Caribbean Categories of Race, Color, Class

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 405-406:

From the earliest days of colonial rule, the Caribbean social and moral order was based on ranked gradations of “races” and “colors” represented by such physical attributes as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. These criteria were treated as literal descriptions of appearance, and their presumed fixed qualities formed a hierarchy of identities—from “white” at the top to “black” at the bottom, with various mixtures and gradations in between—supported by legal structures as well as social values and mores. Consequently, for much of Caribbean history, race and color also have connoted social position and class status. Yet the recognition of a vertical color continuum separates the Caribbean from the rigid binary racial logic of the United States.

Given the legacies of colonial rule and ideology, color and race are still commonly used in daily conversation as idioms for social organization. In Jamaica, for example, the color term “brown” (or “colored”) serves as a category of racial identity but also connotes middle-class status. Color terms are necessarily relational; being “white” or “brown” or “black” necessarily means not being something else. In Haiti, mulâtre is an in-between term connoting a mixture of “black” and “white,” flexible in its interpretation yet typically positioned above “black” and below “white.” In the Dominican Republic, indio literally translates as “Indian,” suggesting indigenous heritage, but its contemporary application signifies a lighter skin color (and perhaps straight hair)—someone not “black,” yet also not “white.” In Martinique, beke refers to French “white” slave owners and their descendants. “Trinidad white” and “French creole” have served as categories of racial identity in Trinidad, specifically distinguished from British, French, and Spanish “whites,” who, in this racial accounting system, historically could claim to be “pure” white and, concomitantly, members of the upper classes. In Trinidad, the term “red” generally refers to a light-skinned individual of mixed “black” and “white” parentage (positioned toward the upper-status end), while in Barbados it is also a historical reference to “red legs” communities—poor whites who, from the days of the slave plantation, labored outdoors and hence were likely to get sunburned.

Mixedness can also refer to multiple combinations, not simply the amalgamation of “black” and “white.” Thus, in the Francophone Caribbean, the term marabou refers to a black-white-Amerindian combination. In Trinidad the term “Spanish” should be interpreted as if in quotation marks, indicating a particular and fluctuating combination of local criteria, including area of origin (Venezuela, or certain locations in Trinidad with historical concentrations of Spaniards, Amerindians, and Venezuelan immigrant labor), skin color (some variation of “brown” or “red’), hair texture (not curly), and self-ascription (Khan 1993).

Notably, these terminologies are based on an African-European axis: the hierarchical color continuum does not lexically include South Asians or Chinese, or the mixed offspring of South Asian or Chinese and European parents. Though the term achinado is used in Cuba to index Chinese phenotypical features (as, for example, in mulato achinado), there is only one term, dougla—common in Guyana and Trinidad—indicating individuals of mixed South Asian and African descent. Indio (Amerindian) in the Hispanophone Caribbean and “Spanish” or “French creole” in Trinidad are not color terms per se, but are measured along the continuum of black and white ancestry. “Indian” (South Asian), “Chinese,” and “Syrian-Lebanese” in the Anglophone Caribbean, “Hindustani” in the Dutch Caribbean, and Hindou in the Francophone Caribbean are common categories not amalgamated into the black-white lexicon.

Caribbean Language Demographics

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 402-405:

Four major languages are spoken in the Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The 17 Caribbean countries that are predominantly Anglophone comprise more than 17% of the region’s population, yet the total English-speaking population of the Caribbean is less than that of the Dominican Republic alone. These statistics clarify the demographic predominance of the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which represent 61% of the Caribbean population. Of the 20% of Caribbean peoples who speak French or variations of French, three-quarters live in Haiti. The Dutch speakers of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles represent another 2% (Knight 1995, 34). Other languages, spoken by fewer numbers of people, include Hindi and Javanese. The languages of the European colonizers remain the official languages of formal Caribbean education and legal systems, but numerous African languages brought by the slaves fused with European, Asian, and Amerinidian languages to create numerous “creole” languages, which are the spoken vernaculars of everyday life in a number of Caribbean countries. Most Caribbean creole languages are young as languages go, having existed for not more than two or three centuries. Today, however, there are growing written literatures in creole languages, and movements to promote the languages to equal standing as vehicles of formal instruction and communication. Among the most familiar examples is Haitian Kreyol, the spoken language of approximately 12 million insular and diasporic Haitians, which along with French has been an official language in Haiti since 1961. Other widely spoken creoles include Jamaican patois, which is spoken by about four million people in and outside Jamaica, and the patois of Trinidad and Tobago, a historical legacy primarily of French on Trinidadian English, which has been in decline since about the mid-20th century. In Suriname, Sranan Tongo is the language of approximately 300,000 people; in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Papiamento is spoken by more than 350,000. And although the varieties of Spanish spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a number of linguistic properties, they also have discernable differences based on geographic location and local histories.

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From its colonization, the Caribbean has represented newness, which Europeans captured in the term “creole.” When applied to the region, the Spanish word criollo and the Portuguese word crioulo (derived from the verb criar, “to raise or bring up”) signified something or someone originating in Europe (or Africa) and reproducing itself in the New World. Thus animals, plants, and people could all be designated as creole. Creole people were the descendants of Europeans or Africans born in the Caribbean, as well as the offspring of African and European parents. Inherent in the idea of creole identity was an assumption that being born in the Caribbean or being the “mixed” descendant of two racially differentiated parents meant losing one’s ancestral cultural heritage.

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In the Anglophone Caribbean, Brathwaite’s analysis of what he called the “creole society” of Jamaica emphasized the creation of new forms through the synthesis of existing ones. Arguing against understanding black and white populations as “separate nuclear units,” Brathwaite saw them as being “contributory parts of a whole” that produce a uniquely Caribbean culture. Creolization here represents the potential for social integration and unity, where the “mixed” population serves “as a bridge, a kind of social cement” that integrates society (Brathwaite 1971, 307, 305). In calling for a renewed emphasis on creole identity and the literary value of the creole language, the most recent Francophone creoliste writers and activists celebrate the heterogeneous dimensions that together comprise the Caribbean or, in the words of Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, constitute Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The creoliste position, along with those of other thinkers, points to the abiding debates about how to characterize and give meaning to the forms of diversity so apparent in the region.

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

Capt. Cook's Americans

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle p. 345-347:

WHILE IN MACAU, Captain Gore learned the distressing news that not only was the American Revolution going badly for the English, but both France and Spain had declared war on Britain. Consequently, for the voyage home, facing the danger of seizure or attack, his two ships would remain on a war footing. The Resolution and the Discovery left Macau in January 1780, stopping briefly south of Vietnam and then in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java, not far from the seething volcano on Krakatoa. By April, the vessels were anchored in False Bay, near Cape Town. In early August, as the two ships approached England, contrary winds forced them far to the west. Gore had to make a long, awkward circuit around Ireland and over Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The vessels plied down the east coast of Britain, finally arriving in London on October 7, 1780. The Resolution had been gone from England for 1,548 days. At the time, it was believed to be the longest exploratory voyage—in terms of both miles and duration—ever undertaken on the high seas. And yet, despite the odyssey’s historic length, once again, not a single person on either ship had died of scurvy.

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AFTER RETURNING TO London, the Americans on board the ships had to face the difficult decision whether to cast their loyalties with Britain or find their way back to their native-born colonies and take up the cause against the mother country under whose flag they had been sailing for the past four years. Because he was still a member of the Royal Marines, John Ledyard was promptly sent to Canada to fight for the British in the waning actions of the American Revolution. He deserted, returned to his native New England, and in 1783 published an unauthorized account of his travels with Cook that became the first written work protected by copyright in the United States. In 1786, not done with epic traveling, Ledyard embarked on a trek of more than six thousand miles, mostly on foot, across Europe and Russia in an attempt to reach Alaska, but he was arrested in Siberia under orders from Catherine the Great. Ledyard died in Cairo in 1788, aged thirty-seven, while preparing an expedition to search for the source of the Niger River.

Ledyard’s fellow countryman John Gore, on the other hand, had no interest in returning to the land of his birth. The Admiralty appointed him as one of the captains of the Greenwich Hospital, the same position Cook had vacated when he embarked on his final voyage. Gore served ten years at Greenwich. He was a popular figure among the old salts and died there in 1790.

Capt. Cook's Family

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 347-348:

ELIZABETH COOK NEVER remarried and remained a widow for fifty-six years. Sadly, she outlived all of her children, none of whom had children of their own. In October of 1780, the same month the Resolution and the Discovery returned to England, Nathaniel Cook, a midshipman serving on the HMS Thunderer, went down with more than six hundred other souls in a massive hurricane off Jamaica. He was only sixteen. Thirteen years later, in 1793, Hugh Cook perished from scarlet fever while at Cambridge, where he was studying to be an Anglican minister. Only a month after that, the eldest of the Cook boys, James, drowned near the Isle of Wight. The shock of losing her last two sons in such rapid succession proved too much for Elizabeth—it was said she spent almost three years confined to her bed.

At least, thanks to Lord Sandwich, she received a pension of £200 each year from the Admiralty, which, together with her husband’s share of the royalties from the publication of his voyage accounts, saw her into old age. “She kept her faculties to the end,” wrote Elizabeth’s cousin Canon Bennett, describing her as “a handsome and venerable lady, her white hair rolled back in ancient fashion, always dressed in black satin. She wore a ring with her husband’s hair in it, and she entertained the highest respect for his memory, measuring everything by his standard of honor and morality. Her keenest expression of disapprobation was that ‘Mr. Cook’—to her he was always Mr. Cook, not Captain—‘would never have done so.’ Like many widows of sailors, she could never sleep in high wind for thinking of the men at sea.”

Elizabeth Cook died in 1835, aged ninety-three.

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.