A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (Latin America Otherwise)

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Description

This book brings back into print, for the first time for the reason that 1830s, a text that was once central to the transatlantic campaign to fully abolish slavery in Britain’s colonies. James Williams, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican “apprentice” (former slave), came to Britain in 1837 on the instigation of the abolitionist Joseph Sturge. The Narrative he produced there, one of very few autobiographical texts by Caribbean slaves or former slaves, became probably the most powerful abolitionist tools for effecting the immediate end to the system of apprenticeship that had replaced slavery.
Describing the hard working conditions on plantations and the harsh remedy of apprentices unjustly incarcerated, Williams argues that apprenticeship in truth worsened the conditions of Jamaican ex-slaves: former owners, no longer legally permitted to right away punish their workers, used the Jamaican legal system as a punitive lever against them. Williams’s story documents the collaboration of local magistrates in this practice, wherein apprentices were robotically jailed and beaten for both real and imaginary infractions of the apprenticeship regulations.
Along with the complete text of Williams’s original Narrative, this fully annotated edition includes nineteenth-century responses to the controversy from the British and Jamaican press, in addition to extensive testimony from the Commission of Enquiry that heard evidence regarding the Narrative’s claims. These fascinating and revealing documents constitute the largest extant body of direct testimony by Caribbean slaves or apprentices.

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