Thoughts on the Objectionable System of Labour for Wages in the West India Colonies

Henry James Ross, identified by local officials as `a native, a West Indian’ and as `an English barrister’, was an Anglo-West Indian, a white Creole. He was born in St Vincent in 1795 or 1797 but spent all of his early adult life in Britain as a barrister. He arrived in Grenada in 1838 to oversee the transition to wage labour on Plaisance, a 650-acre cocoa and coffee plantation with which he had been connected for nearly 20 years. He later took up extended residence in Grenada initially as an absentee proprietor but quickly converted himself into a planter, active professional man and public figure. In this pamphlet - originally published in 1842, here introduced by Woodville K. Marshall – Ross’s report serves as the only extant report on a sharecropping experiment on a British Caribbean plantation and thereby supplies pertinent details of how the scheme worked (and was expected to work) on the ground. The pamphlet is an argument for the total replacement of wage labour by sharecropping and identifies the advantages that such a substitution could bring to all parties and to agricultural practices. The pamphlet is also important as it may well have influences British colonial policymakers as well as some planters and therefore provides a window through which the sharecropping option and associated land/labour issues, can be examined.