“She Would Cut Canes No Longer”: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in Trinidad, 1769-1834
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
First Advisor
Rugemer, Edward
Abstract
“She Would Cut Canes No Longer” is a social history of enslaved and fugitive peoples’ struggles in the wake of the Caribbean Island of Trinidad’s transformation into a deadly plantation society during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The project necessarily covers the late Spanish (1769-1797) and early British (1797-1834) eras of rule on the island. Spatially attentive, it emphasizes the struggles of enslaved plantation workers along coastlines and quiet rural paths, and in forests, slave gardens, provision grounds, livestock pens, cane fields, and sugar mills, centering how both women and men of African descent confronted the violence, labor exploitation, isolation, poverty, and restricted mobility of plantation slavery from the scale of everyday life. Across six chapters, it shows how enslaved plantation workers – as individuals and collectives – pursued both illicit and lawful avenues of action to combat the labor exploitation of plantation slavery, build social ties, reduce the poverty they were forced to endure, and claim autonomy in their lives. It does so through an analysis of important scholarship focused on the island’s slavery-era past and a detailed study of a wide array of manuscript and print sources housed in archives in France, Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, the U.K., and the U.S., including plantation punishment records, legal complaints submitted by enslaved people, trial records, imperial correspondence, plantation records, planter correspondence, newspapers, council minutes, laws, maps, and other documents.
Recommended Citation
Barker, Patrick, "“She Would Cut Canes No Longer”: Slavery and Everyday Struggle in Trinidad, 1769-1834" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 899.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/899
