Dr Rita Pemberton

THE SUGAR planters of Tobago gave very strong indications of their opposition to emancipation during the apprenticeship system from 1834-1838, which was a part of their negotiated compensation package.

Although it was verbalised as a period of preparation of the enslaved population for the responsibilities of freedom, it was in fact a guarantee of labour to the plantations before the onset of full emancipation. This imposition was onerous on the enslaved Africans who were made to bear a part of the cost of their emancipation.

During the years 1834-1838, the plantation owners and their mouthpiece, the Tobago Assembly, made their opposition to emancipation very clear by making every effort to maintain the operation of the slave system to which they had become accustomed on the island. This set the stage for an ongoing conflict between planters and workers, which endured into the 20th century.

During the post-emancipation years, citing what they described as an unwillingness of the resident workers to give their labour to the estates, the lament of the plantation owners was that they suffered from a shortage of labour. This was a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation which developed on the island.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, amid the turbulence caused by French occupation, some estates experienced financial problems. The situation worsened with the termination of the trade in captive Africans in 1808. At this time planters argued that the cost of labour had become extremely high, making plantations operations challenging.

From this period onwards, the consistent planter assessment of the situation was that the sugar industry suffered from a serious shortage of labour, which had to be corrected to make sugar cultivation viable in Tobago. While blame was put squarely on to the shoulders of the workers, there were two major issues which were not included in the planter perception of the equation.

The first issue was that the termination of the trade in captive Africans and the institution of emancipation coincided with a decline in profitability of the sugar industry in some colonies, Tobago being one of them. From the start of the 19th century a pattern of changing land ownership was evident on the island and as the century wore on, estates changed hands with increasing intensity.

The international sugar market situation had changed with the presence of new providers, whose production levels were higher than that of colonies like Tobago. They used modern methods of production while planters in Tobago stuck to the antiquated methods – which they used from the mid-18th century – and these new producers could afford to sell at lower prices. But the major factor was the loss of investor interest in the Tobago sugar industry.

Planters had no access to capital to modernise the industry, so they continued to try to squeeze profits out of a declining industry, selling the lowest quality sugar, which attracted the cheapest prices on the market. In addition, they faced c