2016/02/01 by Marjoleine Kars · 3 citations
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Cuban History and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/121.1.39
openalex publication_date 2016/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This article examines the 1763 slave uprising in Dutch Berbice, a small colony next to Suriname on the Caribbean coast of South America. Interested in the lived experiences of all enslaved people, I move beyond the military conflict between rebel leaders and colonial slave owners on which historians most often focus. Using the unusually rich records generated in Berbice over more than a year of insurgency, I argue that the rebellion did not encompass all enslaved people in the colony, but was the work of a determined minority who used coercion, including re-enslavement, to get others to join. Many enslaved Berbicians were neither purposeful rebels nor committed collaborators or loyalists. Eager to stay alive and preserve their independence once slavery was overthrown, such people, many of them women, struggled to dodge both the Dutch and the rebels. A focus on the internal politics of rebellion, or the struggle over who will rule at home, reveals that as an emancipatory process, armed rebellion was profoundly gendered, hierarchical, and exacerbated existing divisions within the enslaved community. For many, agency in rebellion consisted of accommodation and self-preservation, rather than outright rebellion.