Women Plantation Workers

International Experiences

Shobita Jain, Rhoda Reddock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000324273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

This pioneering collection of essays brings together a description and analysis of women workers and the socio-economic systems of plantations world-wide. The plantation remains a formidable force in many areas of the world and new trends towards tree farming call for further examination of its agriculture. Women have, in the past, constituted a considerable precentage of the work force in this milieu, and continue to do so.Using specific case studies of historical and contemporary plantations, an account is given of the history of female labour, focusing on the colonial and post-colonial eras. The essays examine reasons for women's degraded status and emphasize, in particular, issues relating to migrant workers.The gradual move away from traditional family roles is, to some extent, reflected in variations in the position of the female plantation worker. However, where inequalities in class and status continue to characterize plantation life, capitalist and patriarchal control prevails.Both chilling and bracing, the sufferings of plantation labourers may seem remote to most of us, but they are still very much part of the contemporary world. Providing a close insight into the lives of the female protagonists, these essays have given an opportunity for their stories to be heard.

1 Plantation Women: An Introduction

Rhoda Red dock and Shobhita Jain

Why This Collection?

In discussions with scholars carrying out work on women in plantation societies, certain common characteristics emerged. While some of these were experienced by most groups of oppressed and superexploited women, there were also different ones which began to suggest a certain pattern.

The plantation being a 'total institution' (Goffman's concept applied by Best 1968) operated under conditions which gave rise to specific characteristics of the sexual division of labour. It also created new spaces for negotiated alternatives in male-female relationships. In addition, the plantation experience of initially coerced labour based on strict profit and loss calculations, provided indications of the productive capabilities of women which contemporary ideologies in other parts of the world were seeking to deny. Further, the plantation experience presents a clear example of the ways in which the sexual division of labour and gender roles can be differentially applied depending on the system of labour organization, the class, race, ethnicity or nationality of the workers involved.

The editors felt that there was a strong need to gather into one volume the few studies that have been done on female plantation labour. A collection like this could help to make the data on plantation women more easily available and accessible. It is hoped that this will encourage further research and exchange of ideas, as well as the emergence of a broader framework for analysis. In the existing literature on plantation labour, the role of female labour has found very little space. This omission is particularly conspicuous given the large number of women labourers employed in many plantation regimes. Covering widely situated plantation territories during slavery to colonial to post-colonial eras, this collection aims to fill a major gap in the existing literature. For a collection of essays on capitalist plantations in colonial Asia, see the special issue of the Journal ofPeasant Studies, titled 'Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia', edited by Daniel et al. 1992. Another publication, Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and State, edited by Krishnamurty (1989) notes 'survival strategies' in the plantation sector (e.g. Lai 1989). However, neither publication allows sufficient space to female labour on plantations, though one is about plantations and the other is about women. The context of colonial or neocolonial and capitalist discourse cannot afford to overlook constructions of gendered positions.

The adaptability of the plantation economies from slavery' to colonial to postcolonial regimes shows that the plantation mode of production is to continue in all those countries where state enterprises have failed to bolster economic growth (see Graham and Floering 1984). Moreover, social, economic and cultural contacts between the plantation enclaves and their surroundings have brought about certain changes in societies that are penetrated by the plantation system. To understand the changes, socio-economic generalities necessary for perpetuation of the plantation system, need to be criss-crossed with the cultural patterns of the plantation population. Aspects of local culture, of the culture of migrant labourers, are equally powerful constraints. This book aims to make the shift from socio-economic generalities to understanding cultural specificities. Let us first consider the internal structures of the plantation.

The Origins of the Plantation

In its early usage, the term 'plantation' was often interchangeable with 'colony'. European colonization created these new societies as a part of their economic and physical expansion into previously unexploited territories. The plantation system of agriculture has in fact been the classical form of capitalistic exploitation in tropical areas where it developed as a political and social as well as an economic institution.

The term plantation was originally used to designate a plot of ground set with plants. During the period of British colonization of the West Indies and North America it came to denote a group of settlers as well as the political unit constructed by such a group (Selyman and Johnson 1948). Although plantations are usually located in tropical areas, this is the only way in which they are tropical. The ownership and investment traditionally comes from countries in the North. Local labour is utilized but local ownership was until recently, extremely rare. The plantations fulfil a desire on the part of non-tropical peoples for objects which can only be provided by tropical lands.

Plantations in the West Indies developed sugar as their pnncipal crop in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was as sugar estates that the West Indies and mainland territories first became of value to the British, the French, the Dutch and to a lesser extent the Spanish. Sugar was known in Europe as the 'honey-bearing reed of India' (Greaves 1959: 13). Although coffee, cotton and indigo were among the first crops planted by British and French settlers in the West Indies, they were soon overshadowed by the sugar-cane. Sugar was brought to Suriname and the West Indian islands by the Jewish settlers who had gone to Pernambuco during its occupation by the Dutch. But, as pointed out by Mintz (in a personal communication):

The idea that the first sugarcane grown and the first sugar made in the New World was in Brazil is quite wrong. Sugarcane did not diffuse from Pernambuco to the Antilles. It is true that the Dutch taught the Barbadian colonists to produce sugar, but that was more than a century after it was first grown in Santo Domingo. Sugarcane was brought to the New World on the second voyage of Columbus. It was cultivated on the Spanish island of Santo Domingo, and the first cask of sugar in the New World was made from it and shipped to Spain in (or about) 1516. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish also took the cane from Pernambuco and planted it in Puerto Rico.

In China and Japan tea was an indigenous crop long before it became a plantation crop for export. However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, cultivation of the crop in India, Ceylon and Java was solely for export purposes and the plantation system was responsible for expansion in the trade. Sugar-cane was also widely grown and crudely processed in these areas long before it was assimilated as a plantation crop.

Cocoa was introduced into Europe in the early part of the seventeenth century from Mexico. Today, West Africa rivals Central America as a major source of cocoa. Cocoa was first transferred to West Africa by the establishment of cocoa plantations on the island of San Thome by the Portuguese and also on the island of Fernando Po by the Spanish. Seeds were taken from Fernando Po in the nineteenth century by West African labourers returning to their homeland.

Bananas and rubber can perhaps be viewed as the plantation products of the twentieth century as sugar was of the seventeenth and cotton of the nineteenth. The successful export of bananas depended on the improved sea transportation of the twentieth century, so it was only then that the trade expanded.

In a unique manner the plantation system at a global level has been responsible for the merging of enterprise, capital and labour from different parts of the world to work together in areas which offer new opportunities for tropical crop production.

In the West Indies labour for the plantations originally came from the indigenous island peoples, the Caribs and the Arawaks/Tainos. However, initial efforts to mobilize the native population as a labour force failed because the Amerindians died in their thousands, through suicide or from being too weak to withstand the hard labour. The most successful solution found to the labour problem was the large-scale importation of African slaves. After the abolition of the slave trade in the nineteenth century and the emancipation of slaves shortly after, a new source of labour was sought. East Indians were brought to the plantations through a system of indentureship which was a type of enforced contract labour for fixed periods of time.

In India, China, the Straits Settlements and the Dutch East Indies, the large dependent labour force mainly consisted of Chinese, Javanese and Indians. These labourers were imported at the expense of the planters. Today labour is still of a forced nature despite the abolition of indentured labour. The pay for workers is low and the living conditions are poor.

The Plantation as a System: Change and

The plantation is by definition a class structured system of organization, strongly hierarchical and male dominated in nature. The original plantations were rooted in a considerable degree of centralized control. In the 'old style' plantations, labour was bound, using some mechanism of outright coercion such as slavery, peonage or indentured servitude. Part of the resources of the enterprise — that is the labour time of the workers - was employed to underwrite the consumption needs of the workers and the status needs of the owner (Wolf and Mintz 1957). Labour did not feed itself outside of the boundaries of the plantation.

The 'new style' plantation, on the other hand, according to Wolf and Mintz (1957) is based on 'rational' cost accounting where the consumption needs of both owners and workers were no longer relevant to its operations. By the same token, labour costs are determined by competition or by other factors which affect this competition, such as labour organization. Some of the major characteristics of old style plantations are firstly a predominance of personal face-to-face relationships. Personal action is used to carry out technical functions, most importantly ritual relationships of dependence and dominance between workers and owners.

The old style plantations differ in a large measure from new style plantations in terms of their operational style and some of their objectives. New style plantations are, supposedly, characterized by impersonal relationships between owners and workers. According to this view, the plantation takes no responsibility for the employed labour force, in other words there is no paternalism involved in their relationship. New style plantations are said to be focused on rational efficiency as their production goal and this type of plantation is not an apparatus for servicing the status needs of its owners or managers. Nonetheless, the production process in the new style plantations was not immune to the cyclical fluctuations, experienced in the growth of capitalism during the last two hundred years. Production relations in most new style plantation regimes continued to feature coercion of the labour.

Courtenay (1980), on the other hand, developed a three-part typology of the traditional, the industrial and the modern plantation. Following Best (1968), the traditional plantation was defined as a total economic institution in which the entire existence of the workforce was incorporated into the process of production and reproduction. The inflexibility inherent in the system was tied up with the range of crops produced - sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo - and the need to extract the maximum labour from their investment. This form of production, of course, with significant variations, characterized the slave plantations of Brazil, the West Indies, the mid-Atlantic and Southern USA especially Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia for a period of close to three hundred years. The traditional slave plantation provides the context for Lucille Mathurin-Mair's article on women field workers in Jamaica during slavery.

Changes in the plantation system in the nineteenth century were to a large extent wrought by developments in the international economy and in local production relations. One of the most important of these was the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and the eventual emancipation of slaves in British colonies between 1833 and 1838. These developments were the result both of the continued slave revolts and resistance in the colonies and the emergence of industrial capitalism in the metropole. The other important development was the expansion of the plantation system to new areas in South and South East Asia, Africa and the Pacific and the production of new crops (Courtenay 1980; 44-5).

The new industrial plantations which emerged were adapted to the new industrial era. No longer dependent on slave labour, bonded or indentured labour had to be introduced. Due to increasing competition and technological improvements there was a need to maximize economies of scale. This was effected by amalgamating smaller estates, mechanization, use of improved crop varieties and utilization of land use by, for example, reducing or eliminating the growth of food crops for estate consumption. All of this took place under the ownership of joint stock companies as opposed to the single ownership of the past. The still 'total' character of both the traditional and industrial plantations as we will see in the chapters of this book, presented the possibility of a challenge to traditional patterns of male authority and control. Women's work in agriculture was often as important as or more important than their work in biological or social reproduction (see Edholm, Harris and Young 1977); so much so that plantation labour continued to be primarily derived from migration and until this century the plantation management still had the responsibility to provide basic rations, housing, child care and health facilities for their labourers, albeit at the lowest possible level. Mechanized technology as a substitute for labour-intensive methods was not adopted in most of the new plantations where employers could get cheap and adequate labour supply.

The labour needs of the plantation system occasioned some of the most significant population movements in modern history. During this period indentured labour from the colonized parts of Africa, Asia and China were transported to various countries. By far the largest number were Indians or 'coolies' who were taken to plantations in the West Indies including British Guiana, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad, Southern and East Afnca, Fiji, Malaysia, Ceylon and within India itself to Assam. A number of studies based on this form of labour are included in this collection, including the chapters by Kurian on Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Jain on the Assam tea gardens, Reddock on Trinidad and Tobago, Shameem on Fiji, and Shepherd on Jamaica focusing on the indentureship experience in the post-slavery plantation era.

Another characteristic of the industrial plantation was its coexistence with small farmer production. Small peasant production of estate crops was one way of reducing risk, ensuring the continued use of skilled labour especially female workers withdrawn from public labour on the estates. All processing, however, took place in the plantation factory;

As individual investment gave way to company ownership, investments by trading companies had to be safeguarded and hence often accompanied or followed political colonization by the European powers. By the nineteenth century a trading system had been established which facilitated the flow of raw materials and highly valued plantation crops to European manufactured goods, a situation which in many respects still exists today (Best 1968).

The modern plantation according to Courtenay is much less easily recognizable than its predecessors, largely because many of the characteristics previously unique to the plantation have now been adapted to other forms of agricultural enterprise. This fact and the continued existence of plantations even in their modern form are testimony to the economic advantages of the plantation as an instrument of accumulation. The modern plantations have rationalized land use and used scientific research to improve agricultural methods. This has resulted in raising labour productivity. All the same, labour control in these plantation regimes continues to centralize unfree labour, a feature of colonial plantations. This is the reason why women workers on tea estat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Plantation Women: An Introduction
• 2 Women Field Workers in Jamaica During Slavery
• 3 The Indentureship Experience: Indian Women in Trinidad and Tobago 1845-1917
• 4 Migration, Labour and Plantation Women in Fiji: A Historical Perspective
• 5 Tamil Women on Sri Lankan Plantations: Labour Control and Patriarchy
• 6 Indian Migrant Women and Plantation Labour in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Jamaica: Gender Perspectives
• 7 Gender Relations and the Plantation System in Assam, India
• 8 Women's Role in the Household Survival of the Rural Poor: The Case of the Sugar-cane Workers in Negros Occidental
• 9 Women Plantation Workers and Economic Crisis in Cameroon
• Bibliography
• Index