"Black Caribs" vs "Yellow Caribs": a planter's color split to question land rights (St. Vincent, 1700s; William Young, 1795)

SUMMARY"Black Caribs" vs "Yellow Caribs": a planter's color split to question land rights (St. Vincent, 1700s; William Young, 1795) [Connections: Latin America & Caribbean, Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDLiterary historian Peter Hulme ("Black, Yellow, and White on St. Vincent: Moreau de Jonnès's Carib Ethnography," 2003) shows that planter-commissioner William Young described "two nations of people of very different origin and pretensions" (Young 1795, p. 5), calling the Black Caribs a "colony of African Negroes," though the descriptions rarely give concrete differences and both spoke the same language and shared practices. Hulme argues the African framing cast the Black Caribs as usurpers, weakened sympathy for Indigenous Caribs, and shrank the count of "indigenous" families. Population estimates conflict wildly: British, about 5,000 Black Caribs and very few Yellow; the French soldier Moreau de Jonnès (1795), about 1,500 Black and over 6,000 Yellow. Wikipedia (citing Kim 2013) says modern scholarship sees the label as framing most of the island's Indigenous people as "mere interlopers from Africa" without land claims. St. Vincent historian Adrian Fraser (Searchlight, 2015) calls it "divide and rule."

PATTERNThis is the clearest receipt of the method: label part of an Indigenous nation "Black," then argue the "Black" ones have no right to the land

LENS (WW9)The exact move: renamed Black, so the land is "not theirs."

OPENRead Young's Account of the Black Charaibs (1795) directly; it is digitized

SOURCEHulme (2003), PDF via CORE; Wikipedia, "Garifuna" (redirect from "Black Carib"); Searchlight, "The Carib/Garifuna story, part 2," 31 Jul 2015.