SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Re-thinking the Development of Global Capitalism: Tracing the Kru Diaspora from Eighteenth-century Wage Labourers in British West African Workplaces to Nineteenth-century Labourers in the Americas

Tracing the Kru Diaspora from the coastal and interior regions of Liberia to Sierra Leone as wage labourers in British commercial and military workplaces in the late eighteenth century and as labourers in British Guiana in the mid-nineteenth reveals the active role Africans have played in British trade and calls for a rethinking of African agency in the development of global capitalism.  Their case remains an early example of the “outsourcing” wage labour model that has come to dominate work environments in the 21st century.  Perhaps no other African ethnic group has occupied such a versatile and important social and economic role in British commercial and military contexts as the Kru on both sides of the Atlantic.

Since the 1970s, the historiography on the Kru has been contributed most notably by G.E. Brooks and Andreas Massing both of who focused on the Kru’s socio-political structures in their homeland and headmen structures in their British workplaces. More recently, Diane Frost has produced a thorough examination of the Kru from their 18th century labour activities onboard British commercial and military ships to the socio-economic impact of the Kru Diaspora to the UK in the twentieth century.  However, there has not been a comprehensive study of the Kru Diaspora to the Caribbean and, in particular, to British Guiana.  I hope to fill this void and shed light on the transmission of Kru socio-economic structures from West African shipping contexts to the British Guiana commercial setting.

Over the course of the following paper, I argue that the Kru were crucial players in enabling and maintaining commercial trade between the British and various African communities along the West African coast as well as in British Guiana.  The Kru’s overwhelming presence onboard commercial ships trading in slaves and later in “legitimate commodities” such as palm oil, onboard British man-of-war ships and Royal Navy ships, and shore side as dock workers while providing gang labour pools for infrastructural projects in communities as diverse as Lagos to the Congo suggests that the Kru formed a crucial component of British operations in West Africa in the later part of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century.

While the Kru formed the bulk of skilled and unskilled labourers in all of the aforementioned contexts, they also frequently held specialist positions serving as interpreters between the British and African communities along the West African coast during loading and unloading work periods.  The most vital occupation upon which British-Kru labour relations depended was the headman. The headman’s duties included selecting the Kru labour-force, ensuring discipline and distributing payments to Kru labourers. Without the headman organizational structure in place British-Kru labour relations throughout West Africa simply would not have been possible.  

As such, I contend that headmen remained equally as influential and necessary in British-Kru labour relations in the context of 19th century British Guiana.   Kru labourers carried with them a familiarity with mariner culture, headman socio-economic structures and global capitalism, which informed their work and leisure experiences and ultimately characterized the Kru Diaspora to British Guiana.