Alcoholic Marronage: Drinking by Enslaved Peoples and the Ambivalence of Planters in the British Caribbean

Abstract:Alcohol use was widespread in the slave societies of the British Caribbean. Enslaved Africans and Afro-Creoles drank to facilitate communication with the spiritual world, to remove barriers to social interaction, and to escape the many anxieties of building a life on the unpredictable Caribbean frontier. Plantation owners in the British Caribbean made contrasting claims about the level of drinking among enslaved peoples. Some described them as heavy drinkers, while others described them as abstemious. The disparity in descriptions highlights universal uncertainties about alcohol drinking and its unique ability to generate both harmony and discord. On the one hand, planters in the British Caribbean feared that drinking among enslaved workers was liberating; a fomenter of insurrections that threatened the social order. On the other hand, they saw it as a tool of domination; a way to placate frustrations and soothe social tensions by allowing enslaved peoples to drink and regularly blow off steam. Uncertainties about the conduct that accompanied alcohol consumption help explain why colonial legislatures enacted laws to curb drinking among enslaved peoples, yet planters continued to dole out large amounts of rum to the enslaved peoples on their estates. Travellers' accounts, plantation records, and archaeological evidence indicate that drinking did indeed provide enslaved peoples with a momentary release from the pressures that built up in these societies. As with forms of short-term flight from the plantation (or petite marronage), drinking acted as a safety valve that provided temporary relief from the challenges of daily life and, thus, helped ease tensions between planters and the enslaved. Yet, the evidence also indicates that the sociability and the disinhibition that accompanied alcohol drinking may have, at times, incited civil unrest within enslaved communities. As a result, planters in the British Caribbean had reason to be ambivalent. An ideology of white racism, as well as an economic structure based on the systematic and coerced extraction of labour further increased the planters' ambivalence.