Freedmen And Slaves In The Barbados Militia

"Remains the only treatment of the free people of colour of Barbados from the earliest periods of the slave society to emancipation in 1834 and provides the most detailed discussion of the manumission process for any British West Indian society. Allowed certain rights and privileges not extended to slaves but denied others reserved for whites, the social status of the free people was ambiguous. ... Handler shows how the freedmen's struggle for civil rights was a collective effort to maximize their free status and to avoid a position of permanent intermediacy between white and enslaved.--

"Finally, the most detailed research to date of the 1816 slave rebellion and its impact upon the emancipation debate is presented, which suggests that Barbadian slaves, like their counterparts in Demerara and Jamaica who rebelled in 1823 and 1831 respectively, were saying to their owners and the Imperial government, you will either grant us our freedom by law or force us to make it by war. This work is a polemical account of the changing relationships between maturing black radical consciousness and white power in Barbados during the slavery period. It goes a long way towards assisting the process of decolonising the island's general Eurocentric historiography"--Back cover

Offers a thorough examination of Afro-Barbadian migration to Liberia during the mid- to late nineteenth century.

social history of slavery.