Kit Candlin's research while affiliated with The University of Sydney and other places

War profiteers have long been a theme in conflict studies. Profiteering was as much a feature of the wars that tore through the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century as it was for later wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The age of democratic revolutions in the Atlantic World, beginning roughly with the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and continuing through the American, French, and South American revolutions, brought upheaval to the Caribbean that lasted decades. In this turbulent world of slave rebellion and imperial contest a new group of people emerged to complicate further the social demography of the region. This chapter focuses on free women of colour, who perhaps more than any other social group were able to navigate the revolutionary turmoil in the Caribbean, self-fashion their own lives and profit from division and conflict. These were women who were descended from slaves and yet they themselves became slave owners with little inclination to manumit any of their chattels unless they happened to be family. By the time these conflicts came to an end, their mark on networks of power would be an indelible, often denigrated, part of afro-Caribbean identity. Their presence is an important legacy in the history of war, demonstrating that conflict and insecurity could create important entrepreneurial opportunity to be seized upon by marginalized or displaced civilians.

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas“s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain“s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

As if he were walking through London’s Pall Mall, Thomas Picton regularly took an evening stroll to the sea fort near Marine Square to hear the evening gun shoot off its salute. It was a curious institution — introduced by the British and fired in the direction of Venezuela, as if to remind the Spanish that the British were still there. To many of Picton’s subjects, it was just another habit that the invaders had brought with them.

The Spanish had not cared for Trinidad. In 1797 the British occupied it effortlessly, as they had Demerara the previous year. But in the vacuum of power that an unsupported administration fostered, a society grew steadily with few formal controls. By the 1790s there was little hard currency available and much of the economics of the island was that most basic of trade negotiation: barter. This was a transient world with landing points that permitted small boats to easily come into the capital, Port of Spain. People frequently came and went here, most of them unnoticed. Beyond the capital, a dangerous, undeveloped hinterland hid many secrets.1

In regency Kensington there once stood an old red-brick mansion. It may have at one point been a spacious townhouse for Georgian nobility in London for the season, but by the 1820s it had changed its function and become instead a fine finishing school for young ladies. At that time London was filled with these little private institutions, some paid for by subscription, others by fees and endowments. They often bordered on fashionable areas dotted around the capital.1 This one was no exception, right in the new West End on the road to Knightsbridge.

Empires meant very little to St Hillaire Begorrat. He was the natural product of a world in which imperial loyalties were fluid and shifting. His sense of nationalism, like those of his fellow planters, vacillated throughout his life. Along with British merchant adventurers and émigré Europeans, creole planters like Begorrat played a fundamental role in shaping the politics of the Southern Caribbean, but nowhere more so than in Trinidad. They were, on the whole, a self-serving group of transient migrants with very little loyalty to anyone but themselves. Moving between nations, they had pursued their fortunes with scant regard for whichever colony they happened to be in. At the expense of the existing population and with few controls, they held all the major offices and controlled the government. Along with spies and agents, Thomas Picton was quickly dominated by men such as these. Not only would he emulate their style and habits, he would, to his detriment, add to their power. Subtly and slowly he would be drawn into their capricious world.

Grenada 1795. On the morning of Wednesday 4 March at around half past ten, a washerwoman came running into Grenada’s little capital St Georges, convinced that ‘the enemy’ was marching on the town. Others followed her from the river claiming that they too had heard distant drums and had even seen troops moving into position up the road. According to one observer, the militia had steeled themselves to either ‘defend their lives and properties’ or ‘meet a glorious death’ trying. It was, according to the chronicler, ‘a chaotic and most melancholy scene’.1

For the émigré planters like St Hillaire Begorrat, who brought with them the fears, paranoias and petty jealousies that had marked their previous lives, the huge number of free coloureds in Trinidad was a source of alarm. These fears exploded in 1801 when the island was hit by a wave of suspected poisonings from among its slave workforce. Frantic planters, many of whom were new arrivals from Grenada, St Domingue and other French colonies, persuaded Governor Thomas Picton to hold brutal commissions into the practice to try and find out who was responsible. Bordering on the hysterical, their response to this perceived threat was extreme. In ways redolent of other slave conspiracies across the Atlantic world throughout the eighteenth century, slaves were burned alive, decapitated or tortured, moderate planters were brought into line with the new order and apprehensions about Obeah and witch-doctory ran rampant. In the climate of fear and retribution, the events took on a French flavour, indicative of those who had instigated the allegations in the first place. Despite their best efforts, no one could find real proof, let alone the conspiracy that many were convinced was behind the events.

On 11 November 1814, a tiny boat arrived at Trinidad’s Port of Spain. On board the vessel was a small, bedraggled group of free coloured women and their children. It may have been like any other arrival that month — Port of Spain was, after all, a very busy harbour — but for the fact that those on board had come from Venezuela and that, for the last two months at least, this traffic had been increasing alarmingly. Only days before, the harbour authorities had begun to collect the names and details of those who stepped ashore in an effort to provide some much-needed regulation and to try and control what was fast becoming an exodus.