Abstract
Browne's previous book, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, contained an intriguing chapter on the drivers of the plantation. 1 The enslaved men – and occasionally also women – who drove the slave gangs to work form a group that is crucial to understanding the human drama and economic success of the Atlantic slave system. Expanding on the earlier chapter was clearly a great choice and an important step. In his new book, Browne illustrates important aspects of the practice of slave driving in British Atlantic colonies in the era of amelioration, roughly spanning from 1814 to 1834.
Browne set himself the task of painting the predicaments, choices and struggles of the drivers in the plantation system. These drivers were, judged by their health, wealth and family life, far better off than the field hands on the plantations. The main argument of the book – that the drivers were at the centre of the slaving system – is convincing and is clearly an important contribution to the labour history of Atlantic slavery. Styles of driving and the legitimacy of the drivers in the plantation were crucial components of slave life. When trying to understand a plantation or plantation society, scholars can no longer overlook the role of the drivers.
The archival sources that Browne used for his first book – the (nearly) firsthand accounts by enslaved people who took their complaints and cases to the protectors of slaves and fiscals – offer a wealth of material to analyse the workings of the driving system. The sources and his use of the material is another great example of the way in which legal testimony, supplemented with planter accounts and missionary archives, can be used to answer questions about subaltern lives and specifically the social history of slavery.
From the evidence collected by Browne, it becomes clear that drivers took on many prominent roles in the small village-size communities of the plantations. They were the managers of labour, but often also leading in religious matters and part of the adjudication of justice within the slave community. These roles were obviously blended together, and it might be hard to distinguish which came first. This meant that they were also interesting figures for missionaries who arrived in the Caribbean to spread different forms of Christianity. The drivers could be promoted and demoted, rewarded and punished depending on the wishes of the higher management. The tyranny of slavery extended from the top down, and the drivers formed the middle section of a hierarchical structure in which it was clearly intended that they would bear the brunt of slave resistance, if it arose.
By also exploring the role of women drivers, Browne makes short work of romanticised understandings of the role of elderly women on a plantation. They are often said to have been ‘looking after the children’. Instead, these women were the drivers of the children's gang, preparing the 6- to 12-year-olds for an obedient and productive life in slavery.
Brown clearly states in his introduction that he does not intend to analyse the change over time in the driving system. Most of the examples used to compile the profile of the driver sit at a transitionary phase in the slave and driving system. Amelioration, the formal end of the slave trade and the foreseeable end of slavery as such, meant that the state and judiciary directly intervened in the slave system of the colonies under discussion.
British slavery spiked in the late eighteenth century, but the driving system was far from unique in the Atlantic world. Figures like bushas and bombas existed across the Atlantic empires, often based on West-African and Portuguese practices that stretched back far into Atlantic history. On the plantations they were an extension of the men in the Atlantic slave trade, sometimes free, sometimes enslaved, who were appointed to manage the captives. This continuity in the structuring of the captives seems relevant to consider, also in contrast with the more formally appointed drivers of the nineteenth century.
Some crucial questions of geographic variations and change over time remain. The universality of the driving system is not yet clear. Did all plantations have drivers? And how about the ones that did not? The book gives the impression of clear structures and hierarchies in the organisation of gangs, but this was possibly an exception rather than the rule. Plantation administrators wanting to give the impression of order and regularity might have suggested what they hoped would be the regimented structure of the workforce, but was it actually in place? Or might it have been a description of something that was in fact a self-organised structure of the slave community? Lastly, there remains a question about the end of the driving system. Abolition directly disrupted the powerful and heritable position of the driver. What came of the drivers and the driving system? Were there continuities in the religious, political and cultural domain of the Caribbean societies? These remaining questions notwithstanding, The Driver's Story has offered an extremely valuable prism on the workings of Atlantic slavery at a crucial turn of its history.