"Their locomotive habits": mobility and post-emancipation (dis)order in port cities

This chapter seeks to re-centre the maritime within interpretations of the post-emancipation era in relation to urban unrest. It does so through a ship-to-shore focus on Barbadian protests in 1872, highlighting how the confluence of people, goods and information – underpinned by maritime rhythms and flows – was crucial to the unfolding of these events. The chapter is attentive to the ‘locomotive habits’, or mobile practices, of the African Caribbean population in the post-emancipation period, but not as they related to plantations or the agricultural complex. Instead, the chapter highlights the ‘connexions’ created by the maritime world (Papers relative to W. Indies). Specifically, it interrogates low-income Barbadians' mobile practices at moments of maritime disruption, arguing that maritime intersections of elite and mass mobility presented particular opportune moments, and that African Caribbean people's speculative steps at such moments tested the post-emancipation regime. At such times, individuals practised an embodied politics, involving localised movements and local knowledge of place, as well as protesting or defiant action.