#sugar plantations

[bossymarmalade]

Before my father died, he read an autobiography by another Trinidadian man in his peer group about what life was like on the sugar cane estates. My dad lived in the labourer barracks on Golconda Estate with his grandparents when he was little, so he was very disparaging of this other man’s account and started noting down his own experiences out of spite  XD

We found a bunch of his notes after he passed, all in his draftsman’s block capitals (a little shaky in his 80s) and I’ve been very slowly going through them. Sometimes it’s hard to conceive of the change that my dad saw in his lifetime. The indentured East Indian workers arriving in the Caribbean seem so long ago to me, but he still saw the direct legacy of all that shit.

[ TRANSCRIPT ]

DUTIES: 

1) The Gen. Manager (white English) was the head of the estate & reported to a head manager delegated by [to] owners (”Tate & Lyle”) of England.

2) The overseers also white were mostly bachelors sharing a multi-room bungalow. They dressed in [kakhi] short sleeved shirt, khaki short pants, khaki tall socks, boots & khaki cork hats & supervise all top personnel.

He used to talk about seeing those overseers ride up and down the estate roads on horses, in their cork hats, with whips. In another section of his notes he remarks that all the white English had servants, too.

“In 1937 Kielberg sold his Liverpool sugar refinery to Tate & Lyle and in return was invited to become a co-investor in the company’s new West Indies raw sugar venture.“ <--- this is all that the Tate & Lyle website has to say about its history of exploitation in the canefields. We were nothing more than the living machinery of its venture.

[ausetkmt]

Barbados To Make British MP Pay Reparations For Family's Role In Slavery - Travel Noire

Richard Drax, a conservative British MP is due to pay reparations for the role of his ancestor’s role in slavery. The MP for South Dorset recently traveled to Barbados for a private meeting with the country’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley. According to the Guardian, Mottley’s cabinet is laying out the next steps, which include legal action in the event that no agreement is reached with Drax.

The Guardian also shares that, Drax’s ancestor, Sir James Drax, was one of the first Englishmen to colonize Barbados in the early 1600s. Reports show that he part-owned at least two slave ships, the Samuel and the Hope.The family also owned a plantation in Jamaica which they later sold in the 19th century.

The Drax family were the first sugar plantation owners in Barbados and Jamaica. The family is one of the few who were pioneers in the early stages of the British slave economy in the 17th century. In later generations the family still owned plantations and enslaved people until the 1830s.

Adding to this, in 2020 the Observer revealed that the MP concealed his inheritance of the 250-hectare (617 acres) Drax Hall plantation. It only surfaced after official documents revealed him as the owner.

Given that in 2021 Barbados became a republic, there is growing resistance and scrutiny of the effects of colonial activity on the island. This is an effect that has caused Caribbean-wide reassessment of the relationship with past colonial powers.

Related: Barbados Announces Creation Of A Transatlantic Slavery Museum

Barbados Wants To Make Richard Drax, British MP Pay Reparations:

Rectifying wrong:

The Barbados ambassador to Caricom and deputy chairman,David Comissiong, shared that other families less prominent than the Drax family are being considered for reparations. He mentioned that within these families lies the British royal family.

“Other families are involved, though not as prominently as the Draxes. This reparations journey has begun. The matter is now for the cabinet of Barbados. It is in motion. It is being dealt with.”

Furthering the discussion:

Following the abolishment of slavery in Barbados, the Draxes received £4,293 12s 6d in 1836 for freeing 189 enslaved people, an estimated amount worth £3 million today. Barbados MP Trevor Prescod, chairman of Barbados National Task Force on Reparations, stated, “If the issue cannot be resolved we would take legal action in the international courts. The case against the Drax family would be for hundreds of years of slavery, so it’s likely any damages would go well beyond the value of the land.”

Furthering the discussion about the effects this has on the island, Prescod went on to explain that “The Drax family had slave ships. They had agents in the African continent and kidnapped black African people to work on their plantations here in Barbados. I have no doubt that what would have motivated them was that they never perceived us to be equal to them, that we were human beings. They considered us as chattels.”

Related: The Republic Of Jamaica? It Could Become A Reality by 2025

[henk-heijmans]

Workers taking a break on a sugar plantation near Ponce, Puerto Rico, ca. 1938 - by Jack Delano (1914 - 1997), Ukrainian/American

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Emilio Piani (German, 1817-1862) Sugar plantation in Cuba, 1839 Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes de Cuba, Salon of Colonial art In this scene Emilio Piani, observer, depicts a sugar plantation (un ingenio) in Cuba. Overseers are resting under the shade of an umbrella (held by a laborer) and are on horseback, while slaves or laborers are seen working the landscape to the right and center. Emilio takes careful detail of the tropical landscape, with its palm trees and rolling mountains. Ludwig Friedrich Emil Piani (Emilio Piani) (1817-1862) – a portrait and landscape German painter born in Coburg, duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Germany. As child he was a playmate of the Prince Albert, the future husband of Victoria, the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1837 Emil Piani made a trip to the United States and then to Cuba residing in the later approximately till 1846. In 1841 his studio was on Obispo Street, Havana, probably where today is the Florida Hotel. During his stay in Cuba made several trips to nearby countries like Jamaica. In both islands he painted several portraits of notable persons and landscapes. In 1852 he returned to Coburg and after few years came back again to the Caribbean. He died in Curaçao in 1862.

[nickysfacts]

Drink Up Me Hearties Yo Ho!

🍹☠️🍹

[chuplayswithfire]

and another thing

i do not think some of you who mention slavery so cavalierly understand what it means to be so fucking powerless. i have been blessed in my lifetime to not be a slave, to be born free and live free, but my ancestors were slaves not so many generations back and part of my family still lives on the land they were once enslaved from. every time i look in a mirror at my light skin and look at my grandmother and pictures of my great grandmother and great grandmother i have to know that we get that light skin from rapes that the fuckers who owned my ancestors didn't even consider rape, just making use of their fucking property.

there is no such thing as a good slave owner. not today. not in the 1700s. not any time or any place has a single person who owned another human being been a "good" person. and for those of you who feel like saying something smart-mouthed about good people and pirates and how you don't care about good people just interesting characters, the whole fucking concept of stede bonnet's character in Our Flag Means Death is that he gives a shit about creating a non-abusive work environment where people can work out their traumas and talk through their issues and feel respected and loved and valued, including the people of color on his fucking ship, and he doesn't exist in a world where he owns slaves. where he has taken people and whittled them down into slaves. that guy doesn't fucking exist in a world where he ever owned enslaved people, let alone a world where they're still back home on a fucking plantation owned by his fucking wife and their fucking kids. it doesn't work like that.

so at the very least if you want to engage in a dark and gritty fantasy of a fucked up ass inhuman son of a bitch stede bonnet deciding to hook up with a man he'd never be able to fully view as human based on the color of his skin, in a crew with three black men, at the very fucking least tag it for slavery and don't remind the rest of us that you're an idiot who can't understand that a guy who has enslaved people and who you think still owns black people that he's just casually left back home working the plantation under his wife is the same guy who sits in a chair and asks oluwande for advice and talks to frenchie like a friend and sits back as roach yells at him about the need for supplies and falls in love with a maori man who is visibly not white.

god the inherent cluelessness. the ways that some of you clearly don't see how that kind of thing would radiate and corrupt everything. the fucking idea.

[onewomancitadel]

All of these reviews are bad. I'm angry. I hope nobody gets paid to do this

[frankbelloriley]

Across The Spider-Verse stans are acting like Hayao Miyazaki repossessed and nationalized their grandfather’s sugar plantation.

[katelutter]

When Theo disappears on a defunct sugar plantation in Antigua, a vision points me in the right direction, but will this gangster cat actually be there?

Hot Blogging with Chuck  Katelutter.blogspot.com

[nlutherrealtor]

A Glimpse Inside the Splendor of Sugar Mill Plantation

[circuitmouse]

19tth Century Hawaii

[almightyrozenidiot]

I'm trying to practise my Japanese reading skills by reading this free online book that's a very cheesy romance and I keep getting thrown off because the protagonist's eventual love interest is called Sousuke (though his name is spelled differently).

[farmerstrend]

Sugarcane Farming In Kenya, its importance, challenges, and opportunities.

Sugarcane farming is an important sector of agriculture in Kenya, contributing significantly to the country’s economy. In this article, we will discuss the history of sugarcane farming in Kenya, its importance, challenges, and opportunities. History of sugarcane farming in Kenya Sugarcane farming in Kenya can be traced back to the 1920s when sugarcane was first introduced in the country. The…

[artthatgivesmefeelings]

Frans Post (Dutch, 1612-1680) Brazilian Landscape, 1660s National Gallery of Ireland This painting shows a sugar plantation with a group of slaves fuelling the wood-fired boilers of a furnace house on the right. Others put out the cane on the drying platform in front of an unidentified building. The foreground includes a papaya tree next to macaúba and coco palms, in addition to an alligator, armadillos, anteaters and a monkey. Frans Post, the younger brother of the painter and architect Pieter Post, accompanied an expedition in 1637 of Prince John Maurice to Brazil, a Dutch colony at the time. Post was part of a group of artists and scientists employed to record various aspects of South-American life, fauna and flora. The artist returned to the Netherlands in 1644 and took up residence in Haarlem, where he spent the rest of his career painting views of Brazil. Portrayed in a precise manner, without tonal perspective, his landscapes possess a sense of immediacy and a naïve quality. In this respect, he was influenced by his brother’s work and that of Cornelis Vroom. Post’s later views of Brazil are more decorative in character.