of 1763 and the measures Storm van ‘s Gravesande took to build alliances with the Amerindian population for the purpose of controlling the Negroes were discussed in Chapter II.  But while the individual planter could depend upon this power being mobilized in case of emergency, he had to run an economic enterprise and to live with his labourers from day to day.  The plantation was not only a unit of production; it became the most important unit of society in the Guianas of the period around 1800.

Each plantation had its ‘great house’ where lived the owner, or more frequently an attorney or a manager, since absentee proprietorship was common.  Managers, overseers, and bookkeepers were invariably whites except for a few cases in Berbice where educated mulattoes had managed to become attorneys and even planters in their own right.  Originally whites of a lower status had performed skilled trades such as carpentry, bricklaying, and coopering, but gradually they were replaced by free-Coloured as these menial whites took advantage of the opportunities for making money by owning a few slaves and hiring them out for job work.  The free-Coloured were mostly the offspring of slave women and white men, and were usually manumitted by their fathers and not infrequently sent to Europe to be educated.  Whilst technically free they were not accorded full equality with the whites, though as a group intermediate in status their identification was with those above, not those below, them.  In practice the whites depended upon the free-Coloured a good deal.  They formed a majority of the militia in Berbice for example, though it was not until 1823 that the principle of allowing mulattoes to hold commissions was established.[1]  Free women of colour were much in demand as concubines, sometimes being brought out from Barbados which was the main centre of European culture and refinement.  The intermediate social position of the free-Coloured is clearly shown by the fact that whilst tickets to balls in Georgetown usually admitted the holder plus ‘two ladies of colour’, dances run by the mulattoes themselves were normally open to slaves, and were not attended by whites unless they were specially invited as guests.  The slaves themselves, despite their uniform legal status, recognized a host of distinctions within their body.  One big distinction was between the Africans of recent importation and those who were either locally born (creole) or had become thoroughly integrated into their new environment.  Because of the great expansion which took place in the population and exploitation of the Guiana colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the proportion of African-born was extremely high.  By 1823 in Demerara and Essequibo there were 34,462 African-born as against 39,956 creole Negroes.  Another distinction of major importance was between house-slaves and field-slaves.  The former enjoyed much higher prestige within the plantation community and were the most assimilated to European ways of living and behaviour.  The immediate control of the field-slaves was in the hands of ‘drivers’ who were themselves slaves but obviously possessed of power and authority delegated by the manager and overseers.  Punishments were ordered by the whites but administered by the drivers.  Whilst there can be no doubt of the degradation that the system of slavery involved for master and slave alike, there appears to have been a considerable variation in the way in which plantations were run and the labourers treated.  Pinckard, writing of the period just before 1800, contrasts the cruelty of some masters with the paternal care others lavish upon their slaves.[2]   He is careful to stress that the contentment of the slaves flows from their lack of ambition for freedom: ‘.  .  .  to remove him from the quiet and contentment of such a bondage, and to place him amidst the tumults and vicissitudes of freedom were but to impose upon him the exchange of great comparative happiness, for much of positive difficulty and distress’.   Pinckard’s observations reflect something of the most enlightened opinion of the time; whilst there was revulsion at the excessive cruelty of the slave regime, there was a firm belief that with benevolent paternalism the situation of the African was actually improved under slavery.  Certainly there is ample evidence to refute any assertion that the slaves preferred slavery to freedom; rebellions, abscondment, and suicide were not uncommon.  But there was undoubtedly an acceptance of the system on the part of all involved in it that went further than a mere condescension to work with the drivers’ whips at one’s back.  The creole slaves in particular came to accept their position near the bottom of the social hierarchy (but just above that of the African-born), to feel their inferiority, and to depend on the favours, governance, and patronage of the whites.  Before this happened, the object of rebellious slaves was to escape from the system.  Later it was to redefine their position within the system.  The first fifty years of the nineteenth century saw first the abolition of the slave trade, then the long preparation for emancipation, and finally emancipation itself and the establishment of a new form of social integration.

THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT AND THE GROWTH OF MISSIONARY ACTIVITY

The development of the movement for the abolition of slavery was highly complex and was closely related to the changing structure of the British economy.[3]  A current of humanitarian opposition to the institution of slavery had begun to flow as long ago as the seventeenth century and it eventually grew into a veritable flood before slavery was finally abolished.  This humanitarian movement would probably have been ineffective had it not been for the fact that opposition to the ‘West India Interest’ and West Indian monopoly developed for purely economic reasons among a group of men who could fight the humanitarian battles in Parliament.  The centres of support for the attack upon slavery were the industrial centres, particularly in the north of England, where prosperity was becoming increasingly dependent upon free trade.  So long as the West Indies enjoyed preferences and monopolies in the supply of tropical agricultural produce to Britain, countries such as India found it difficult to trade their produce for the products of British industry.  Those with interests in the Far East made a double attack upon the West India planters; they tried to abolish West India preference and they tried to undermine the West Indians’ economic position by attacking slavery.  The full effects of this opposition to the West India trade were not felt in Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice until after about 1820 despite the fact that the first victory of the British manufacturers was the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.  The first twenty years of the nineteenth century were years of progress and expansion as planters with their slaves moved from the less fertile soils of the island colonies to Guiana’s coastlands.  Trinidad, which had been occupied in 1796-7 and acquired by Britain in 1802, also formed part of this new ‘frontier movement’, as Ragatz termed it.[4]  The inclusion of these new areas of productive land within the orbit of the West Indian trade was bound to have an adverse effect upon the already declining fortunes of the older colonies, and since the markets were contracting rather than expanding, the prosperity of these newer colonies was to be short-lived.  However, for the time being the Guiana coastlands were being more and more extensively planted in sugar-cane, the one crop that was particularly vulnerable to the attacks of the free-traders, and prosperity was increasing.  The gradual build-up of the economy in the first forty years of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the development of a system of social relations and social control which was able to withstand the transition from a slave regime to that of a nominally free society with remarkably little disturbance.  In this two factors are of primary importance; the activities of the missionaries and the development of a governmental system directed mainly from the Colonial Office in London.  The three colonies had, almost from their beginnings, been provided with churches, or at least with clergymen, but slaves were specifically barred from attendance at divine service in the days before the abolition of the slave trade on the assumption that education and the acquisition of Christian ideas would tend to induce dissatisfaction with a slave status.  When a Wesleyan missionary arrived in Demerara in 1805 with the intention of establishing a mission to the slaves the Governor insisted upon his leaving by the next boat.  We know practically nothing of the religious beliefs and practices of the slaves before missionary activity began, but there is evidence that the planters permitted drumming and dancing; funerals of slaves were organized by themselves through tribal associations; and even unofficial wedding ceremonies appear to have been performed in the case of people such as drivers who enjoyed high status in the slave compound.  The persistence of beliefs and customs brought from Africa was probably more marked in the Guianas than elsewhere in the British West Indian colonies because of the high proportion of African-born up to about 1820.  However, the proportion of the creoles was rising and religious beliefs rooted in ancestor worship and a complex kinship structure, embodied only in oral traditions, soon lost ground before even a limited missionary activity in these new surroundings.  Or rather it would be more correct to say that only certain beliefs, such as witchcraft beliefs and curing rituals, survived because they continued to fill a need untouched by Christian Church activity.  The conviction that slaves should be drawn into a closer contact with the ideas and customs of European society as a means of making them more tractable was slow in developing and was bitterly opposed by the majority of the planters even after its success had been demonstrated.  The period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the final abolition of slavery in 1838, however, saw the consolidation of a remarkably stable social hierarchy in which things English and white were highly valued; things African and black were lowly valued.  The churches became one of the chief instruments through which these values were disseminated and made acceptable to the slaves, but the means by which they achieved this were incompatible with the continuation of slavery as an institution.

The first missionaries attempting to work among slaves in what was later to become British Guiana, appear to have been two Moravians who visited Berbice in 1738.  They were not permitted to christianize slaves and turned their attention to the Amerindians.  The first successful mission to the slaves resulted from the action of one Hermanus H. Post, proprietor of Plantation Le Resouvenir on the East Coast Demerara.  A naturalized Englishman of Dutch origin, Post was one of the few planters with ideas ahead of his time.  He wrote to the London Missionary Society asking them to appoint a minister to Demerara and offering to provide accommodation for him.  The London Missionary Society was a body formed in 1795 for the sole purpose of evangelical work among the heathen.[5]  Originally a non-denominational body it eventually became in effect a Congregational society.  The first missionary to the slaves in Guiana, the Rev. John Wray, arrived in February 1808 and took up residence at Le Resouvenir.  Hermanus Post provided him with a house and a chapel was built, largely financed by Post but also contributed to by other planters in the district.  Although there was planter opposition from the beginning to such a radical activity as christianizing slaves and even teaching them to read, Wray’s relations with the planters around Le Resouvenir appear to have been quite amicable and many of the whites in the area attended his chapel.  Before he died in 1809, Hermanus Post, in a letter to a friend expressed his satisfaction at the results of John Wray’s activities.  He wrote:

It is not possible that such a change could otherwise have been effected in their [the slaves] conduct, both on mine and other estates, but especially on the estate next to mine.  They were formerly a nuisance to the neighbourhood, on account of their drumming and dancing two or three nights in the week, and were looked on with a jealous eye on account of their dangerous communications; but they are now become the most zealous attendants on public worship, catechising, and private instruction.  No drums are heard in this neighbourhood, except where the owners have prohibited the attendance of their slaves.  Drunkards and fighters are changed into sober and peaceable people, and endeavour to please those who are set over them.[6]

Post was not a typical planter; opinion was sharply divided on what the effect of missionary activity would be.  The planters depended absolutely upon slave labour to produce crops which they had to sell in Britain under the protection of a substantial preference.  The slave trade had been abolished by Parliament on humanitarian grounds in 1807; the planters could not obtain fresh supplies of labour and they were determined to utilize what they had to the limit.  They were intelligent enough to realize that it paid them to keep their slaves healthy and to take care of the children, but at the same time they were not at all sure whether kindness or coercion was necessary to ensure obedience and diligence.  There was a constant fear of revolt and the planters were desperately afraid that the slaves would ‘get out of hand’.  In accounts of the period one often finds reference to ‘the planters’ taking this or that course of action, but the fact is that they rarely behaved either consistently or as a body united in their views until increasing pressure from the metropolitan government pushed them into a semblance of unity.  It was the British government that had abolished the slave trade and the antislavery group in Britain expected that slavery would disappear of its own accord in time.  The missions to the slaves were supported by large sections of the British public and interference with them only served to harden the opinion of that public against the planters.

In Demerara many planters welcomed the activities of Wray and of Davies, another London Missionary Society clergyman who had come out to start a school in Georgetown in 1809, believing that they would in fact make the slaves more tractable.  In Georgetown Davies held special services for whites and free-Coloured separately from the slaves; Wray’s wife ran a small school for the daughters of whites; Carmichael, the Governor, and many of the planters contributed money to the missions; and the missionaries were careful not to undermine the authority of the whites as far as the slaves were concerned.  Despite all this there were so many inconsistencies in the situation that conflict was inevitable.  The slaves themselves had a lively sense of the changes that were taking place.  They greatly resented the constant whippings that the managers and overseers considered an essential form of control.  The mission churches represented to the slaves the interest that was being shown in their welfare by the people in England.  The planter’s fear that instruction in the principles of Christianity would make the slaves dissatisfied with their slave status was justified, though it was probably less a matter of principle than of the special attention given to the slaves by the missionaries.

The Case of John Smith

The celebrated case of John Smith, the ‘Demerara Martyr’, illustrates particularly well the developments that were taking place in this period between abolition of the slave trade and emancipation, and it brings out some of the complexity of the forces involved.

After John Wray had been transferred to work among the British government’s slaves in Berbice in 1813, the mission station at Le Resouvenir remained without a resident minister until John Smith arrived there in 1817, direct from England.  By this time there had been an increase in missionary activity in Demerara.  The Rev. Mr. Elliott of the London Missionary Society was working on the west coast; Davies was still in Georgetown where a chapel had been built; the Methodists had stations at Mahaica and in Georgetown; the Church of Scotland had opened its doors to slaves; and even the Anglican priest in Georgetown was conducting services for slaves.  There were many whites who made life difficult for the missions, by interrupting services, throwing stones at the churches, prohibiting the ministers from entering certain plantations, refusing permission to build chapels on plantation land, and so on.  But on the whole they were not badly treated in comparison with their fellow workers in other parts of the West Indies.  For the first few years of his stay at Le Resouvenir John Smith made satisfactory progress.  He employed the special techniques he had been taught for instructing the ‘perishing heathen’ in the basic principles of Christianity and gradually bringing them up to a stage where they were ready for baptism and finally for communion.  Admission to baptism and communion was by no means indiscriminate.  In a letter to the Directors of the Society, dated 1817, John Smith explains his procedure for admitting and examining a candidate.  Before a slave could be considered for baptism, he had to produce a note from his master certifying that he was a worthy character.  He was then questioned as to how many wives[7] he had and then ‘questioned in Dr Watts’s first catechism.  If they give satisfactory answers to these questions, profess to believe in Christ, and to be sorry for their sins, I do not refuse them.’[8]  It is clear from contemporary accounts that baptism and admission to the Church was something in the nature of a reward.  In all probability the baptized and the communicants formed an élite group among the slaves consisting of those permitted to participate in the religion and rituals of the dominant group.  Smith had been specifically forbidden by the Governor to teach slaves to read, but he did run a school for free people of colour and their children; again an example of gradation of privilege and status.  Many slaves who had learned to read in Wray’s time, or had taught themselves, carried on the process of evangelization, instructing their fellow slaves in the catechism and in the teachings of the Bible.  The growing strength of the mission movement may be judged from the fact that in 1819 Smith was able to report that his flock had raised £230 for the repair of the chapel and that £26 of it was being sent as their first free-will offering to the parent body for missionary work elsewhere.[9]  Not only this, but some of them were even persuaded to give up their weekly trip to the Sunday market, selling their private garden produce to a huckster instead.

In England a new parliamentary campaign to attack West Indian slavery was being planned.  In March 1823 Wilberforce published his pamphlet, An Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, in behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies; the Anti-Slavery Society was formed; and on 15 May Buxton introduced a motion before Parliament advocating the gradual abolition of slavery.  As a result of the resolutions passed by Parliament the government issued an Order in Council instituting measures for the amelioration of the condition of the slaves in the Crown Colonies (which included the Guiana colonies) and expressing the hope that the legislatures of the other West Indian colonies would adopt similar legislation.[10]

The Governor of Berbice upon receipt of these orders immediately issued a proclamation and asked John Wray to explain its contents from his pulpit.  The main provisions of the Order in Council were the limitation of the hours of labour to nine daily and the abolition of flogging for female slaves.

In Demerara, Governor Murray received the Order in Council on 7 July 1823.  On 21 July and again on 6 August the Order was discussed in the Court of Policy, and although it was exceedingly unpopular it was actually decided that a proclamation limiting the daily hours of work and abolishing the use of the whip on women would have to be passed.  Not unnaturally news of the Order had become widely known but no official statement was forthcoming.  Under the circumstances the slaves became convinced that the Governor and the planters were deliberately withholding from them rights which had been granted by Britain.  It was widely known that the slaves were dissatisfied at the absence of a proclamation and that they were discussing whether they should not take action to acquire their rights.  Revolts of this nature had been common in other territories, and were to be common in the future, but the Demerara authorities were determined to retain control and initiative in when and how they granted concessions.  The result was that the slaves in East Demerara decided to cease work and to drive the whites to Georgetown, and it is of cardinal importance to note that their reason for doing so was their belief that their actions were justified because the local whites were withholding rights granted by the King of England.  The rebellion started at Le Resouvenir and the adjoining Plantation Success; the slaves used remarkably little violence and only a few whites were killed when they opposed the rebels with firearms.  Other whites were put in the stocks without being physically harmed.  Martial law was declared and the rebellion quickly suppressed after several hundred slaves had been shot with no loss of life amongst the white soldiery.  Mass executions followed, bodies were displayed in chains and heads mounted on spikes along the east coast.

One feature of the rebellion was that the leaders of the agitation seem to have been those slaves with the highest status such as coopers, and some of the members of Smith’s congregation were implicated.  Whether they advocated violence or not is doubtful, but they perished in the rebellion.  Smith himself was accused of treason on the grounds that he was alleged to have known of the uprising and suppressed his knowledge.  From the account of his trial it appears that he certainly knew of a rumoured uprising, but so did many other whites, and he seems to have consistently warned slaves of his acquaintance of the folly of using violence.[11]  Despite this he was found guilty of the charges by a court-martial and sentenced to death.  He was reprieved by the home government but before this news reached the colony he died in imprisonment from consumption.[12]

Smith’s case received great publicity in England, and although the initial reaction at the news of the Demerara rebellion was sympathetic to the planters and opposed to the anti-slavery group, when the full details became known the tide began to flow the other way.  From 1824 the campaign for the final abolition of slavery really began.  In Demerara and Berbice feeling against the missionaries ran high and their activities almost came to a standstill.  In an attempt to exclude missionaries from the colony, the Court of Policy passed an Ordinance granting state aid to the Church selected by a majority of the planters in each district.  Smith’s chapel at Le Resouvenir was seized and used by the Anglican Church.  This atmosphere did not prevail for long and soon the mission churches were not only restored, but expanding.

THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AND TRANSITION TO A FREE SOCIETY

In 1825 the Demerara Court of Policy was at last forced to pass an ‘Ordinance for the religious instruction of slaves and for meliorating their condition’.  This provided for a complete exemption from work from sunset on Saturday to sunrise on Monday; limited field work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a two-hour break; the appointment of a Protector of Slaves; abolition of whipping of women; prohibition of whips in the field; the privilege of marriage which had hitherto been denied slaves; the right of holding property; and the right of purchasing manumission.[13]  There now followed a series of amendments and new ordinances, each going further than the previous one in establishing civil rights for the slaves.  Each was strenuously resisted by the local legislature and many of the planters simply failed to carry out the provisions of the ordinances.

On several occasions the planters disputed the right of the British government to pass laws binding on the colony, claiming that under the terms of capitulation of 1803 the Court of Policy had been invested with the exclusive power of legislation within the colony.  These claims were invariably rejected by the home government, but since the planters controlled the voting of the taxes upon which the government of the colony depended they could, and did on occasion, make things difficult for the administration by refusing to vote the civil list.

The culmination of the efforts of the anti-slavery group in the British Parliament came with the passing of an ‘Act for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Colonies, for promoting the industry of manumitted slaves, and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the services of such slaves’.  This Act was passed in August 1833 and became effective on 1 August 1834.  The planters of British Guiana received £4,297,117 10s. 6½d. as compensation for the loss of 84,915 slaves.  It was decreed that there should be a transitional period of ‘apprenticeship’ during which time the slaves still had to work but beyond a certain amount of basic labour were paid, housed, clothed, and fed for their services.  This semi-slavery was ended on 1 August 1838, after which date the slaves were legally free-men.

The transition from a slave system to a free society involved far-reaching changes in the structure of Guianese society.  The changes were not as abrupt as they may appear, and elements of the structure of society that was laid down during the slavery period persist even today, but 1838 saw the introduction of a new element in the stated ideals of the society which at least provided a point of growth for new kinds of social relations.  The growth of central government activity and services to replace the paternalistic rule of the planters necessitated an increase in the size of the administration, and reforms in the methods of taxation and in the franchise were now necessary.  After 1834 no head-tax could be levied on slaves, nor could the possession of slaves be used as a qualification for voting.  The disappearance of the head-tax tended to deplete the King’s Chest (the term applied to the funds directly controlled by the Governor in his sole discretion and corresponding to the old Company Chest) and thus to place even more power in the hands of the Financial Representatives who had to be prevailed upon to vote the civil list.  Reforms in the franchise did not result in any appreciable widening of the electorate but they introduced an important principle capable of great extension.  Instead of a slave-owning qualification the qualification of a voter was now based upon the amount of direct taxes he paid, and the amount was fixed at a level which resulted in there being in 1847 only 561 qualified voters in a population of 130,000.  Furthermore there was much indebtedness among planters now that the abolition of slavery coincided with a sharp decline in the market price of sugar, and many of them had to vote according to the dictates of a small wealthy controlling group.  This narrow oligarchy that was able to dominate the Combined Court had as its policy the furtherance of the planter interest.  With no responsibility for governing the country its sole object was to exercise influence to promote the well-being of the sugar industry.  The Colonial Office treated British Guiana as a special kind of Crown Colony in which the Secretary of State represented the interests of the unrepresented sections of the population.  Despite the influence of the planter group the power of the Crown was used to great effect in pushing through limited developments in social services and in ensuring the administration of some kind of justice, but even the Colonial Office accepted the view that the future and prosperity of the colony depended upon the sugar industry.

The first major effect of the abolition of slavery was to aggravate the labour shortage.  The desire of the newly liberated slaves was to acquire their own land to provide a material base for their new freedom.  The planters’ main interest was in retaining their labour for plantation work.  Some of the more enlightened planters attempted to meet their workers half-way by providing them with land nearby on which to build houses and gardens in the hope that they would continue to work for wages.  Others attempted coercion by refusing to make land available, by cutting down fruit trees, prohibiting fishing, and threatening to evict the workers from their houses.  It had been greatly feared that with emancipation large numbers of ex-slaves would remove themselves completely from the coast and go off into the bush.  This did not happen; the ex-slaves wanted to get off the plantations but remain in the society, and there was enough land in the form of abandoned plantations to enable them to do so.  The establishment of free Negro villages after emancipation is one of the most remarkable episodes in Guianese history.[14]  The usual procedure was for a group of ex-slaves, sometimes numbering as many as sixty or seventy, to pool their money and nominate one or two of their number to effect the purchase of an abandoned plantation.  They would then divide the land among themselves so that each ‘proprietor’ had a house lot and portions of farmland.  Work on the maintenance of the village drainage and irrigation works had to be contributed by each proprietor and its direction entrusted to elected headmen.  It was on the basis of these democratically organized village communities that the present local government system was built.[15]

The period of establishment of the free Negro villages was from 1838 to 1852.  After that year there was very little expansion in the area of Negro settlement, and it had also become evident that the villagers were not becoming an independent peasantry living off the products of their own land; instead they depended on wage labour to a great extent, and only a minority were able to live completely off the produce of their farms.

Although most of the ex-slaves remained partially dependent upon the sugar estates for wages with which to buy consumer goods, they had largely escaped from the plantation as a social milieu.  Instead they were caught up in a rapidly developing national control system in which the central government played a much larger part than it had ever done before.  In the days of slavery each plantation had functioned as a relatively self-contained unit.  Central government existed of course but its functions were limited, consisting mainly in organs for the regulation of commercial transactions among whites; for the regulation of trade and shipping; for the maintenance of a garrison and the organization of the militia.  During the early part of the nineteenth century its sphere of activity increased to include such matters as the better regulation of roads and bridges, the control and policing of Georgetown, and so on, but the most important extensions in its functions arose as the consequence of the various measures initiated by Parliament in England.  After the passing of the Emancipation Act these functions increased considerably.  Provision had to be made for the establishment of a paid magistracy to replace the old Justices of the Peace; an expanded police force was necessary; new bases of taxation had to be devised to replace the head-tax on slaves and to provide for the greater number of government services; before long central government regulations were necessary to assist the Negro villagers in the administration of their communities; the government began to take a greater interest in education and health; and it also became deeply involved in the various schemes for the importation of labourers for work on the sugar estates.

These burgeoning activities of the central government, and of the schools and churches which were equally outside the sphere of the plantation, impinged directly upon the lives of the new free-men.  Instead of being subject to the control and punishment of the planters they were now subject to the jurisdiction of the courts and the police.  The churches formed one nucleus for the activities in the new villages and the schools became the instruments for stressing the value of ‘European’ education and culture (without of course being able to transform their pupils into cultured Europeans).  School-teaching came to offer one, and practically the only, avenue of upward mobility for the villager, and the local school-teachers gradually came to constitute a rural Negro élite.  The growth in the size of the civil service also created posts, many of which had to be filled by local people.  When the principle of appointment by merit was established, it provided at least some opportunities for advancement for educated Negroes.  In practice this principle was not interpreted to mean that local non-whites could be appointed to the very top positions except in very exceptional cases.

To sum up the position in the most schematic way, one could say that the Negroes, the Coloured, and the English-speaking whites all came to share a common conception of the colonial society; a conception in which things English and ‘white’ were valued highly whilst things African and ‘black’ were valued lowly.  The coincidence of skin colour with social status was of course an accident of history which was, and still is in many places, rationalized into a natural law.  Most writers in the early nineteenth century took it for granted that Negroes were by nature inferior to whites, but this doctrine really reached its peak when a naive evolutionism could be invoked to give it a ring of scientific authenticity.  The really important thing, however, was that the Negroes themselves accepted their inferiority.  The term ‘nigger’ was used in a pejorative sense amongst themselves; to be a creole was accounted better than being African-born; to be a ‘double creole’ even better; the ability to speak properly, to dress properly, and to be able to read and write were all marks of prestige defined with reference to ‘English culture’.  What gave the system its distinctive character was the element of colour; that ineradicable symbol of birth status which tended to sap initiative in those who accepted their inherent inferiority as blacks and were left poised uneasily between a genuine attempt to behave ‘properly’ and a fatalistic and shamefaced acceptance of their inevitable relapse into ‘black people’s customs’.  So long as the sharp distinctions in social status, power, and wealth persisted, the tendency was for the lower-class Negroes to accept more and more of upper-class behaviour as ‘right’ and even to copy it as far as their circumstances allowed, but in view of the practical impossibility of becoming white they also accepted their own distinctive and differentiating cultural characteristics as inferior but inevitable.  The ‘coloured’ or racially mixed group was poised uneasily between the white aristocracy and the black proletariat.  For long a privileged group even during the slave period, many of them were highly educated and came to occupy important positions in the society and in the government.  But again their position was partially defined in terms of colour, and since they themselves accepted the values on which colour discriminations were made, they emphasized even the smallest colour differences amongst themselves rather than accepting their common identity.  When they demanded consideration they did so on the grounds that they were English in all but colour.

INDENTURED IMMIGRATION

As the Negroes gradually moved out of the confining and regimented system of the plantations, other workers were moved in.  Even before 1838 some planters had begun to take steps to replace the labour that they anticipated losing.  For many years the planters of British Guiana had attempted to attract labour or to buy slaves from the other West Indian territories and they persisted in these attempts right through the nineteenth century, often against the strenuous opposition of the island planters.  In 1835 one planter imported some Germans on a four-year contract; English ploughmen with their ploughs and horses were also introduced; in the same year 429 Portuguese arrived from Madeira; in 1836 44 Irish and 47 English labourers were imported; in 1837 43 labourers from Glasgow; in 1838 396 persons arrived from India; in 1839 208 Maltese and 121 Germans were landed.  Practically all these immigrants came as indentured servants.  In 1836 the Court of Policy had passed an ordinance providing for the introduction of servants bound by indenture to serve for seven years, but this was disallowed by the imperial government which by an Order in Council limited the terms of service to three years, which was again revised in 1837 to permit indenture for five years.  It seems that the planters believed that importations of this nature would serve to convince the Negroes that their services were not indispensable and thus result in their modifying their wage demands.  None of the workers so imported proved to be of much use for field labour except the Indians and West Indians.  The others either suffered terribly from tropical diseases, drank excessively, or drifted into more profitable occupations.  The importation of labourers met with considerable opposition from the Anti-Slavery Society in England which claimed that this was slavery reintroduced under a different guise.  The planters considered that such opposition was inspired by the ‘Manchester manufacturers’ and free-traders.[16]  Although the Anti-Slavery Society successfully blocked attempts to resume large‑scale importations of labourers from Africa, and their activities sometimes resulted in checks on importations from elsewhere, the planters of Guiana were able to engage in a voluminous traffic in labour until 1917.  The number of individuals introduced under contract from the various countries between 1835 and 1917 is shown in Table 3.  The conditions under which the indentured immigrants lived were practically identical with those from which the slaves had recently been liberated.  The main difference in their situation was that they could look forward to completing their indentures and returning to their homeland with savings.  Many Indians and Portuguese returned home with substantial savings, and so despite the degradation of their position some kind of hope and long-term goal was built into the very circumstance of their recruitment.  In practice the vast majority never realized their hopes of making even a small fortune; they either died, reindentured for further service, or tried to establish themselves as independent farmers or business men.  The Portuguese were extraordinary in that they virtually took over the retail trade of the colony in the very first years after their arrival.  Before emancipation there had been a minimum of retail trade.  The main needs of the slaves had been supplied directly by their masters who imported bulk supplies.