[COLONIALISM.] The Case Of The Free-Labour British Colonies …

The Aftermath of Abolition

[COLONIALISM.] The Case Of The Free-Labour British Colonies … London: James Madden . 1852.

8vo. Publisher’s pale pink printed wrappers, pp. xvi, 155, [1 (blank)]; wrappers reinforced with later card, a few marks to wrappers and repairs to spine; internally very good.

Uncommon first edition of this pamphlet on sugar production and taxes two decades after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica, St Lucia, Guiana, St Vincent, and other territories in the West Indies, giving detailed descriptions of the working conditions.

The focus is the transition from slavery to free labour and the state of economic crisis in the West Indies in the years following the 1834 Emancipation Act, which featured an apprentice system intended to train former enslaved people for wage labour whilst keeping them on plantation; in 1838 the apprenticeship system ended early. The present work comprises a case by the Colonial Sub-Committee of the National Association for the Protection of Industry and Capital, ‘submitted to the British Legislature and the British nation for an impartial rehearing’, providing pleas to representatives of British colonies that ‘all impediments to the introduction of free labour into the British Colonies from all parts of the world … should be at once removed; that [reductions off duties on foreign and slave sugar should be applied] until the final extinction of slavery be fairly established’ (p. 31).

Another petition, regarding Jamaica, expresses the wish that ‘our fellow-subjects in England may be relieved from the degradation of eating slave sugar and drinking slave coffee by the prohibition of its use’, and that ‘a large supply of industrious labourers be introduced into [Jamaica], at the national cost’ (p. 21). Speeches made in the House of Lords by Earl Grey and Lord Stanley are also reproduced.

SKU: 2117984