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ABSTRACT
This article examines the use of coins by enslaved and indentured communities in nineteenth-century British Guiana and the visual imagery of these practices. Both Afro-Guianese and Indo-Guianese people appropriated the portability of coins for spiritual and aesthetic purposes as a response to the common experience of a violent plantation society. The development of photography during the migration of Indian indentured labour to British Guiana and the popularisation of the image of Indian indentured women wearing jewellery made from coins as representative of indenture at large, however, has overshadowed this shared history. By charting the afterlife of minted coins across economic, spiritual and aesthetic realms, this article offers a more nuanced understanding of worn silver and the people who wore it.
Notes
1 Elizabeth Edwards (Citation2014) contends the CO 1069 albums were produced with the aim to reassure by showing the presence of solid and recognisable state institutions in the colonies.
2 British Guiana, Colonial Office Photographic Collection, Colonial Office, CO 1069/355, The National Archives [TNA], London, United Kingdom.
3 For the history these different migrations to British Guiana, see Asiegbu 1869; Schuler Citation2000; Sue-A-Quan Citation1999; Menezes Citation1991; Adamson Citation1972; Rodney Citation1981.
4 For the key works on early British Guiana, see Rodway Citation1893b; Oostindie 2012; Farley Citation1955; Browne Citation2017; Viotti da Costa Citation1994; Draper Citation2012.
5 On silences in the indenture archives, see Bahadur Citation2013.
6 For such histories, see Bakewell Citation1971; Brading and Cross 1972; Bakewell Citation1984; Cole Citation1985; Brading Citation1971; Tandeter Citation1993.
7 For an exploration of the appropriation of the use of coins for aesthetics in the early modern Pacific world, see Hamann Citation2016. For the ‘Pine Tree Shilling,’ see Peterson Citation2013.
8 Walter Rodney (Citation1981) is perhaps the best example of an exception to this trend in Guyanese historiography.
9 James Carmichael-Smyth to Charles Grant, 3 August 1835, No. 36, CO 111/139, TNA, London, UK.
10 James Carmichael-Smyth to Charles Grant, 11 August 1835, No. 47, CO 111/139, TNA.
11 James Carmichael-Smyth to Charles Grant, 17 August 1836, No. 200, CO 111/146, TNA.
12 James Carmichael-Smyth to Charles Grant, 12 November 1835, No. 78, CO 111/140, TNA.
13 For the Essequibo strikes, see Turner Citation2004, 317.
14 1 guilder = 20 stivers and 1 stiver = 16 pennings. British Guiana, like other Caribbean colonies, was not immune to the importation and use of counterfeit coins; see Smoak Citation2017.
15 For a detailed history of these different currencies in British Guiana, see Chalmers Citation1893; Pennington Citation1848; Abraham Citation1891.
16 For a history of the Berbice Association, see Dalton Citation1855, 182. Chalmers (1983) contends Berbice had no coins in circulation before unification.
17 James Carmichael-Smyth to Thomas Spring Rice, 1 December 1835, No. 89, CO 111/140, TNA.
18 James Carmichael-Smyth to Charles Grant, 19 June 1838, No. 80, CO 111/154, TNA.
19 See Sprang (Citation2015) for discussion of money as a predominantly social phenomenon which reflects its users.
20 This difference in currency also overlapped between ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ (counterfeit) money. See Mintz Citation1964; Smoak Citation2017.
21 1 shilling amounted to 14 2/5 stivers under the 1838 ordinance but 5 stivers (or ¼ guilder coin) passed as 1 bit among the Afro-Guianese population meaning the British shilling fell somewhere in between 2½ and 3 bits; see Pennington Citation1848; Chalmers Citation1893.
22 Willem would eventually be convicted and hanged for the murder of an enslaved woman, Madalon, during a spiritual ritual; see Browne Citation2017; Paton Citation2015.
23 See Luard Citation2010, 24.
24 Crossing the kala pani (dark waters) of the Indian Ocean was believed to break caste. However, it is clear certain caste practices continued in British Guiana; see Bronkhurst Citation1883.
25 A. H. Alexander to G. L. M. Prince, 8 February 1883, No. 330A, AA2/1, WRA.
26 A. H. Alexander to F. Griffin, 27 December 1883, No. 3943A, AA2/11, WRA.
27 A. H. Alexander to G. H. Hawtayne, 5 December 1881, No. 2818A, AA2/9, WRA.
28 Fiche No. 674, 27 April 1852, MMSC, FBW West Indies Correspondence 14, Methodist Missionary Society Archive, Special Collection, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
29 The founder of the family business had begun as an itinerant jeweller in the early twentieth century. Ram and Sharma Maraj in discussion with the author, 12 March 2017, L. Seepersaud Maraj and Sons, Stabroek Market, Georgetown, Guyana.
30 Caribbean stylistic variations included bamboo indentations in Guyana and Suriname and cocoa pods in Trinidad; see Mahabir Citation2017, 118.
31 See Jenkins Citation1871, 30–31.
32 Nassibun v. Stoute, 26 May 1894, British Guiana Law Reports, Law Offices of Cameron & Shepherd, Georgetown, Guyana.
33 James Crosby to M. Cracqen, No. 995, 8 April 1874, AA2/3A, WRA.
34 For the overlap between widows and women who migrated through indenture to British Guiana, see Bahadur Citation2013.
35 Charles Bruce to Henry Holland, 17 January 1889, No. 26, CO 111/451, TNA.
36 Charles Bruce to Henry Holland, 11 October 1889, No. 342, CO 111/453, TNA.
37 Charles Bruce to Henry Holland, 31 January 1890, No. 31, CO 111/455, TNA. This problem continued up to 1904, James Swettenham to Alfred Lyttelton, 22 January 1904, Private, CO 111/540, TNA.
38 The other illustrations include two Chinese caricatures of plantation abuse by the Dalziel brothers and a map of British Guiana. For an extensive critique of Jenkins’s work, see Maria del Pilar Kaladeen Citation2012.
39 The same copy of Chinese caricatures was also printed in Good Words 1871, 48, 401 and 472.
40 For examples of this, see Kirke Citation1898, 260; Jenkins Citation1871, 52; Rodway and Stark [Citation1895?], 42; Crookall Citation1898, frontispiece; Rodway 1893a, 35.
41 Unlike places like Jamaica or Trinidad, Guyana’s visual history lies primarily in published texts and private collections.
42 For examples of this, see Kirke Citation1898, 260; Jenkins Citation1871, 52; Rodway and Stark [1895?], 42; Crookall Citation1898, frontispiece; Rodway Citation1893a, 35.
43 Smith Bros & Co., known as ‘The Whiteley’s of Demerara,’ was a large department store on Water Street, Georgetown. Whiteley’s was London’s first department store. Many thanks to Charles Kennard for this clarification.
44 The publisher is not stated on the card nor a date but there is a partial postmark on the reverse for the United States, pre-1910. Many thanks to Charles Kennard for this information.
45 See ‘A Madras woman, Trinidad’ (Image 3139) and ‘Coolie woman’ (Image 4140) by Felix Moran in the private collection, The Caribbean Photo Archive, Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/caribbeanphotoarchive/albums/72157608816942471.
46 The likeness in style to earlier Indian postcards of dancing girls and courtesans is remarkable and indicative of the genealogy of the sexualisation of nineteenth-century Indo-Guianese women by the European gaze; see Pinney Citation2008; Stevenson Citation2013; Khan Citation2018.
47 See Stark and Rodway [Citation1895?], 61. Richard P. Kaps was a watchmaker and jeweller active between at least 1899 and 1909; see British Guiana Directory and Almanack Citation1898, and Badley Citation1909.
48 See the Michael Goldberg Collection, Alma Jordan Library, University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad.
49 Indian labourers did gradually join shovel and cane-cutting gangs over indentureship; see Rodney Citation1981.
50 Whether indenture was or was not slavery is a continuing historiographical debate that originated during indenture itself; see Hossain Citation2017.
51 For examples, see William Walker to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 8 December 1859, No. 115, CO 111/324; William Walker to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 25 October 1859, No. 109, CO 111/324; Philip Wodehouse to Henry Labouchere, 10 October 1857, No. 30, CO 111/317; William Walker to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 22 September 1858, No. 114, CO 111/321; William Walker to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 8 December 1859, No. 115, CO 111/324; Philip Wodehouse to Henry Labouchere, 10 October 1857, No. 30, CO 111/317; William Walker to Henry Pelham-Clinton, 22 September 1858, No. 114, CO 111/321, TNA.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Louise Moschetta
Louise Moschetta is a PhD. student in history at the University of Cambridge. Her work focuses on the material histories of Indian indentured migration in British Guiana and the Southern Caribbean with a particular interest in bureaucracy and plantation life. She is completing a thesis entitled ‘Indian migrants in British Guiana and the paper cultures of indenture, 1830s–1920.’