Читать книгу Playing the Rake's Game - Bronwyn Scott - Страница 4

I hope you enjoy the new locale for this mini-series: the sunny Caribbean! There was plenty of British activity in the Caribbean not just in the eighteenth century, when Britain tamed the waters against piracy, but in the nineteenth century too.

Ren’s story is set against the backdrop of Barbados entering into its era of emancipation. His story comes right after the abolition of slavery—which had some significant anticipated and unanticipated repercussions.

One of the big issues which was anticipated dealt with wages and labour. Would it ruin the plantations’ abilities to make a profit if labourers had to be paid? To offset this, the British parliament gave the planters what we might today call a ‘financial incentive package’. They also set up the apprentice system. One historian notes that the system was meant to instruct newly freed slaves in the management of wages while helping planters access a ‘stable labour force’. Needless to say what worked well in theory was soon abused by the planters, who were bemoaning the loss of their power.

Another concern was political: the Plantocracy feared that freed slaves would want to vote and, of course, those votes would outnumber the white vote. And the final, perhaps somewhat unlooked-for consequence of emancipation was the finite availability of land. Freed slaves who wanted to be landowners and farm their own land simply didn’t have access to it. On an island, land is finite.

This is the scenario Ren Dryden enters when his story opens. He thinks a plantation in the Caribbean will be the answer to his family’s own financial problems, only to realise he’s inherited far more than he bargained for. I hope you enjoy Ren’s story, and learning a little about the context in which it is set.