Matters got worse for slaves in the eighteenth century. Even planters’ defenders admitted that they used abnormal levels of cruelty against slaves. Indeed, they reverted to punishments, such as castration and burning by slow fire, which had lost favor in Britain since medieval times. The rector of St. Catherine parish noted in 1751 that when planters sought “to deprive [negroes] of their funeral rites by burning their dead Bodies, [it] seems to Negroes a greater punishment than Death itself.”39 He wrote this just a year after Thomas Thistlewood had arrived in Westmoreland parish. Thistlewood’s diary entries prove the truth of what the minister wrote to the Bishop of London. Twelve days after arriving in Westmorland, on 12 April 1750, he watched his employer, William Dorrill, apply “justice” to runaway slaves by whipping them severely and rubbing lime juice, salt, and pepper into their wounds. Not long after he saw the chief slave on the estate getting “300 lashes for his many crimes and negligences.” On 1 October 1750, visiting the St. Elizabeth town of Lacovia, he “Saw a negroe fellow named English … Tried [in] Court and hang’d upon ye 1st tree immediately ([for] drawing his knife upon a White Man) his hand cut off, Body left unbury’d.”
This unbridled cruelty included forms of psychological debasement. On 19 March 1752, for example, Thistlewood related with amusement some stories that speak volumes about the character of life on the Jamaican frontier. “This morning,” he noted, “Old Tom Williams,” the patriarch of a major planting family, “Call’d and made his observations as usual.” Thistlewood recorded two stories that he evidently found funny. Williams told him first how he had once killed a young girl with diarrhea by “Stopping her Anus with a Corn Stick.” Then he told a story about how when he felt a domestic was doing a poor job cleaning his house, “he Shitt in it and told her there was Something for her to clean.” With attitudes like this, it is little wonder that Charles Leslie declared in 1740 that “No Country excels them in barbarous Treatment of Slaves, or in the cruel Methods they put them to death.”40
In the end, however, it may have been planters’ interest in increasing workers’ productivity, not their commitment to brutality, which affected slaves most. Caribbean planters were relentless innovators, anxious to try new methods or tinker with existing technology to increase their profits. The efficient use of slave labor was the key to the profitability of the integrated sugar estate. As Henry Drax of Barbados explained in the mid-seventeenth century “There must be especial Care taken in working the Hands, that every negro doth his part according to his Ability…. The best way that I know of to prevent Idleness, and to make the Negroes to their work properly, will be upon the change of work, constantly to Gang all the Negroes in the plantations in the Time of Planting.”41 Sugar planters saw themselves as enlightened improvers and from the mid-eighteenth century began to publish books outlining their plantation methods.42 Many of these ideas came out of the Lesser Antilles, smaller islands where geography placed a premium on efficiency, but Jamaica also participated in such reforms. The Jamaican historian Edward Long declared in 1774, “A spirit of experiment has of late appeared which, by quitting the old beaten track, promises to strike out continual improvement.”43
The key part of what Antiguan planter Samuel Martin called a “well-constructed machine” was its human component. Planters devoted enormous attention to improving their human capital so that enslaved people could work more efficiently and, more important, could increase in value over time.44 One indication of the hardheadedness and calculating business sense of Jamaican slave owners was their determination to get as much value out of enslaved women’s labor as they could. West Indian planters divided slaves by physical capacity rather than by sex. They insisted that the “stoutest and most able slaves … without any regard being had to their sex” should do the hardest work, such as digging cane holes, dunging, and cutting and harvesting cane. By the early eighteenth century, women were the majority of field hands on Jamaican sugar plantations. Plantations that needed extra labor hired women and men at the same rate, suggesting that there was little distinction in what they did as ordinary field laborers. This lack of gender differentiation in field work persisted until the end of slavery. David Collins in 1803 insisted that there are “many women who are capable of as much labour as man, and some men, of constitutions so delicate, as to be incapable of toil as the weakest women.”45 Planters were so determined to utilize women’s labor capacities that they gave little attention to alleviating field work for sick or pregnant women. Planters were reluctant to lose women’s labor. Slave reproduction came very low on the list of their priorities. Most women worked in the fields up to close to the time they gave birth and were returned to the field soon after. Able female field hands probably had no more than five weeks before and after birth where they were released from arduous field work.46
There is some evidence that planters worked women even harder than men. They were more likely than men to be field laborers, and they did extremely physically demanding tasks, such as cane holing and dunging, in greater proportions than did men. Accordingly, women tended to have very high rates of sickness. By the late eighteenth century planters began to admit that the demands they placed on women, especially young women at the start of their childbearing years, were too great. Jamaica planter Gilbert Mathison conceded in the early nineteenth century that “perhaps young females are too much subjected to hard labour at an early and critical period of their lives.” Nevertheless, slave women proved demographically tougher than slave men. Slave labor patterns on Mesopotamia Estate in the second half of the eighteenth century suggest that women had longer life expectancies than men and enjoyed lower death rates.47
Despite planters’ Enlightenment ethos of rational improvement, they were largely unwilling to apply those ideals to improve the lives of their enslaved laborers. The hallmarks of the large integrated plantation were discipline, coordination, and coercion. Planters were determined to make slaves work as hard as they could. They concerned themselves little about the deaths such demands produced. Our best data on the workload of Jamaican slaves comes from late in the eighteenth century. At Prospect Estate in the developing parish of Portland, slaves worked twelve hours a day for an average of 272 days, with sixty days off. Illness or other problems stopped work for thirty-three days.48 During their days off, enslaved people produced their own food, constructed their own housing, and attended to the needs of themselves and their children. Like the cotton mills of early industrial England, which depended on fresh inputs of laborers from the countryside to replace worn-out or dead workers, the sugar plantation depended on a functioning slave trade to maintain numbers. It was a consuming industry to cater to the growing consumer markets of western Europe.
In the French Caribbean, early eighteenth-century missionary accounts provide some indication of colonists’ attitudes toward the enslaved men and women whose labor was transforming Saint-Domingue. When the Jesuit Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix described Saint-Domingue sugar slavery in the 1720s, he was struck by the workers’ misery, the rags they wore, and their lack of food. Yet he contrasted their “perfect health” with the “infinity of illness” that plagued their French masters.49 Frustrated by the apparent inability of some Africans to learn even the Lord’s Prayer, Charlevoix used a mechanical metaphor to describe their “extremely limited intelligence,” describing Africans as “machines whose springs must be rewound each time that you want them to move.” Though he called the whip a necessary disciplinary tool, Charlevoix believed that the French were kinder masters than the English. If Saint-Domingue bordered an English colony, he claimed, most of the slaves would decamp to the French side.50
Writing a few decades earlier in Martinique, Jean-Baptiste Labat, who was both a missionary and a planter, also believed the English were crueler than the French. In 1696, after warning his readers about the frequency of deadly accidents at the sugar mill, where careless workers might be dragged into the rollers, he claimed that the English used their sugar mills to execute slaves who committed major crimes, gradually lowering their living bodies into the machine.51 Yet Labat highlighted the industrial character of plantations like the one he directed in Martinique: “Whatever you say about the work in an iron forge or glass factory or others, it is clear that there is nothing harder than that of a sugar mill, since in the former there are no more than 12 hours of work, while in a sugar mill there are 18 hours of work a day.” Because of mill workers’ lack of sleep, Labat