Abolition and the Victorian Culture War
The abolition of slavery in the 19th century was only the beginning of a culture war on race and empire that divided the intellectual classes of Jamaica and Britain.
According to the historian Hilary Beckles, British colonial state forces killed more Black people when suppressing revolts in the Caribbean in the 50 years after slave emancipation in 1838 than in the 50 years leading up to it. Emancipation brought compensation for former slaveowners but not for the enslaved. The extreme inequality between a wealthy, politically powerful white minority and a Black and mixed-race majority with little or no property continued after emancipation. In Jamaica, British Guiana, St Vincent and Barbados, many people freed from slavery (freedpeople) burned plantations and seized land and resources in protest against these conditions in which Black lives barely mattered. The most infamous of these protests and their aftermath were the events in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1865. The suppression of a rebellion, killing of rebels and protestors and the subsequent failure to punish the colonial agents responsible changed politics, racial ideologies and Empire in Jamaica and Britain.
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