Sugar Cane Alley: The Slave Revolution In The Caribbean

The plantation systems in the Caribbean were its most distinctive and characteristic economic form. These plantation systems were created in the New World during the early years of the sixteenth century and were mostly staffed with slaves imported from Africa. It was Spain that pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labour, and the plantation form in the Caribbean. Before long, within a century, the French and British became the world’s greatest makers and exporters of sugar. The film, Sugar Cane Alley, depicts the essence of a key transitional moment in French Caribbean history. It highlights the tribulations (daily efforts and working conditions) of many Noir sugar plantation workers in Martinique in the early 1930s. Hence,

Sugar plantations in the French Caribbean began in the era of the slave trade and continued well onto the remaining years of colonialism. In the mid-seventeenth century, when the French colonists first considered producing sugar in the Caribbean, they were only small-scale cultivators with limited means. Therefore, many of them had to employ freshly arrived settlers from the mother country (France) who were contracted to labour for a fixed number of years. Often, these workers were servants in debt, petty criminals, political and religious nonconformists, labour organizers, and different types of political prisoners. These contracted French labourers, called engagés (indentured servants) , represented a vital contribution to the labour needs of the colonies; however, for the colonists in Martinique, more labour than was readily available was needed. Sometimes they were able to acquire some enslaved natives of the Indigenous population who would work alongside the contracted Europeans. Eventually, the island planters began to procure enslaved Africans. Hence the early labour patterns in the French Caribbean colonies were a mixed bunch; comprised of European smallholders, indentured labourers, and African and Indigenous

For years, the sugar plantations of the French colony of Martinique have been a major contribution to their economy. The amount of labour needed for the continued production of sugar lead to the immigration of contracted French labourers, enslavement of the remaining Indigenous population, and importation of enslaved Africans. The procurement of slaves was one of the methods used to curb the large capital required for the operation of these plantations. Although these slaves were emancipated in 1948, they still remained the majority of labourers working in the sugar plantations, even as ‘freed men’. The plantation systems are a huge part of Martinique’s economic history. Sugar plantation systems constituted a significant facet of France’s colonization of