A Shilling and a Bigger Task

When my great-grandfather Rambishoon arrived in British Guiana in 1888, the Arkati had not told him he was entering a sugar industry already fighting for its economic life. The Great Depression of West Indian sugar had begun around 1884, spurred by cheaper European beet sugar, heavily protected and subsidised in its home markets.
The price of cane sugar fell by a third in the five years before his arrival, while the costs of maintaining the below sea-level coastal estates remained stubbornly high. Between 1884 and 1900, the acreage under cane declined from roughly 77,000 acres to 66,000, leading to plantation abandonment or consolidation.
The planters’ response, however, was to find ways of producing more sugar and cheaper. With their slave-labour history, one of their immediate moves was to keep importing indentured labourers like Rambishoon, with the one-shilling daily wage, even as they kept fixed expenses such as logie housing and hospitals as low as possible. In the planters’ economic calculus, it was how much more work – the task for a day’s pay – could be obtained for that shilling. This was achieved by the overseers increasing the size of the task, tightening supervision, adjusting piece rates, or shifting workers into more demanding categories to effectively reduce the labour cost per tonne of cane or sugar without necessarily reducing the nominal daily wage.
The new regime created great tensions, as some workers could not complete their tasks even into the evening and had their pay cut or withheld. Rambishoon took great pride in his work ethic, but when his tasks became inordinate, he protested vehemently for the umpteenth time to the overseer, who decided to file charges against him for non-completion of his task. He had to appear at the Magistrates’ Court in nearby Stewartville, where he remembered his experience when he had been registered at the one in Bankipur in India.
While there was also an interpreter who conveyed the questions and his answers, it was clear to him – as in India – that the magistrate was in cahoots with management. He lost his case and was given the choice of a fine of $5 or 14 days’ imprisonment, as it was his first offence. He chose to pay the fine, which was equivalent to 100 days’ pay – his savings for an entire year. Fortunately, the following year, the law was changed, and workers were allowed to go home once they finished their tasks, and Rambishoon returned to his old pace to get home early.
Extracting more work for the constant wage was only one part of a much larger planter strategy to lower costs. Another was plantation consolidation, which Rambishoon was already aware of since he knew that before he arrived, the factory at Zeeburg had been shuttered and its machinery cannibalised to the Uitvlugt factory, which now processed Zeeburg’s cane. By 1884, seven companies already owned or controlled nearly half of British Guiana’s sugar production, and by 1901, only 52 of the 113 estates operating in 1880 remained. De Willem’s transportation system had been integrated into Uitvlugt-Zeeburg’s the decade before, and the factory finally closed in 1895, not long after Rambishoon’s indentureship ended in December 1893. It was completely amalgamated into Uitvlugt, now owned by the McConnel Booker Demerara group.
While most of this was beyond Rambishoon’s ken, the planters also focused on technology to increase production efficiencies. They had already invested heavily in steam-powered factories with improved roller systems for extracting juice and improved vacuum pans and centrifuges to make sugar crystals, plus improved irrigation and better transportation. The statistics tell this larger story – British Guiana’s sugar exports actually rose from about 92,000 tonnes in 1881 to 116,000 tonnes in 1891, even while the value of those exports continued falling dramatically. The planters’ answer to falling prices was, therefore, in considerable measure, to produce more sugar and produce it more cheaply.
And that is where Rambishoon’s experience became part of the economic history of Guyana. He did not arrive in 1888 simply as another Girmitiya looking for work. He arrived at precisely the moment when the plantation system was being forced to recalculate the value of every acre, every machine, and every hour of human labour. That was the deeper meaning of Rambishoon’s one shilling, which was only half the equation. The other half was the task in the cane field: more rows, more cane, more cutting, more loading, more exhausting hours – while the shilling remained stubbornly the shilling.