9
production facility, where the juice from the cane was processed into an assortment of
finished products. A variety of parallel efforts were required to make the process work,
for example harvesting timber and transporting water to fuel the steam-powered
machinery used on the more advanced plantations. Women were often employed as
agricultural labor in the fields, reserving men for the heavy work of staffing the
machinery of production. This turmoil of activity continued for a period of time ranging
between four and six months. Throughout this time period planters required constant and
reliable access to laborers. Slaves usually slept for only a few hours each night during the
harvest and any peripheral effort, for example cultivating subsistence food crops, was put
aside until the harvest was complete.
What Jamaican planters discovered after the passage of Britain’s emancipation law was
that sugar production, as it had been organized prior to the abolition of slavery, was
imperfectly suited to a world organized under the principles of freely contracted labor.
During the period of apprenticeship that followed emancipation, former slaves were
required by law to work for forty and one-half hours each week on the estates of their
former masters (Holt 1992). The expectation was that former slaves would continue to
labor, for wages, during their free time. Jamaican planters found their expectations
unfulfilled. In fact, many former slaves fled their apprenticeships to live as free persons,
hiding among free black settlers in distant territories. Those who did not flee worked with
little enthusiasm during their hours of obligatory labor and spent their free time cultivating
subsistence crops on their own small parcels of land. Women in particular, previously the
back-bone of the agricultural labor force during the harvest, stopped working for wages
altogether.
Convention