Beyond Massa

FOUN 1101 Caribbean Civilisation

14th November 2014.

The eighteenth century Caribbean can be considered as a period of agricultural dictatorship. Caribbean gold came in the form of sugar, an agricultural entity. At this time in the region, sugar production was characterized by enslavement. This essay would serve as a book report on Beyond Massa Management in the British Caribbean 1770-1834. This book was written by John F. Campbell, who is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies – St. Augustine. This book generally discusses or looks at Sugar Production at every level in the eighteenth century. The book has its settings mainly on the Golden Grove Plantation in Jamaica. The text consisted of seven chapters, a soft cover and cost two hundred and fifty dollars. Issues that would be discussed throughout this essay is as follows; enslavement, gender, human resource strategies/policies and revisionism.

Beyond Massa Management in the British Caribbean 1770-1834 goes straight to the point of enslaved African labor. To get the ball rolling on slavery, one must understand the types of slavery involved and also that in referring to the word slave reference is being made to the word servitude. In traditional African society, “Africans could become slaves for punishment, for crime, as payment of family debt[s], or most common of all, being captured as prisoners of war”[1]. In this particular type of slavery the Africans grew in, understood, accepted and were still considered human. The slavery that existed in the eighteenth century Caribbean was called chattel slavery and it saw the enslaved as objects. “The word Chattel in its legal context simply mean property”[2].

There is a common belief that slavery was due to racism. Although this text focuses of enslaved African labor, mention must be made that “unfree labour in the New World was brown, white, black, yellow.”[3] “The reason for slavery, wrote Gibbson Wakefield, are not moral, but economical...