Caribbean Family Land: Communal Land in a Colonial Society

Abstract

Subsequently published as:

"Caribbean Family Land: A Modern Commons." Plantation Society in the Americas. 4(2-3):135-58, 1998.

"Commons have usually been associated with pre-modern societies such as those of feudal Europe or tribal Africa. Indeed, the advent of capitalist economic systems is associated with the destruction of common land tenure systems. An interesting exception to this pattern is Caribbean family land which, in the course of the nineteenth century, developed and flourished among the emancipated slaves and their descendants. As a modern commons within the periphery of the Western world system it therefore poses an interesting exception which challenges our thinking about the role of land and collective land holdings in human societies. In this paper I shall suggest that family land provided a useful response to the conditions of economic and social marginality which characterized the Caribbean after the abolishment of slavery. It provided both an actual place where the freed might settle and create a life for themselves, and a more symbolic family center, whether or not this center constituted the physical home of the family members. The importance of family land therefore should be found in its value as an actual and imagined home for people who have had to make their living as 'hunters and gatherers' in the margins of the global economy, often in distant migration destinations. This discussion therefore points to the significance of land as a means of creating and sustaining local identities in a world where the conditions of life are defined, to a great extent, by global networks of social, economic and cultural ties."