Complicating Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion: Jewish radicalism, Asian indenture, and multi-ethnic histories of 1865

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica has generally been interpreted as a struggle between the post-emancipation Black peasantry and the white colonial government, which led to a violent confrontation, military suppression, and the demise of the Jamaican House of Assembly in favor of direct Crown Colony rule. Yet, the archival record shows other more complex currents that were also at play, including multi-racial, cross-class alliances, and strong conflicts over local politics, corruption, and labor rights. This article focuses on a little noted aspect of the events of 1865: the arrest for sedition of Sidney Lindo Levien, a Jewish newspaper publisher of The County Union. Levien advocated for the poor, foreigners, and women; joined the Underhill Meetings supporting the political rights of the vast majority of people emancipated from slavery; and was arrested under martial law during the rebellion and later found guilty of sedition, serving nearly 7 months in prison of a 1 year sentence before being pardoned. Drawing on his own writings, photographs, family genealogy, and Levien’s hitherto unknown “Chronicle of 1865,” I argue that his story opens new questions about the relation between Jews and Baptists, Black and “Coloured,” Asian and Maroon, and varied elite and non-elite “White” populations in Jamaica, taking us beyond the typical Black-vs-white framing of the Morant Bay Rebellion toward a more multi-sided emphasis on cross-racial protest and multi-denominational resistance within the imperial global economy. Both dominant “White” colonial histories and subsequent Jamaican “Black” national histories have erased the more diverse actors and cross-cutting interests that shaped the events of 1865, which only come into view through a multi-ethnic history of global mobilities and shifting identities, which I refer to as a critical cosmopolitan perspective.

1865 and the Incomplete Caribbean Emancipation Project: Class Migration in Barbados in the Long Nineteenth century

The year 1865 has served a temporal marker of freedom in both the USA and the Caribbean. For African Americans who sought various means to escape the travails of an American slave society, 1865 symbolized the possibilities for a future secured by legislation. By contrast, instead of optimism, 1865 in the British Caribbean signaled demise, failure, and gloomy prospects for the future of an already 30-year-old emancipation legislation passed by parliament. It thereby came to mark a point of renewed resistance. While the Morant Bay Rebellion played a prominent role in symbolizing the failures of the 1833 Emancipation Act in Jamaica, everyday Barbadians had maintained the quest for liberty in the years leading up to 1865 and after. Indeed, as a point of legislative, economic and political collapse, the 1865 upheaval, by serving as a highpoint, reveals the connections between everyday resistance that flanked both sides. Viewing the failures of the emancipation legislation through the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a temporally specific and spatially bounded phenomenon, would be to dismiss the quotidian efforts of the different social groups as they pushed against the boundaries erected around freedom. By exploring the different motivations and calculations by which different groups of Barbadians came to view migration as desirable after both 1834 and 1865, this essay shows how 1865 instead served as a point of continuity for different social classes in Barbados who had long used mobility to vigorously reimagine and transgress the boundaries around freedom throughout the long nineteenth century.

Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion and the Making of Radical Reconstruction

In chapter 3, Edward Rugemer examines how Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion was not only reflected tensions in postemancipation Atlantic societies but was also related to US Reconstruction and the ways in which its advocates envisioned life for freed slaves. The example of the Morant Bay Rebellion, Edward Rugemer argues, provided an example of the dangers of emancipation without political rights. American politicians did not have to look far in other postemancipation societies to be alarmed. Rugemer demonstrates that Radical Reconstruction—or how Congressional Republicans decided on intervention in the spring of 1867—reflected these fears.