Epilogue

Presenting Predicaments

The case of Dominica is altogether an exceptional one. It is, I believe, one of the very richest islands in possession of the Crown in the West Indies in the natural productiveness of the soil; at the same time, it is an island in which practically nothing has been done, and to this day the very best Crown land in the island, amounting to about 100,000 acres, is absolutely unproductive.

—Joseph Chamberlain, 1896

THIS BOOK HAS SHOWN how enslaved laborers engaged in everyday forms of resilience as they negotiated the slow and fast violence wrought by the plantation and its global interdependencies.1 It is an all-too-predictable irony that 133 years after William Young planned the administration of Dominica, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain addressed Parliament with the words above. Much of Dominica’s history has been one in which nature was viewed as abundant, though utterly useless without the ability of labor and markets to catalyze that latency into capital. Laborers are portrayed as having little control over land use and thus being particularly ineffective stewards of the land and authors of their own poverty. Missing from this account are the predicaments faced by laborers making a living on lands they did not own, in a stratified society in which they were exploited. Political, economic, and environmental forces differentially impacted the lives and livelihoods of Dominicans of Indigenous and/or African descent in the years after the legal abolition of slavery. Also left out are the everyday acts of conservation and reorganization that enabled them to live. The resilient solutions they crafted might continue to be useful as people encounter new predicaments today.

In Dominica, people solved problems not of their own making. People legally defined as property were purchased to perform agricultural work in eighteenth-century Dominica. And while plantation labor was not the only experience of people categorized as slaves, and enslaved people were not the only ones affected by this transformation, they were the ones who were most directly responsible for implementing the plans of English-speaking elites. Security, mobility, and belonging presented challenges in the everyday lives of enslaved workers. Water, as a political, economic, and cultural matter, maps these predicaments and how the enslaved resolved them.

These problems did not begin with the sugar revolution, but they intensified after agents of empire argued that Dominica and its resources should be put to new purposes. Humans have been shaping Dominica for nearly five thousand years. Water was an important part of this story. It was a resource that had to be accounted for as farmers moved onto an island where, in some places, agriculture is entirely rainfall dependent. There were hydrosocial aspects to water, whereby ideas were shared and alliances forged. It was also a cultural substance with meanings, hard to recover, attached to its use. While sugar cane was not entirely new to the island in 1763, the intensity of activities undertaken to cultivate it and the geographic spread of these endeavors were. Before then, the labor and crops of enslaved workers supplied people who claimed ownership over them with profits from the sale of food to neighboring islands. There was flexibility to the choices they made about what crops to grow and where—flexibility that modulated changes in the environment, including political alliances, market demands, and the weather. This flexibility, however, was read by colonizing narratives as a poor utilization of the Nature Island.

In 1763, colonizing narratives viewed Nature’s Island as an open frontier with a latent abundance that could be realized only through the work of slavery and markets. Agents of empire did not anticipate, however, the degree to which sugar would be adopted across the island. Factories and fields sprang up in places where these agents thought they should, as well as in places they thought they shouldn’t. According to the standing and ruined buildings that dot the landscape, the process was dramatic. Within two decades, eighty-seven new sugar estates were built, and some 18,000 people were added to the population of the island. Land and its resources became scarce, making workers more vulnerable to changes in weather, precipitation cycles, and the vagaries of commerce. Scarcity here is not a prior condition, but something that emerged from discourses surrounding abundance. It is no surprise, then, that cheap goods used to store liquid become increasingly popular as parts of domestic assemblages only after Dominica’s sugar revolution.

Observing these processes, land-holding residents grew increasingly disillusioned, fearing a future in which maroons and enslaved workers would conspire to dislodge them from the island. Where I stress scarcity, observers stressed the governor’s, and his functionaries’, inability to cope with the American Revolution as the inflection point that changed their world. It interrupted commerce and the supply of the colony. It is important to take such arguments seriously, as they were formative in the experiences of the enslaved. Of course, such accounts are written from a particular stance filled with blind spots. Nonetheless, they point to questions to ask of the archaeological record. Objects recovered from the villages where enslaved laborers lived found their way there through illicit and sometimes illegal means. These objects speak not only to an unexpected economy in which workers interacted face to face with maroons and Kalinago, but also to increasingly shared idioms between people who lived on islands that owed allegiance to different sovereigns. Despite fears of poorly scrutinized alliances and attempts to maintain financial integrity to the island’s economy, the mobility of slaves was needed to make slavery and plantations work. Though not within the scope of this book, I feel it is important to gesture that predicaments of security, mobility, and belonging did not just end with slavery.

Slow violence is intergenerational, as resolutions to predicaments create new problems. This study of agricultural intensification on the Nature Island anticipates the continuity of problems that a largely landless majority were still forced to resolve after effective emancipation in 1838.2 In Dominica, markets for botanical commodities, new and old, created conditions in which small holders and planters alike would replace one crop with another (lime with sugar and cocoa with coffee), or plant new crops altogether, such as bananas.3 By and large, people who were the children of enslaved workers, or who were once enslaved themselves, could not accumulate in ways that plantation owners and white settlers with enough cash could. Low wages, along with laws stipulating the minimum amount of land that could be purchased, regulated who got what land.4 Wage workers continued to feel the squeeze. Force also played an exclusionary role. After familiar attempts to take away the political franchise the 1831 “Brown Privilege Bill” had conferred to people of color, violence erupted at the courthouse and the marines were summoned to quell the unrest.5

Discourses that legitimized some priorities over others continued to create problems that others were forced to solve. In the 1880s and 1890s, a spate of bushfires led some to complain that once-rich agricultural lands were now “barren wastes of rock,” when the fertile “soil left burned and bare” was “washed to the valley or sea.”6 Dr. Nichols, one of the observers introduced in chapter 2, complained, “year after year, during the dry season, planters . . . suffered great losses by fires set by their neighbors.”7 The “neighbors” in this account are not other members of the planter class. Rather, they are people who were once enslaved, or the children of people who were once enslaved, who continued to be racialized as Black. Provision strategies seem to be mostly portrayed by reference to pathology—a people living close to subsistence and next to disaster, who overtax the soil through unstable agricultural practices. Nichols would go on to argue that burning would rob the soils of “nitrifying microbes.”8

With an eye to “modernize the island” and secure what was perceived to be an increasingly tenuous relationship between colony and metropole, Henry Hesketh Bell, Dominica’s newly appointed governor, encouraged white settlement, funded experiments with new crops, and facilitated the banana industry. In 1900, Bell remarked “that a great majority of colored people speak nothing but patois.” He went on to state, “it is sometimes difficult to realize that one is in a colony which has been British for more than 120 years.”9 To redress these perceived concerns, Bell encouraged whites to emigrate from Britain and even suggested that Boer prisoners be resettled in Dominica as part of a plan to whiten the island. He also lobbied for a Carib reserve, which the government established in 1903. Creation of this territory was foundational to interpretations of “authentic” and indigenous Caribbean history.10

What emerged in the wake of these efforts were new settlement patterns creating new predicaments. Crown-lands on the narrow band of coastline became the sites of new villages where landless, largely black Dominicans made new lives and livelihoods. Some continued to work as wage laborers on estates. Others became fishers. Still others found new opportunities as they continued to work the spaces between estates, experimenting with new crops for new markets and cultivating old ones that continued to be staples. Yet for the million problems faced, there were a million solutions.

This book is as much about the way we confront contemporary predicaments of water and soil as about those forged in the wake of the sugar revolution. Extreme weather events, changing precipitation, and sea-level rise have made those living in the global north more mindful of the vulnerability of lives and livelihoods in a time of climate change. “Resilience” has been popularized in policy statements written to confront these challenges. But what lesson does the mapping of water in eighteenth-century Dominica hold for contemporary policy on resilience? We can take note of how contemporary social relations shape our interpretations of the archaeological record.11 We can also recast our focus on how the experience of those caught up in circumstances beyond their control shaped the archaeological record.12 This record, then, addresses present-day concerns about “human rights, the environment, and socio-economic development,” and provides an important set of data about everyday forms of resilience.13

Everyday life has gotten more difficult for many of the Dominican colleagues with whom I started this project. Increasingly intense weather associated with climate change has become part of the predicaments they have to negotiate on a daily basis. In September 2017, Dominica was ravaged by Hurricane Maria. While hurricanes are not a new threat to the region, the magnitude of the storm—in the wake of Tropical Storm Erika in 2016, from which the island was still in recovery—resulted in historic devastation. As has been widely reported in the media, the hurricane devastated the island nation’s infrastructure, housing stock, and economic base, and the government sought assistance from governmental, nongovernmental, and private organizations for the long process of recovery. On some islands, such as St. Croix, sustainable archaeology projects were in place to immediately assess the short-and long-term damage.14 For my small part, I went to Dominica in April 2018 to assist in whatever small way I could.

High winds, floods, landslides, and recovery efforts have deflated, exposed, or endangered important archaeological and historic sites, many of which have been central to Dominica’s tourist industry. My specific goal in 2018 was to assist the government in assessing the storm’s impact on these resources. We identified, documented, and described known and unknown archaeological sites as one step in recuperating the heritage infrastructure of the island. The other goal was less academic. I wanted to track down colleagues and friends with whom I could not talk via WhatsApp or Facebook.

I heard how environmental devastation impacted everyday life. In the days after the storm, water was so scarce that in some cases people would drink water straight from the open drains that line the roadways in the small coastal villages. I had also heard how NGOs used these communities as an opportunity to promote themselves through their good efforts, creating a predicament of abundance. I was told many stories of relief agencies providing items that would be of little use at the time they were delivered. The port was crammed with containers holding items that might have been useful but also might not have been appropriate for the conditions at hand. I witnessed the damage to houses and housing stock. Many of the coastal villages settled in the years immediately after emancipation were the ones hardest hit by the storm. Damage varied from a few missing roofs to villages completely buried by the loose, gravelly soils exposed over the years due to aggregate mining for concrete. The aggregate was used for roads and buildings, erected by Dominican and foreign capital in the form of hospitality companies and overseas aid organizations.

The day I was leaving on that first trip after Maria, optimism struck as I drove past a garden high above the village of Massacre and saw shoots of dasheen begin to poke through the soil. That provision grounds still provided security in the aftermath of environmental devastation suggested the importance of solutions of the past. In the weeks, months, and years after Maria, resilience became a common phrase and a call to action. But as I hope this book has shown, there is a social history and archaeology to resilience. For centuries, people living on Caribbean islands, particularly those who are most economically and politically vulnerable, have been at the forefront of solving climate problems, including agricultural precarity, water resource management, and forced migration. Despite the harsh conditions of slavery, enslaved laborers in regimented plantation villages carved out new spaces where they could lead rich social lives with networks extending to other communities on Dominica and beyond, including Kalinago and maroon. Through these ties, they cultivated a set of ecological priorities that helped solve problems not of their own making.