ABSTRACT
The slave rebellion that swept the sugar growing parishes of western Jamaica in December 1831 utilized three strategies, arson, armed resistance and strike action, and made two demands, free status and wage work. The attempted general strike in 1831 suggests that sugar estate workers had prior small-scale experience of strike action and other forms of group and collective bargaining practices. Both the aims and strategies of the rebel slave workers, in short, indicated similarities between the methods of struggle used by slave and wage workers. The considerations informed the investigation of labour bargaining at Amity Hall estate in the Grand Square of Vere parish, some of the best cane producing land in Jamaica. Slave subsistence by estate grown, rationed staples supplemented by slave allotment produce, termed here the ration-allotment system, also characterized the Leeward Islands, the Bahamas, Barbados, Demerara-Essequibo and Berbice and affected some 30 per cent of the British Caribbean slave population.
