By Cecilia McAlmont
This is an edited version of a ‘History this Week’ column which first appeared in Stabroek News on August 4, 2011
In British Guiana, the dominant planter class felt that because of the availability of Crown land and abandoned estates, when apprenticeship ended the ex-apprentices would abandon the sugar estates which would lead to a labour shortage, the collapse of the sugar economy and by implication, the end of ‘civilised society.’ To forestall this eventuality, the planters used their control over the political institutions of the colony to put in place measures that would keep the apprentices landless and to restrict the freedom of movement of the soon to be ex-apprentices. Not all of the