Unappropriated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados

This classic examination of the freedmen in the slave
society of Barbados was first published in 1974 and has not been widely
available 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 available to a new
generation of scholars and students. The work remains the only treatment of the
free people of colour of Barbados from the earliest periods of the slave
society to emancipation in 1834 and provides 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 was ambiguous. Thus there was wide latitude for varying interpretations
of what their position should be, but Handler shows how the freedmen=s struggle
for civil rights was a collective effort to maximize their free status and to
avoid a position of permanent intermediacy between white and enslaved.

Using 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
should be based on that set of social and economic criteria that whites used in
drawing distinctions among themselves. It was evident, however, that as long as
the slave society continued to exist, the freedmen of Barbados would remain an "unappropriated
people", neither enslaved nor entirely free.