Near a Plantation

The book is an attempt to show that, contrary to general belief, free villages were established in Barbados soon after the end of the Apprenticeship in 1838. The term “free villages” is employed in the way that it was coined by its author, William Knibb, Baptist missionary in Jamaica. He said in November 1838 that such villages were to be the blacks’ routes of escape from their “inveterate enemies”; the emancipated black man could use the village as an “asylum” from which he could “defy them with scorn, and go to any estate he pleases to work”. Therefore, the fact that as many as 69 such settlements could be found within thirty years in small, densely populated Barbados suggests that the scenario which was being played out in less densely populated territories was not absent from Barbados. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that every opportunity was being exploited by blacks to acquire land that they could control and therefore escape the restrictions of conditional tenancy on planters’ lands.

However, free village development in Barbados can be seen as a variant. Unlike elsewhere in the Caribbean, free villages could not be equated with the emergence of a small farmer class of significant size. In Barbados, the average size of holding was less than one acre, which meant that the vast majority of the villagers had to find regular employment as agricultural labourers on the plantations. Therefore, by 1945, while free villages housed a majority of the rural population, that population was forced to remain close to the plantation, not merely because of the size of the island, but because the plantations were the main source of employment. In this way, free village development in the island did not adversely affect labour supplies on the plantations.