Vagrancy and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation Anglophone Caribbean, 1834-1900

This collaborative PhD project will investigate the development of vagrancy law and poor relief in the Anglophone Caribbean in the years after the end

The abolition of slavery in the British Empire coincided exactly with England's adoption of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), and followed soon after the substantial revision to English Vagrancy law through the Vagrancy Act of 1824. These developments have deep connections as part of a shift towards liberal ideas of the self-sustaining individual within a free market but have not been researched in relation to one another. This project will bring the two fields together by examining the development of and implementation of legislation relating to vagrancy and poor relief in the post-emancipation Caribbean colonies (1834-c. 1900).

The creation of new legal forms of rule was at the heart of the change from slavery to free labour, as it was envisaged by the British government. Laws passed across the Caribbean region in the wake of emancipation included Vagrancy Acts, Poor Laws, and laws that regulated the use of urban space such as Jamaica's Towns and Communities Act, first passed in 1843, and still in force today. This legislation was passed at the same time as law in Britain rapidly developed, through the Vagrancy Act of 1824, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and related legislation. However, the Caribbean legislation in this period has been relatively little studied, and its relationship to British legislation has hardly been considered at all. This Doctoral Award will allow the successful candidate to undertake significant research in the period during which the critical elements of today's Caribbean states were established.

The research will address important empirical and analytic questions. Empirically, by collating and comparing legislation in the core areas of vagrancy, poor law, and control of public space in the larger British Caribbean colonies (Jamaica, Trinidad [Trinidad and Tobago after 1889], Barbados, and British Guiana); and investigating the implementation of this legislation in two of these colonies chosen as case studies. Analytically, the focus will be on identifying the political and cultural significance of the legislation, the extent to which its implementation and responses to its implementation shaped identities, and its similarities and differences to equivalent legislation in Britain. How much did the Caribbean's colonial and racialized status and its history of slavery affect political and legal understandings of poverty and vagrancy? How did legislation and its implementation develop in relation to other areas of change such as the rise of new economic activities, and the shift in many colonies from legislative to Crown colonies? To what extent did legislation follow British policy, and how far did it respond to local conditions and concerns?