Profile of: Connor deMerchant

Award Received: Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral

Awarded for the project: Making Whiteness, Remaking Empire: The Poor Whites of Dorsetshire Hill, St. Vincent, 1834-1940

Department: Historical Studies

Supervisor: Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

My project demonstrates that the racialization of poverty in Barbados and St. Vincent is, in many ways, a legacy of an earlier history of the Caribbean, reaching back to the post-emancipation period. My work focuses on the scheme proposed by Governor Francis Hincks in 1859 to relocate poor whites from Barbados to other islands in the Caribbean. This impoverished population constituted a distinct socio-economic category within Barbados for over two centuries, having arrived as indentured servants in the seventeenth century to work alongside enslaved Africans in the early years of sugar production. During the period of slavery, the island’s lower-class white population was provided only minimal poor relief from the island’s parish vestries. However, in the decades following emancipation in 1834/8 the colonial government enacted poor relief measures to ensure that all white people––regardless of class––retained a higher socio-economic standing than the Black population. When these measures proved insufficient, the colonial government proposed to remove the poor white class off the island.

My dissertation traces the history of the poor whites of Barbados from emancipation in the 1830s to their migration and settlement at Dorsetshire Hill, St. Vincent beginning in the 1860s, up until the mid-twentieth century. It argues that the racialization of poverty and state formation are key to understanding the “poor white problem” and the colonial migration schemes of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Although the origin story of the poor whites of Barbados has appeared frequently in scholarship, the major effort to help them in the nineteenth-century, which ultimately took the form of a large-scale migration scheme, remains largely unexamined. My project brings wider attention to these efforts and demonstrates how a proposed solution to the problem that this group posed to Barbados was largely the product of white supremacy, and attitudes toward whiteness and poverty.

My research highlights how intersections of race and poverty must be understood within specific historical contexts. Although their whiteness gave the poor whites some social capital, centuries of poverty kept them disenfranchised and a small few continue to live in poverty in the present day.