The Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados

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This classic examination of the freedmen in the slave society of Barbados used to be first published in 1974 and has not been widely to be had for years. Reissued now with a new introduction by Melanie Newton that places the work in the context of the historiography of studies of Caribbean free-coloured populations, this classic is now to be had to a new generation of scholars and students. The work remains the only remedy of the free people of colour of Barbados from the earliest periods of the slave society to emancipation in 1834 and provides probably the most detailed discussion of the manumission process for any British West Indian society.Allowed certain rights and privileges not extended to slaves but denied others reserved for whites, the social status of the free people used to be ambiguous. Thus there used to be wide latitude for varying interpretations of what their position must be, but Handler shows how the freedmen=s struggle for civil rights used to be a collective effort to maximize their free status and to keep away from a position of permanent intermediacy between white and enslaved.The use of the petitions and addresses written by the freedmen themselves, Handler contends that they neither challenged the notion of a class society nor attempted to deny the upper stratum those privileges commensurate with its rank. They argued that a hierarchically organized society must be in accordance with that set of social and economic criteria that whites used in drawing distinctions among themselves. It used to be evident, alternatively, that so long as the slave society continued to exist, the freedmen of Barbados would remain an Aunappropriated people@, neither enslaved nor entirely free.

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