From 1791 to 1804), French St. Domingue, the most profitable colony in the world, with slave labor producing 40% of the sugar and 60% of the coffee exported to Europe, had a slave rebellion turned national liberation struggle. Rival imperialist powers looked to fill the void in the sugar and slave market, at the time two commodities as interlocked as capitalism and colonialism. After three hundred years of neglect by Spain, the small colony of Puerto Rico that had served it as a military garrison and strategically located way station—a gateway to the Caribbean and the hemisphere—became in Spanish merchants and financiers’ eyes a place where there was a profit to be made.
Meanwhile, a weakened Spain, within a decade to face Napoleon’s occupation and in two the loss of almost all its colonies in the Americas, acceded to Puerto Rican trade with England and the U.S., opening up in the 1820’s. During that pivotal period of wars of independence of Spain’s colonies in the Americas and the Haitian slave uprising, Puerto Rico became a destination point for the French and South American criollo planters displaced from the liberated colonies. They came with their slaves, tools, machinery, and capital, induced by the Spanish regime’s offer of land and unimpeded access, and they set up shop in the Island. It was a market enterprise involving acquisition, sale, and exploitation of slaves, land, and equipment, mainly exporting the cash crops of sugar and coffee. Europeans with means—English, Irish, Germans, French, Mallorquins, and Basques—would also take advantage of the opportunity. Over time, the wave of new planters and merchants would become creolized, Puerto Rican. The rising landowning class—creole and newly arriving—were incentivized to produce for the growing North American and European market. But they were constrained. They needed land and labor.
One source of labor was slavery, but the English abolition of the slave trade in 1807 made it increasingly expensive and difficult to get this labor, even with the slave market provided by Dutch and French colonies. Since the beginnings of the plantation system in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and throughout the period of slavery, free people of color (mixed-race and black) outnumbered slaves in the labor market of Puerto Rico. Nevertheless, as sugar and coffee production grew so did the slave population: 6,537 in 1776, 13,333 in 1802, 18,621 in 1815, 34,240 in 1830, and peaking at 51,265 in 1846 (according to the “official” census).
At its peak, slave labor represented 11% of the total labor force, but it was strategically placed in the critical sugar and coffee cash crops. The enslaved people responded to their exploitation and oppression with sabotage, escapes, and rebellion, while the hacendados (big landowners) and Spanish imperialist increased their repression. In 1812, the Spanish governor orders that a slave disrespectful to the master get 50 lashes from authorities and then face the “owner’s” lashes. If the offense was violent, punishment was doubled. With greater vigilance, there were less large-scale escapes but many more individual runaways. Those not chancing it after 1850 got organized and demanded better clothing, shorter working hours, better labor conditions and food, an end to sexual exploitation, and increased negotiation between slave and master. Slaves gained increasing rights to work for themselves on their own time, making money to buy back their freedom.
The criollo and new planters needed land and greater access to labor, much like the early English capitalists, who turned to the Enclosure Acts to appropriate common land and force the peasantry into urban factories. In the Island, the hacendados needed to strip the land from the jíbaros, who had subsisted on it for centuries, and put them to work, alongside slaves, to produce sugar on the coastal plains and coffee in the interior highlands.
Since the last quarter of the 1700s, the criollo planters had been working on the continual expansion of an export economy at the expense of the jíbaro’s cultivation of subsistence crops.They got passage of the work pass law of 1849 (Reglamento de Jornaleros), obliging country folk with little or no land to carry a work pass, or libreta, recording their pay, time worked, debt (for advanced salary), and the landowners’ comments on their work and character. The jíbaro had to produce a (non-existent) title to the land to avoid forced labor on the hacendado’s land—becoming a jornalero, or day laborer. A poor rating in his libreta shut off work elsewhere, so the libreta became a tool to tie the laborer to a particular hacendado. This forced labor of the jornalero became known as white slavery (although jíbaros were not just white).
The jornaleros weren’t paid in money, but in vouchers good only in the planter’s, or hacendado’s, store, the only place the laborers could get what they could not provide for themselves. The criollo bourgeoisie and European financiers and merchants buying the Island’s agrarian goods (and dealing in slaves, machinery, technology, and know-how), all profited. Ultimately, of course, the criollo planters were restrained by Spanish interests and politics and at the mercy of the international marketplace. These hacendados went go through good times, bad times, and catastrophe over the course of the 19th century, following the rise, downturn, and fall of Puerto Rican sugar. Their death knell was tolled in 1898 when American capital took over the sugar industry in Puerto Rico.The good times for the criollo hacendados had lasted to about 1870, when Cuban competition in sugar, abolition (1873-6), the fall in sugar prices, and lack of capital and new technology began to make their impact.
