In Our Time - The Morant Bay Rebellion

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rebellion that broke out in Jamaica on 11th October 1865 when Paul Bogle (1822-65) led a protest march from Stony Gut to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay. There were many grounds for grievance that day and soon anger turned to bloodshed. Although the British had abolished slavery 30 years before, the plantation owners were still dominant and the conditions for the majority of people on Jamaica were poor. The British governor suppressed this rebellion brutally and soon people in Jamaica lost what right they had to rule themselves. Some in Britain, like Charles Dickens, supported the governor's actions while others, like Charles Darwin, wanted him tried for murder. The image above is from a Jamaican $2 banknote, printed after Paul Bogle became a National Hero in 1969.With Matthew J Smith Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College LondonDiana Paton The William Robertson Professor of History at the University of EdinburghAndLawrence Goldman Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter’s College, University of OxfordProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, on the 11th of October 1865, Paul Bogle led a march from Stoning Gut to Jamaica to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay,

and there, simmering anger turned to bloodshed. The British had abolished slavery barely 30 years before, but the plantation owners were still dominant, and the British governor suppressed this rebellion brutally on their behalf. Hundreds of people were killed. As a result, Jamaican people lost what right they had to rule themselves, while in Britain some like Dickens supported the governor, while others like Darwin wanted him trying for murder. With me to discuss Samarant Bay Rebellion, Adana Payton, the William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh, Lawrence Goldman, Emeritus Fellow in History

at St. Peter's College University of Oxford and Matthew J. Smith, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London. Matthew Smith, what was it like for the majority of people in Jamaica before the abolition of slavery in 1834?

It was very brutal. In fact, the experience of enslavement had been going on from the 17th century in Jamaica with the great expansion of slavery and the sugar trade in the 18th century. Much of it was around the production of large-scale quantities of sugar for the British crown for export. Jamaica was one of the principal producers of sugar in the Caribbean, and it also made Jamaica one of the principal places, colonists, in British America, since it was taken by the British in 1655 from the Spanish.

So the expansion of sugar and racial slavery in Jamaica during the period from the 17th century going on into up to the period of abolition, really, was very, very significant and led to a very brutal regime. In fact, when compared to many of the other islands in the Caribbean, Jamaica was one, was renowned for being one of the most devastating in terms of the treatment towards enslaved Africans. Is that because it was the richest? It was partly because it was the richest, but it was also because the involvement of Britain in the transatlantic slave trade was so extensive. Over 2.6 million people being brought during the period of British slavery to Caribbean Islands, and Jamaica being the largest of the British possessions, it was one in which the plantocracy relied very strongly on that steady supply of captured Africans. So Jamaica really was sort of a place forged in brutality. In about 1834

Was the balance 400,000 people who come from Africa and 15,000 people who come from Britain? In the island of Jamaica. The best estimates we have which are from the registers of enslaved persons which were filed every three years from 1817 to 1834

estimate roughly 350,000 enslaved persons at the time of abolition in Jamaica. And so you had a very black majority, mostly African or Creole African-descended persons. What changed, for better or for worse, for the majority, after 1834? There was a short-lived moment of optimism.

1834 meant the ending officially of slavery, but it also meant the beginning of a new arrangement between the plantocracy, which was very much in league with the assembly and the political body of the country. And out of that came an apprenticeship system that lasted. four years. So full freedom really arrives in 1838. What did I mean by apprenticeship? Apprenticeship was meant to be a transitional period

between enslavement to freedom from slavery. It was meant to sort of help both the planters and adjust to the fact that the formerly enslaved property as they were, human property as they were to them, would become wage earners. And so that new labor arrangement

was meant to be sort of transition through the apprenticeship system. But the apprenticeship system ended in 1838, and that's the moment that people celebrated as a moment of full freedom in Jamaica. But that optimism was fast-demed because there were lots of other problems that emerged. The planters were incredibly intransigent to change their relationship with their laborers, even though they were free laborers at this moment. There was the imposition of taxes and impositions of regulations and laws and so forth,

which limited the exercise of that freedom, such as the purchase of land, the political franchisement and so on. So life became incredibly difficult as the period after 1838 progressed. So for the Ambridge person in Jamaica, the condition of the life didn't change much? It did not, no. Insofar as the freedom to begin to exert degrees of their liberty, there was some improvement there. And that was manifest, particularly in negotiations over wage rates, negotiations over hours of work on estates and so forth. Thank you. Diana Payton, what was the political culture developing in the first decade after the abolition? I think there's multiple kinds of political culture we need to think about. So the first that I would point to is the

electoral realm. So although there was a high property franchise, it was not so high to exclude the whole population and a significant but small number of people who had been enslaved actually become able to vote in the post-1838 period. And they vote for the Jamaican Assembly, which is the legislative body. But they also vote for the vestries, which are parish-level lawmaking bodies or governance bodies. And they're actually developed this really vibrant electoral culture in the 1840s and 1850s with people who had been enslaved, in some cases running for office, and certainly being the electorate who's being appealed to.

to. And that creates, in some, is a real threat to the plantocracy, a real fear that people from below are achieving political power. And somebody who's going to become important later in the conversation, I think George William Gordon kind of comes through that system and becomes elected to the Assembly. He became one of the kind of thorns in the plantocracy's side later on. There's a couple of other areas of politics that I think we should look at as well, though. And one is a kind of popular politics, a culture of petitioning, of all. organizing public meetings and what you might call direct action too. So there were a lot of conflicts over land, over people who thought they had title to land and then other landowners who thought that they were basically squatters trying to evict those people.

When the police came to evict them, often communities around them would defend the people who were being evicted and that could lead to conflict and even violence. And there's also religious politics. Religion is really important to freed Jamaicans. and the kind of spaces of the church become a really critical place for people to develop religious leadership. And that religious leadership also often entails political leadership, protest, concern about injustice and all kinds of forms.

Is this largely Baptist? It's partly Baptist, and in particular, not just missionary-led Baptist churches, but what comes to be called Native Baptist, which are communities who are black-led. Some of them have conflicts with the white missionaries who had been the leaders of those communities and actually want to take their religion in a different direction that the white missionaries often didn't approve of. What concessions were the planters, plantation owners, they called them, the planters?

What concessions were they prepared to make for this new reality? Well, the short answer is they tried to make as few as they possibly could. I mean, if you look at interpersonal relationships, you can see an attempt to really propagate and continue that kind of relationship that existed between master and slave. Very great authority and the use of violence. There are complaints that we have, records of people complaining that a white man's coming down a path on his horse and he refuses to give any kind of concession to pedestrians walking on the same path. That kind of assumption of being in control. At the political level, there are attempts by the planters who still control the assembly to direct things in their favour.

But it's also important to note that in a more global sense, they can't really fully keep control over everything because they're in a global sugar market. And there are places like Cuba, places like Mauritius, places like British Guyana, which are massively expanding their sugar production on the basis of unfree labour and putting in lots of capital investment, buying machinery, like railways, vacuum technology, steam-driven technology. And the Jamaican planters don't have that kind of capital to really fully compete. And they also don't have a fully controllable wage labour force.

So there is by necessity a kind of retraction of the power of the sugar planters. And they do end up having to many of them, they sell off parts of their land. And that's part of what enables the small farmers to get a real foothold in Jamaican landholding, which is important too. I want to go on. Thank you very much. What were the main perspectives in Britain this early on? Well, there were many were people taking real interest, and if so, what was the interest they were taken? Well, the answer, I think, is probably no, because the history of empire is always moving. As Matthew said, Jamaica is terribly important to the first British Empire, the 18th century British Empire, which is westward-facing an Atlantic.

But by the mid-19th century, the West Indies no longer count in quite the same way. The empire is increasingly moving eastwards and southward. You can see that by sort of a couple of interesting dates, either side of the 1865 Jamaican rebellion we're talking about. In 1857, there's the Indian mutiny, a rebellion, a much bigger rebellion in India, which leads to a massive change in the way India is governed and a refocusing on the subcontinent. the way it should be responsibly managed. And then in 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal,

the route to India is much faster. That drives Britain towards an informal empire in the Middle East because we have to control access to the Suez Canal. It also... You choose to control. Well, we choose to control. And by 1878, we've actually financially got control of the Suez Canal Company. And also, if you think about the geography, we need also control of East Africa because of the Red Sea route out into the Indian Ocean. All of this means that from a British perspective, there are many other things that are driving empire. Empire is moving elsewhere. Let's concentrate now on the governor of Jamaica. Edward Eyre, he's totally central to this

story in every way. He was the governor in 1865. Can you tell us something about his background? He was from a quite humble background. He was born in 1850. his father was a clergyman. He was not particularly well educated. He didn't go to university. At 16, he went to Australia, in fact, where he was a farmer and a drover of cattle and so forth. And then he became an explorer and actually was quite celebrated

opening up Western Australia. Many places in Australia are actually named after him. And interestingly also, he worked with Aboriginals at that time as guides and so forth and formed a strong opinion, a good opinion of them. But he was then drawn into the colonial service, for which he had absolutely no training and no proper background. And he was sent to New Zealand and then to the West Indies. And by 1862, he's deputy governor in Jamaica.

By 1865, he's acting and the real governor. What I've gathered from the information I've got from you through is that he changed when he came to Jamaica. it became harder and nastier and more brutal. Is that correct? And if so, why? Well, that's interesting. I think there are obvious personal weaknesses here.

This is a man who, it would appear, is inflexible, he's stubborn, he will not listen. It's clear that the planters are telling him, not just the people of Jamaica, but the planters, that there are very severe problems and the island is a powder keg, but he's not listening. And he also tends to take criticism, legitimate, political, discussion and debate as personal attack. Did that not happen to him when he was in Australia, New Zealand, so?

Well, interestingly, in New Zealand, they didn't complain about his personal characteristics, they complained about his low social background, that he wasn't really govern a material. You know, his father was an obscure rural clergyman. And so, you know, I think this is a case of somebody untrained, not particularly reflective, undoubtedly with racist views about the freed people he's got to govern,

somebody who is just personally unfitted for the crisis that's developing and unable ready to appreciate all the economic and social factors that we've heard about so far. Matthew, Matthew Smith, who was Paul Bogle, and why was he leading the march from Stony Gutt? Paul Bogle was a central figure in the Morant Bay Rebellion and in many ways his biography is kind of a crystallization of a lot of what we've been talking about.

This was the political cultures that evolve after emancipation, but also that longer legacy of slavery and hardened racism. He was born in 1820. He was born and was living in St. Thomas in the East, which is the central parish of the site of the Morant Bay Rebellion. He was a baker, an artisan by trade. By the 1840s, Paul Bogo, was very much involved in land owning, and he owned land.

purchased land sometime in the 1840s and was cultivating on that land, provisions, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of cotton as well. He became a person of great standing in the area that he was from Stoney Gut, and a lot of that had to do with his position on questions of politics and his position in terms of the religious culture. He was evolving. He was very, very supportive of a figure that we'll talk about. I'm sure shortly George William Gordon, because of Gordon's alignment with the claims and interests of the small farmers like Bogo and others. And he believed very strongly that members of that class who had the franchise, now he would have been within just about 1% of the population of Stony Gut that could actually vote. And that alone gave him a great sort of leadership and command in that community. But as Diana mentioned, the political culture around the franchise was even broader than the people who could actually vote because when elections would happen at local levels, this wasn't just people who could

vote who would turn out and support the campaigns, but large groups of people who didn't have a vote, but who were supporting and rallying behind whoever that candidate was. And Paul Bogel had a very, very key hand to play in that. Bogel then goes through a period of spiritual awakening. And this is where that religious culture aspect of it begins to intersect with the political culture. The Native Baptists, which are independent Baptists, as we heard from Diana, who were sort of separate from the London Baptist, became very dominant after a moment of great revival, as it was called in Jamaica, 1860 to 61.

George William Gordon is part of that, and it's a big transition for him, moving from the Anglican and the Presbyterian backgrounds that he was involved in into the Native Baptist. And then eventually, Paul Bogle becomes involved in it. In fact, he's baptized by George William Gordon in March 1865 and becomes a deacon in the native Baptist church and has his own chapel in Stony God.

And that spiritual leadership he now has merged with that political authority that he has in the community makes him a very, very powerful figure in the area of Stony God. Thank you. Diana, so what happened on the 11th of October on Morant Bay? The 11th of October is the kind of culmination of something that had been brewing for. for some time, 1865, that's right.

On that day, Paul Bogle leads a group of several hundred people who come from his village of Stony Gut into Morant Bay in military formation. They have drums accompanying them. They have conchels that they're blowing. And they arrive in the village. What provoked this much? What provoked this much? We need to go back a bit.

So 8065 is the kind of combination of periods of real hardship in Jamaica. There's been a series of droughts. The American Civil War blocked a lot of the import trade, and so provisions, food and so on, was much more expensive than it had normally been. And there'd been a series of protests and public meetings. And epidemics. Yep, there's a disease as well.

So there's a real intense poverty and an effort to change the political situation and the economic situation, in which air and the rest of the governing class had basically completely ignored. So he's marching there to get changes made? They're marching there. The specific thing that provokes the march is a few days before a court case at which

there'd been a kind of fracker and some people had been arrested for trying to intervene in the court case and the police then go to the village of Stony Gut to try and arrest, re-arrest those people who had been involved in this fracker in the court case. The police get fought off. by the villages of Stony Gut,

and I think that's the moment that Bogle decides to move, and there's a sense that this has been planned for some time, that there was an emerging consensus, that there was a need to act. You want to comment? Yeah, I just want to add to that, because Dan is definitely laying out the motivations for the march, and one thing that we just want to also introduce to it

is the way in which the space that they were going to the Morant Bay Courthouse, where a vestry meeting was in session, was always a place, the Pettysessions courts, the small courts, that this abuse of the power of the plantocracy was most vividly and most tangibly felt. There would often be large sentences, prison sentences, handed out for very minor infractions. Something like abusive language could fetch you 30 days in prison,

or something like trespassing on property that sometimes was your own property, could get you 20 days in prison. And one of Bogle's cousins had actually been in the session on October 7th. So Bogo was there for that sitting, and the cousin was also being unfairly tried for trespass. Bogus Bogle, Paul Bogle's brother, had also previously been sentenced 30 days in prison. So there's a real build-up here that was going on for quite some time. And so, as I mentioned, the assembly at Stoney got to go into Morant Day in October 11th. On October 11th was really a sort of straw that broke the camels back.

At that moment, when warrants had been issued for the arrest of people who were present at the previous sitting on the 7th of October, the resistance was really the moment when people said they couldn't take this anymore. There's this attack on the courthouse in Morant Bay, also on the prison, also on the site of the vestry and the police station. So these symbols of the state, it was a planned attack on symbols of the state. And then once the Morant Bay attack, have happened, the authorities lose control of the rest of the parish.

It becomes an uprising. It becomes an uprising, absolutely. And it's an organised one in Bogal issues, a kind of call to arms a few days later, calling, this is the time for all black men to stand up and fight. There's a sense of racial solidarity and racial injustice, which is intertwined with class concerns, concerns about the way wage earners are being treated

and small farmers are being treated. Yes, and just to add to that, as it spreads to all the districts around St. Thomas in the east, outside of Morant Bay, the big objective for air and the authorities is to contain it so that it doesn't spread across the island. And so the Morant Bay Rebellion really kind of comes at the, in this moment in which there had been this great fear that it could become something big. And 1865 is a very important year across the Americas. because there had been a war already taking place in Santo Domingo, the future Dominican Republic. There had been a movement also in Haiti as well in 1865, and there had been, of course, the ending of the civil war in the United States, all of which the local political elite and the planters would have been reading.

So the big question was, how do you contain the situation? As Diana mentioned, that the Morant Bay events that happened in the town of Morant Bay served as an ignition for all of these other claims and all of these other senses of injustice that could not have been or were not properly dealt with that people were dealing with themselves. So it grew much larger than people intended, I would imagine, and then eventually that became the focus of how to violently suppress it. So what happened? Well, what happened was when the demonstration reached the courthouse,

they found themselves facing a volunteer militia, probably people who'd never fired a gun before, in fact. But they did on this occasion, and seven of the protesters fell dead. And then there followed mayhem and a knight of bloodshed, during which something like 18 whites were murdered, and buildings were set on fire. And the response of air, which is really central to the whole history here, was draconian.

He cut off the eastern provinces of Jamaica, which is where the rebellion was taking place. He believed, in fact, that the whole island would go up in revolt. He moved the army in immediately. And over the next... The army being with the British army? The British army, absolutely. And the Navy too.

And they were stationed there, absolutely. There was always a fear of unrest. So there were always detachments of troops. And Jamaica, as Matthew has said, had this tradition of unrest. And over the next two or three days, the situation, was brought under control, but at the cost of something like 400 lives. It was a shoot to kill policy. 400, 400 were killed. About 1,000 habitations were set on fire by troops.

There was enormous violence, but over that period, as it were, the rebellion was crushed. Now, we have to be clear. These are people with staffs and agricultural implements. They're not really armed with serious fighting weapons. that was bad enough. But what then happened was in some ways even worse, because Air extended martial law for 30 days and he used it to capture, try and execute under martial law, another three or four hundred Jamaicans. It was summary justice. People had hardly the opportunity to plead their case. There was often no evidence and they were sent to the gallows. And a Among those who were sent to the gallows were Bogle and Gordon,

and it's Gordon's death that was particularly controversial. Can I come back to the island who's mentioned Gordon before and push it down the alley, but let's go for it now. Yeah, so Gordon, as Matthew said, he becomes both a religious and a political leader in the 1860s, and he's from a kind of middle-class background, I suppose, although he's born in slavery, but he becomes free at an early age and he requires property and land. But from the 1860s, he really, mainly, I think,

through his religious conversion, he is able to create a kind of sense of connection with poor Jamaicans that enables them to represent them politically. And he has this close relationship with Paul Bogle. He was a real thorn in Governor-Eyes side. He's putting forward in the assembly the kinds of claims for justice, for change in the criminal justice

system, for change in the land system that really the plant is found intolerable. But even more than that, it's the connection he has of the people, the ability to address the people and have that connection. So in a way, he comes out as public and him in the war. He doesn't live in a martial law area,

but plucks him out at the sanctuary of land which takes him into a moment. martial law area. Summary, no chance to plead his own case and executed. That's right. And he's, you know, Air personally writes the warrant to have him taken from Kingston to St Thomas in the East to do that.

Lawrence Goldman. What support was that? Let's turn to the reaction in Britain because it was an immense event, immensely well publicised. Back in Britain, there were polarised, big names were getting heavily involved from the beginning. What support was? that for Britain, first of all.

Well, there was support. From sociologically, one might say, from people from an aristocratic background, a military background, an Anglican background, traditional kind of conservative figures, but also, interestingly, from writers. And it's remarkable that figures like Thomas Carlyle,

John Ruskin, the art and social critic, Charles Kingsley, the historian and novelist, Tennyson, the poet, and even Dickens were subscribers and supporters of the Governor Air Defence Committee. I know, I can't, I mean, in the last few days I've been wondering how the expeditive deleted, Dickens got involved on that side of the argument. I know, it is surprising. And also Keensley, how he got involved in that side of the idea.

It is very surprising. I will make an attempt to stab at an answer. I think, first of all, there was a sense, and this was very widely held in British society, and it plays out later, that air may have been severe and extreme in his reactions, but this was a man doing his duty and the rebellion was put down and he should not therefore be harried by liberals and by the courts in the way that seemed was going to happen.

So that's the first thing. And I think they probably all agree on that. I think for many of the people in the Governor Air Defence Committee, there's a kind of anti-liberalism. It's because the bleeding heart liberals and radicals are wanting to process, prosecute air that they, as it were, enter the lists in his defence. In the case of Thomas Carlyle, and I think one needs to be quite clear here, and this is why Dickens, I quite agree, needs to be put to one side. In the case of someone like...

I don't put him to one side. No, well, but I mean, I think in the case of someone like Carlisle and no doubt others, Carlisle was already an open racist. He had published essays at the end of the 1840s and in the 1850s in which he had essentially argued that the freed people in Jamaica and the West Indies were not fit for freedom. They should remain in slavery. It was not possible for them to govern themselves. So there's a spectrum of views and I don't think they were all as extreme as Carlisle. Where does Darwin fit into the Florence before? Well, on the other side, there's the Jamaica. There's the Jamaica Committee. And Darwin is a subscriber to the other side. And Darwin is a subscriber to the other side, those who would bring air to trial for his crimes. The leader of the Jamaica Committee is

John Stuart Mill, and he's supported by academics and scientists, so not writers, but people of a different kind of bent. Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's great lieutenant, Darwin's Bulldog, a populariser of science, Herbert Spencer, the sociologist, a liberal radical MP, close acolyte of Mills, Henry Fawcett, is a good example as well. So these were the kinds of people who joined the Jamaica Committee. They were liberals and radicals, and they wanted heir to be held responsible at law. They tried first to get him on a charge of murder.

That failed. They then tried to get him before courts on the charge of high crimes and misdemeanors. But again, a jury would not find him guilty, arguing or responding that he was merely doing his duty. And finally, as late as 1869, the Jamaica Committee had encouraged Jamaicans to bring suit in British courts for compensation. And they also failed because the Jamaican Assembly, just as Eyre was leaving Jamaica in 1866, indemnified him of all crimes. And British courts upheld that law.

And they said he can't be tried because he's already been let off, as it were. Can I come in on Dickens? Because I don't think it's quite as surprising as we might at first sight of think that Dickens takes the side of air. Because if you look at his writing, there's a lot of sympathy for the British poor and an attempt to depict their plight and to show the problems of the kind of mid-19th century in Britain. But Dickens is not particularly concerned for the poor overseas, the poor in the empire. That doesn't excuse what it did, does it?

It doesn't excuse it, but it explains it, I think, and it speaks to a kind of dynamic in that post-slavery period in which for quite a number of people, like Dickens, there's a sense that we've been paying too much attention to problems of empire and we've not been paying enough attention to the poor at home. But that's a different argument. It is, but I think it feeds into this perception that the people in Morat Bay needed to be put down

because they were, couldn't govern themselves, they were out of control, and Air was only acting in order to control and uncontrollable people. You want to say something, then I wanted to go to America. Yes, it is that there's another domestic context as well, because between 1865 and 1867, this country is debating democracy, the coming of democracy. In 1867, the Second Reform Act, for the first time in franchise's working men. And so the Governor-Air controversy plays into this wider debate,

And on the one hand you have people saying, this is what comes of closed aristocratic government. This is the worst form of governance and we need to democratise and make rational our institutions. And on the other side, you have people saying, look at Jamaica, this is what you get from democracy, from unrestrained violence of people, as it were, who need to be held in check. And so there's a kind of ideological debate going on in Britain. and the Morant Bay affair plays into that. Matthew, Britain quickly reimposed rule on Jamaica. What effect did that have?

It was a significant effect. It completely changed the political administrative structure of Jamaica. Previously what had happened was a representative system, which we've described. Limited franchise, but still an assembly of elected officials from the people who could vote again by the... time we get to 1865, it's really males only, and property males

at that. But the lot of property's males were poor farmers. A lot of them were poor farmers, but of course, the planters had previously used their power and their extensive holdings to dominate the assembly. But as Diana mentioned earlier, there's a transition period happening, especially after

the 1830s, when so-called free collards and Jewish members of the society could actually have civil rights, and then there was a move towards them having more representation in the Assembly. So the Assembly was a place of a great degree of internal political fighting, but it was significant because a lot of local administrative laws and so forth

would be passed by the Assembly. That was gone. The Assembly actually also dissolved itself after the Morant Bay events. Air addresses the Assembly not long after, and very to the surprise of many people who observed it at the time, even some of his harshest critics in the Assembly lined up behind him and agreed, and it speaks to this point about this sort of fear on the part of a political elite internationally that Morandi was the stirring of something that could become even more detrimental down the road.

And that sort of fear and that sort of almost a moral panic that took hold in the colony at the time was what sort of moved into this uniform acceptance to dissolve the assembly on the particular point about saving Jamaica from becoming another Haiti. this literally was the term that Air used in his address to the Assembly. I have saved this colony from becoming another Haiti. And then Jamaica became a Crown colony, directly ruled from Britain, in a form of a more authoritarian type of administrative structure in which the governor, as we saw in the case of air,

always having this sort of log-aheads or potential log-aheads with local political representatives, didn't have that anymore. It removed that. And there was space there for positive reform, but at the same time, space for continued abuse of that power. Diana, can you develop that in any way? In addition to abolishing the Assembly,

they also abolish the local vestries. So every vestige of democracy is gone. It's a really contradictory period because in some ways, what British kind of governmental people think is Jamaica is a failed experiment and the ruling class has failed as well. as the people have failed at becoming a kind of respectable working class. And so the official policy is to try and modernise Jamaica in certain ways.

Some of its institutions change. There's a little bit more policy that enables small farmers to develop with slightly better access to land and so on. But at the same time, there's this intensely authoritarian political system. So it's termed sometimes benevolent despotism. That's how the British saw. it. But what it meant was that when anything came to conflict, any of these kinds of reforms were not baked in because they could always be taken away very quickly by the political

class that was not elected whatsoever had no accountability to the people. Matthew, Matthew Smith, how did the rebellion come to be seen in Jamaica a few decades down the road? Depends on which group you're looking at. The local political elite, the ruling elite, tended to celebrate air immediately after. In fact, when he was leaving the colony, In 1866, there was a parade for him, and people were hailing him as a hero. I'd save the colony from destruction. And that view actually held for quite some time.

There was, in the Planta Papers, for instance, praising not only of air, but of what was called, and this is a direct quote from one of the Planta newspapers of 1866, the supremacy of English justice over lawless violence. And so the whole idea that Jamaica could have become, like, Haiti, after 1804 when Haiti became a republic, was very much sort of ingrained in the mind of a Jamaican political elite at that point in time in the decades afterwards.

And so they reinforced and repeated that continually. And that really sort of is crystallized in its own way when the British historian, James Anthony Frood comes to Jamaica in 1888 and writes famously about when he passes Morant Bay on his boat saying that's where George William Gordon tried his folly to make this colony into Haiti. So that really becomes a dominant narrative. That's one view.

Then under another view, there's a popular view in which the efforts of Bogle and those around him were seen as valiant efforts, and that sort of simmered for a very long time, but was never very much pronounced in a national narrative until we get to the 20th century. So after the rebellion, Dana, and the sugar trade was subsiding, and partly because so many other countries were producing sugar as well. Did the British view of Jamaica change? I mean, I think as Lawrence said at the beginning, Jamaica is becoming less part, less the centre of the British Empire,

had already become so, and that becomes even more so. I think there's also a shift which is kind of consolidated by the more rebellion in racial thinking in Britain at the time, a shift from a kind of paternalist type of racism that was very prevalent at the time of emancipation, which saw black people as inferior, but inferior in ways that were to do with their enslavement and that they could be kind of brought up, so to speak,

to be like white Britons. By the time of Mount Bay, that view is already receding and being replaced by a view more like the Carlisleian one that Lawrence was describing before that sees black people as kind of inherently, incapable of self-government, inherently, permanently inferior. And that view is really consolidated by the Morant Bay Rebellion and the debates that

surrounded. And it becomes the dominant view in the last third of the 19th century. Do you have anything to add to that long? Only I think that we need to be aware that this is a debate, at least in the British context, between two groups of people who still believe in empire. One group, however, wants empire run responsibly and properly and fairly. And although one wouldn't want to give too optimistic a view of this, in the 1870s, for the first time, you do get a sense, at least in Parliament, that there are some who are beginning to pay very close attention

to the way the empire is governed, and they're beginning to take note not only of cheap government and effective administration, but the rights and the needs of local people. And some of those people have come out of the Jamaica Committee. They're MPs. One of them, Henry Fawcett, I mentioned before, Mills' close ally in all of this. He became known as the member for India,

precisely because he became interested in the whole governance of the empire. But I would want to say this. I'm not sure that it's out of Morant Bay and the Caribbean, that this growth of responsibility comes. It's not a direct line, but it is something that does develop in the 70s and 80s. Finally, Matthew, Matthew Smith, how's the rebellion commemorated if it is in Jamaica?

It's held in high regard as a moment of great resistance in Jamaica, and that changes quite dramatically over the course of the 20th century. So Gordon and Bogle, the two sort of principal figures in it, are sort of go through a rehabilitated in the sort of national story. Previously, they weren't taught about. There was, in fact, a petition, as I recall from something I had looked at some time ago in the 1920s from some schoolboys saying that they would like to learn more about them. And their schoolteachers say, no, these are not people that you need to learn about.

And that changes by the time we get to the 1930s, when you get the moment of a new nationalism stirring in Jamaica after later. labor riots state place. And then Gordon first is actually actively resuscitated in this national narrative story as this light-skinned politician who was from a middle class who sought to work on behalf of the black majority to achieve ends. And there's a way in which that was very self-serving for a new political class of the 20th century. That was then rising because they then connected themselves politically and their genealogy in that way. Then Bogle, by the time we get to the period of the independence,

Jamaica becomes independent from Britain in 1962, Bogle then is resuscitated as a sort of great figure for black consciousness in Jamaica, and then both of them become national heroes in 1965, two of the seven national heroes of Jamaica, George, William Gordon, Paul Bogle, and their statues and films and productions and so on around them. So they become sort of enshrined as these sort of martyrs for this cause of Jamaican nationalism, but that changes over time.

Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you, Matthew Smith, Diana Payton and Lawrence Goldman, and our studio engineer Phil Lander. Next week, it's Bauhaus, the influential German school that helped spread modern design around the world. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that we didn't say, Lawrence? Well, I think one point that I would make, and it just further adds to the problems of Jamaica, is to fill out the economic history of this. And to make two points about the way Britain and the British Empire were developing economically, caught in two terms, free trade and laissez-faire.

This is an age of free trade that we're dealing with, and it's interesting that for decades, Jamaica, and the West Indian sugar islands had benefited from protective tariffs which worked in their favour. In other words, the British home market was protected for them. They paid less to sell their sugar into the British market than did all those other places that were growing sugar in the early 19th century, as we mentioned, Cuba, Brazil and so forth. But in 1846, the year of free trade, when we repealed the corn laws, we also, passed the Sugar Duties Act, which equalized duties for all imports of sugar. And as Matthew and Dina have said, as these other islands could, and these other places around the world, could produce

sugar more cheaply, suddenly the West Indies, you know, after emancipation, when they needed support to restructure their economy, they had lost access really to their main market. And at the same time, this is an age of, they say, let it be, let be, leave alone. It's not an era where the dominant economic philosophy is one of assistance, intervention, infrastructural development and so forth. And we can see from our perspective how useful, how necessary that was to, or would have been, to assist emancipation after 1834. But the dominant economic philosophy, both at home and abroad, is of non-intervention. And so the British sit there and do nothing to, as it were, economically expedite this.

And if I can just mention, Melvin, the Queen's Letter. Ah, yes, I should have mentioned it. I mean, it's a small point, but it sort of sums it up. Because in 1865, in the summer of 1865, there are meetings across Jamaica of ordinary folk putting their grievances forward. These are sent to Governor Eyre, who then writes a kind of critical commentary, and sends them on to London. And what comes back is the Queen's letter. I don't think Victoria had anything to do with it.

It was actually written by a man called, I think his name was Henry Taylor, who was the head of the West Indian administration in the colonial office. But basically this letter that came back to the people of Jamaica told them to just work harder and work for wages on the plantations. They should accept being wage labourers on the plantations. plantations, but the answer to their problems was hard work. In other words, this was laissez-faire. We can't help you. You alone can help yourselves. It was patronising in the extreme.

50,000 copies of the letter were apparently distributed across Jamaica. And you can imagine it didn't assist this very volatile situation at all. Yeah, it's a real provocation that letter, I think. And it's also interesting because it's a response to some really quite sophisticated political thinking and demands that in some ways sort of anticipates a later more interventionist kind of understanding of the role of the state. You know, people from below, they were asking for support for kind of peasant cooperatives to develop the infrastructure of Jamaica that would enable them to sell their goods properly and effectively. And I think this also speaks to one of the real issues in post-admantcipation Jamaica, which is the sort of tension between the people's main aspiration,

which is to become a successful peasant farmer rather than a wage worker on a sugar plantation and the sort of imagination of the elite, both in Jamaica and Britain, which really didn't go much further than sugar as the centre of the island's economy, there was no sort of effort to develop Jamaica or anywhere else for that matter that had been a slavery-based colony into any other kind of economic basis.

I think it's very interesting in many ways, although I'm not a historian myself of the Caribbean, it reminds me of the situation in America after emancipation after the Civil War as well, where again the planters want the former slaves, the freed people, to continue to work on the plantations. They need a labour force and they want day labourers to work on their plantations.

They don't have much cash, it must be said, to even pay them wages, but they want that. Whereas, of course, what the freed people want is to live of their own, to be subsistence farmers, and to have a measure of personal economic and also familial independence. But what's interesting, I think, in America, and it doesn't happen in Jamaica,

is that you get the development of sharecropping on the land, which is a kind of a compromise, it's not very favourable to the freed people in America, but they do at least work the land as they wanted, although they don't own it. But in Jamaica, it's actually very difficult, I think, for the freed people after 1834 to live of their own. Yeah, just to come in on this,

and with a view to just add a few things that I think are very helpful here. One of the consequences of the events in Moran Bay was a Royal Commission, and the British government sent a group of commissioners in 1866 to Jamaica to do interviews. And they produced an extensive document, well over 1,000 pages, and interviewed over 200 people, including Governor Ear himself. What's significant about it is that a lot of ordinary Jamaicans, Jamaican small farmers, people who lived in these communities were interviewed to talk about the deaths they saw, they talked about the floggings they received and so forth,

but also about the labor relations on the estates. and many of them made it very clear in these interviews, in these testimonies, of the level of abuse that they were facing and how systematic that had become. That was a major issue. And coming back to Governor Eyre, these sorts of complaints were reaching him. He was not, they weren't unknown to him, but he was not only intransigent and stubborn, as we have said, but he was also very personal. He was a person who really allied himself with certain people who were prime figures in the Assembly, figures in the actual parishes themselves, and he took their sides over the side of the people who actually issued the complaints. Another thing to mention with Air, which I think is significant

that we haven't mentioned yet, is that Governor Air was also a very spiritual man. He was, you know, as Lawrence mentioned, he was a son of a vicar in Yorkshire, and he was very much devoted to the established church and to Anglicanism, which was part of the reason why he was so offended by someone like George William Gordon becoming a native. Baptist. So his sort of animosity to Gordon extended beyond just the politics to this personal kind of view that Gordon was the antithesis of all that he held in high moral standing, and that sort of was protracted across all the different dimensions and realms within the island. Just one other thing. I mean, I think if you look at someone like Air who is not that

well educated and has not been trained, one of the interesting developments, and it's probably a good development in the late 19th century is that empire starts to depend rather more on well-educated first-class men out of universities who are then trained before they're sent mainly to the subcontinent. This is the Indian civil service who set the model. But there is a sense that we can no longer just send out into the colonies people of personality and type

who really don't have the background and the diplomatic skills, and the understanding and the breadth which is required. And one of the things that improves, I think, it's not again directly related to Morant Bay, but it is an improvement, is the calibre of person who is sent out in the late Victorian period. But at the same time, what's happening with the shift to authoritarianism

is the suppression of any potential development of people within the colonies, including in Jamaica, to develop that kind of, political skill and leadership themselves. And so there's a, in many ways, that's a kind of backward step as well. Absolutely. I wouldn't disagree with that. But at least the people who are suppressing them are rather more subtle and intelligent,

you might say, in the suppression. You get a narrow, shabatic suppression. Who would you prefer to be suppressed by? Yeah. Another thing to point to us is this sort of long history of shift of Jamaica away from Britain completely. We were asking several questions. about how there's Britain viewing all of this, but what's going on in this long 19th century period

is the shift in which Jamaica's becoming less important to Britain, but also Britain's becoming less important to Jamaica. Jamaica's starting to orient more towards the United States by the late 19th century in terms of trade relationships, for instance. You know, the expansion of the banana industry, which we didn't address, but there's a move away from sugar to people growing bananas for export, and the big companies that are coming in to develop that banana industry and to buy the bananas from the small farmers are American.

So there's a sort of geopolitical and economic big shift going on there as well that this is part of that story too. Well, I think you're going to be off of tea. Here you're here, here's the man. Would you want to like tea or coffee? Some tea, please. Tea please. Tea please.

Tea please. You want tea, Melvin? Thank you. Do you want tea, Melvin? Yes, please. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hello fellow fans of In Our Time. I'm Dr Michael Mosley and I want to let you know about my new podcast, Sleep Well. In each episode, I'll focus on a scientifically proven sleep technique and guide you through it, all to help you drift off. It's designed to be listened to at bedtime or any time you want to really unwind. The idea is to get comfortable, listen, and let the cares of the day fall away.

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