Slaves, Free Men, Citizens - CIFAS

xivIntroductionjugated African and Asian majorities regarded themselvesas West Indians, even though most of them were eventuallyCaribbean-born, and many had lost all contact with theirancestral homelands. For many West Indians, "home" wasa European country they may never have seen. The residuesof an absentee mentality still linger in these societies,where it is widely believed that the way to get ahead isto get away, and where the prizes to be won and the exemplarsto be followed beckon from London, Paris, andNew York.Slavery and indenture created and sustained highly stratifiedsocial orders, in which distinctions of race and ethnicityreinforced class differences. The melange of European andAfrican in a plantation environment set the basic structureof West Indian societies, each then modified by its uniqwhistorical circumstancef and by an exclusive relationshipwith its imperial center. But racial inequality, segregaticm,prejudice, and selfdenigration are threads that run throughoutWest Indian history everywhere from the beginning tothe present day.In each territory a different balance of slave and free,of black and colored and white, and of various economicenterprises made for a different social order; and distinctionsof religion, nationality, and imperial relationship magnifiedthese differences. The nineteenth century added newsociocultural wmplications. for economic adjustments afteremancipation brought East Indians, Chinese, Portuguese,and Syrians into the West Indian economic and social order.Given such racial and ethnic diversity, it is no wonderthat contemporary West Indian societies exhibit so wide arange of cultures and languages, social and political ayaterns,and relationships to their European metropoles.Yet the general outline of West Indian history is similarthroughout the whole area. Mercantilism, the economiccounterpart of nationalism, was from the outset the guidingdoctrine of the competing European powers In the WentIndies. Colonies were sought and developed for the solepurpose of producing goods and markets useful to themother country. For England and France, in particular, theIntroductionchief value of the West Indies was the intensive cultivationof nigarcaae. In all tbew plantation colonies, refrdlw ofimperial and sociocultural Çfierenew overriding economicforces imprinted similar organizational pattenu. The imprintkç btç of laÈlm impoi~~~t for West llÈlià dstructure. Colonizing policies, relations between master andslave, the intermediate role played by their free-colored offspring,the struggle for emancipatim and its general failureto alter the social structure, the "creolizationn of customand attitude in all segments of society, including the feelingof not being at home in the Caribbean-these themes arerepeated in almost every territory.Three salient moods stand out in West Indian history.The first is the enduring sense of racial and ethnic differencefelt by people whose disparate ways of life w e largely detenninedby enforced occupational and social roles. A iecondis tk pervasive influence of the pmt and a lack of faithin future prospects: the appearance of change to assumedto be illusory, the trappings alter but not the substance. 11Èulow pace of popular participation and of self-rule over thep twy, the inability of local govemmeots to matemuch of a dent on inherited inequalities, the relative smallnessand weakness of Caribbean state* are all conduciveto a sense of futility, of bei detennincd by the past-A third mood stems from relatively recent attempts tolead meaning and wen virtue into local history, a historyof a post burdened with the degradation of slavery, the denialof belonging, and the difficulties of local self-definition.But if the search for identity has not yet led West Indiansto manufacture a new history for themselves, it has begunto persuade them to view their old history in new ways.The ctmqueoces of that history are to be seen in theextraordinary heterogeneity of contemporary West Indianculture and social institutions. The typical West Indian"Creole" society is distinguished by a tripartite division intowhite, colored, and black, rather than merely white andblack as in the United States. Class and color still closelyconverge despite legal sanctions against discrimination:most whites are well to do, most colored people are middlexv