Mark Scheme

Essays are marked using the level descriptors printed after this scheme. The indicative content below is not a checklist: candidates may reach the top band by any well-evidenced route. Reward argument and judgement over accumulation of detail.

Section A — Module 1

Question 1

(a) (10) — Indicative content: the cacique as hereditary chief of a yucayeque, controlling land allocation, storage and redistribution of food, organisation of labour and religious ceremony, the office normally inherited matrilineally through a sister's son; a ranked but not rigidly stratified society of nitainos (sub-chiefs, advisers, war leaders), behiques (priest-healers, custodians of the cohoba ceremony) and naborias (the labouring majority); larger paramount chiefdoms in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico where a cacique held authority over several villages, against smaller and less hierarchical organisation in Jamaica and the Bahamas; communal land, the cacique's obligation to redistribute surplus, and the absence of market or currency; social and religious integration through the areito (ceremonial song-dance recording lineage), the batey ball game and zemi worship, the cacique holding the most powerful zemis. Naming the four ranks without explaining the cacique's functions cannot exceed Level 2.

(b) (15) — The top band requires a supported judgement, not merely both cases set out. For disease: no prior exposure to Old World pathogens — smallpox (Hispaniola 1518–19), measles, influenza, typhus — producing "virgin soil" mortality; the speed and scale of the decline (Hispaniola from several hundred thousand or more in 1492 to a few hundred by the 1540s) is hard to attribute to violence alone. For Spanish policy: the encomienda stripped labour from the conuco subsistence system, producing famine; exceptional mortality in mines and pearl-diving; warfare and reprisal (the Hispaniola campaigns, Hatuey in Cuba, Enriquillo's revolt) and the terror described by Las Casas; separation of couples and refusal to bear children into slavery, collapsing the birth rate; slave raiding from the Bahamas depopulating whole islands directly. Synthesis expected at the top band: the explanations are not independent. Disease was the proximate killer, but policy determined vulnerability — malnourishment, exhaustion, dispersal, suppressed reproduction — and destroyed the capacity to recover, which is why the decline was permanent rather than cyclical. Do not place a monocausal answer in the top band, however detailed.

Question 2

(a) (10) — The question demands comparison; two separate descriptions cap at Level 2. Taino intensive conuco mound cultivation of cassava (bitter manioc, processed to remove prussic acid), sweet potato, maize, cotton and tobacco supported dense sedentary populations, against smaller-scale Kalinago swidden cultivation supporting smaller, more mobile settlements. Both fished extensively, but the Kalinago were the superior navigators, using large piraguas for inter-island raiding and trade the Taino did not undertake, and their craft production centred on canoes and weapons where the Taino produced pottery, cotton cloth and zemi carvings for exchange and alliance. The Taino surplus supported a non-producing chiefly and priestly stratum; the Kalinago surplus was smaller and the ouboutou, chosen for war, less economically privileged.

(b) (15) — Up to 6 for evaluation of the source, up to 6 for corroboration, up to 3 for judgement. Usefulness: a contemporary eyewitness account written within the period of collapse by an author with direct opportunity to observe Hispaniola; it identifies four distinct mechanisms — mine labour, flight and starvation, collapse of the birth rate through separation of couples, and epidemic disease —; its closing claim that the sickness "would not have found them already broken" shows contemporaries recognising the interaction of policy and disease. Limitations: a friar writing in the Las Casas tradition of denunciation with a clear purpose, the reform or abolition of the encomienda, so the emphasis on Spanish culpability is interested; the population claim is impressionistic rather than enumerated, and such figures were rehearsed to shock; "gentle, without weapons of iron" idealises the Taino and passes over indigenous warfare; it is silent on slave raiding, generalises one island to "the Indians", and is partly reported testimony ("it is said that"). Corroboration: repartimiento counts and the collapse of the encomienda confirm the depopulation; the 1518–19 smallpox epidemic supports the disease strand; Spanish resort to Bahamian slave raids and then to African labour corroborates the destruction of the labour force. Against the source, modern scholarship weights epidemic mortality more heavily than the friar allows. Judgement: reliable as to mechanism, unreliable as to magnitude; its central claim, that policy determined vulnerability, is broadly sustained despite the polemical framing.

Section B — Module 2

Question 3

(a) (10) — Indicative content: the sugar revolution from the 1640s (Barbados, then the Leewards and Jamaica) demanded a large, disciplined, year-round gang force for planting, cutting and the continuous operation of mill and boiling house, which indentured servants on fixed terms could not supply; supply contracted in England after 1660 as conditions improved, the mainland colonies competed and Cromwellian transportation ended; on cost, an indenture ran three to seven years and expired, whereas enslavement was for life and, crucially, heritable, delivering the next generation's labour too; and African supply became cheap and elastic through the Royal African Company (1672) and free trade in slaves after 1698. Racial ideology acted as facilitator, making bondage permanent, visible and heritable in a way impossible with Europeans. Credit candidates who note, with Eric Williams, that the choice was in origin economic and the racial justification followed — and credit a reasoned challenge to that sequence equally.

(b) (15) — Both sides required for Level 4. For resistance: continuous resistance from the outset — marronage (the Jamaican Maroons to the treaties of 1739–40; Suriname); the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), which proved slavery could be destroyed by the enslaved and permanently altered planter and metropolitan risk calculation; the late rebellions — Barbados 1816 (Bussa), Demerara 1823 and above all the Jamaica Christmas Rebellion of 1831–32 (Sam Sharpe), involving perhaps 60,000 people — which persuaded Parliament that amelioration had failed and that the alternative to emancipation was war, legislation following within eighteen months; and planter reprisals, including the killing of missionaries and the burning of chapels, which alienated metropolitan opinion faster than abolitionist propaganda. For the abolitionists: emancipation was enacted by the imperial Parliament, not conceded on the ground; the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1787), Clarkson's evidence-gathering, Wilberforce's parliamentary campaigning and the mass petitions of 1814 and 1833 created the political conditions; the 1807 abolition of the trade, achieved before the late rebellions, shows metropolitan agency independent of large revolt; the Reform Act of 1832 delivered a Commons less controlled by the West India interest; and Seymour Drescher's demonstration that the British slave economy was expanding at abolition ("econocide") undercuts the economic version of the Williams thesis. Synthesis: the strongest answers argue interdependence — resistance supplied the crisis and the evidence, the abolitionists the parliamentary vehicle and the language; neither alone explains the timing of 1833.

Question 4

(a) (10) — Any three features: 3 marks for description, 3 for purpose, 4 for quality of explanation. Legal (slave codes) — chattel status, denial of legal personality and of testimony against whites, restricted assembly, movement passes, prohibition of drumming and literacy — to remove every avenue of redress and prevent organisation across estates. Division and privilege — distinctions between field, factory and domestic labour and between African-born and Creole, elevation of coloured and skilled workers — to prevent a unified interest. Material dependence — control of rations, housing and provision grounds — to make subsistence conditional on compliance, though the provision-ground system also created an internal marketing economy and a measure of autonomy that partly undermined control. Reward candidates who note that these measures were reactive, codes being tightened after each conspiracy, and therefore themselves evidence of persistent resistance.

(b) (15) — Marks are reserved for use of the figures: an answer that does not quote and manipulate the table cannot exceed Level 2. Use of data (up to 5): across 1700–1808 some 846,000 Africans were landed, yet the enslaved population reached only about 324,000 — a shortfall of over half a million; in 1700–1720, 96,000 landed against a population of 74,000, and the gap widens in every later period; sugar exports rose more than tenfold (6,700 to 71,000 tons) while population rose about fourfold, so output per enslaved person rose sharply. A top answer notes re-export — Jamaica was an entrepôt, and some of those landed were sold on to the Spanish colonies — before attributing the whole gap to mortality. Explanation (up to 7): the failure of natural increase, deaths exceeding births throughout, caused by a heavily male-skewed import sex ratio, low fertility from malnutrition, hard labour in pregnancy, amenorrhoea and prolonged lactation, very high infant mortality including neonatal tetanus, and the planter's calculation that replacement by purchase was cheaper than rearing children; working conditions, with crop-time shifts of eighteen hours or more, mill and boiling-house injury, and the exceptional mortality of sugar compared with coffee, cotton or provisions. Rising output per head indicates intensification — more work extracted from each person, itself raising mortality — so the two columns are causally linked, not merely parallel. Judgement (up to 3): the demographic evidence establishes a system that consumed its labour force and depended on continuous replacement from Africa, organised for extraction rather than reproduction, which explains why abolition of the trade in 1807 was expected to force amelioration.

Section C — Module 3

Question 5

(a) (10) — Indicative content: established by the Abolition Act 1833, effective 1 August 1834 across the British Caribbean, but not adopted in Antigua and Bermuda, which moved straight to full freedom — a point that discriminates the better answers. Former enslaved people over six became apprentices attached to their former owners, children under six being freed. Apprentices owed 40¾ hours of unpaid labour weekly, time beyond that to be paid; they retained house and provision ground, and the owner remained obliged to supply allowances. Stipendiary magistrates, paid from imperial funds and appointed from outside the planter class, were to adjudicate disputes and control punishment, removing that power from the owner,. £20 million compensation was paid to owners; apprentices received none. Purposes: to secure a guaranteed labour supply through the transition; to accustom the freed to wage discipline and, in the official phrase, prepare them for freedom; and to protect estate capital and reassure the West India interest. Credit candidates who note that Apprenticeship collapsed early, on 1 August 1838, discredited in Britain by over-working of hours, withdrawal of allowances, the treadmill and the flogging of women.

(b) (15) — The question specifies both types of territory; an answer confined to one caps at Level 3. Support for the view (the "pull"): withdrawal as a deliberate assertion of freedom, escaping the gang, the driver and the estate's control of time; the withdrawal of women and children from field labour to household and provision-ground work, the largest single component of the fall in estate labour and a positive family decision rather than a response to eviction; free villages, with land purchased under missionary assistance in Jamaica (Sligoville, Sturge Town, under Knibb and Phillippo);. Against the view (the "push"): rent for house and grounds deliberately tied to labour, so that a family withholding labour lost its home — the tenancy-at-will system — with eviction of those who worked elsewhere; and refusal to sell land in small parcels, with legislation raising the minimum purchasable lot to price the freed out of the market. The land variable, the discriminator: where land was abundant — Jamaica, British Guiana, Trinidad — a substantial peasantry emerged, estate labour fell sharply and planters turned to immigration. Where land was scarce and wholly engrossed — Barbados, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis — the freed had no alternative; estate labour continued with little interruption, wages stayed low, and the located-labourer and tenantry systems bound workers to estates, Barbados exporting labour rather than losing it to a peasantry. Judgement: the top band recognises that choice and compulsion are not alternatives — the freed exercised choice where land and law permitted, and the planters' response was to remove the choice.

Question 6

(a) (10) — Indicative content: recruitment from India followed the failure of earlier schemes (Portuguese Madeirans, Chinese, liberated Africans) and the collapse of Apprenticeship, beginning with British Guiana in 1838 (the Gladstone experiment), suspended amid abuse and resumed under regulation from 1844–45, and Trinidad in 1845 with the Fatel Razack; the system ran to 1917, with repatriations to 1920. The contract was normally five years of industrial residence, later with a further five to qualify for a return passage, the immigrant assigned to a named estate and unable to leave without a pass. Breach of contract was a criminal offence — absence, "malingering" and desertion punished by fine or imprisonment — so the system rested on penal sanction rather than contract law alone. The return passage was initially free, later part-paid and, in Trinidad, commuted to a grant of Crown land, a principal reason a majority remained and formed a settled Indo-Caribbean population. Reward candidates who explain the purpose: to restore a controlled labour supply and equally to depress the wages and bargaining power of the freed African population by creating a labour surplus. That second purpose distinguishes strong answers.

(b) (15) — Up to 6 for evaluation, up to 6 for typicality, up to 3 for judgement. Value: an official contemporary report by a stipendiary magistrate, an imperial appointee salaried from London rather than a planter; based on direct inquiry across seven estates, and distinguishing between them rather than generalising; and supplying a precise causal mechanism — that where a shilling per task was paid without rent deduction labour was forthcoming for five days together, while where rent exceeded the wage labour was withheld. The closing sentence, that the people refused terms "which leave them poorer than idleness", states the economic rationality of the freed and directly refutes the planters' account. It is therefore strong evidence that the "labour shortage" was a dispute over terms, not a withdrawal from work. Limitations: a very small sample — seven estates, one colony, one year — with no figures for the workforces involved; British Guiana was atypical, its abundant Crown land giving labourers an exit option unavailable elsewhere; stipendiary magistrates were dependent on planters for accommodation and varied in sympathy, this one's framing being evidently sympathetic; the report records the magistrate's inference about motive, with no testimony from the freed people themselves; and it is silent on other causes, notably the withdrawal of women and children from field labour and competition from independent provision cultivation. Typicality: the rent-as-coercion practice was widespread in Jamaica and British Guiana and well attested, so the source is representative of the land-rich territories. In Barbados, Antigua and St Kitts there was no comparable shortage, because the freed had no alternative; there the located-labourer and tenantry systems achieved the same coercion without a labour crisis, and the source does not describe those societies at all. Judgement: highly valuable on the mechanism of the labour dispute in a land-rich colony, and unrepresentative as a picture of the region. The conclusion available is that the post-emancipation "labour problem" was a bargaining conflict whose outcome depended on land availability, and that planters resorted to immigration to end that bargaining.

Level descriptors (essay questions)

Applied to all questions; the 10-mark parts use Levels 1–4 scaled proportionately.

• Level 4 (top band, 20–25 / 8–10): Sustained, relevant argument that directly answers the question set. Accurate and precise evidence — named territories, dates, legislation, figures — deployed to support argument rather than displayed for its own sake. Where the question is evaluative, both sides are treated with genuine weight and a reasoned judgement is reached and justified. Where a source is set, its provenance, purpose and limitations are used to assess specific claims, and the source is tested against other evidence. Historiography, where used, is accurately attributed. Fluent, well-structured continuous prose.
• Level 3 (15–19 / 6–7): Sound knowledge and a generally relevant argument, but development is uneven; some paragraphs describe rather than argue. Evidence is accurate but its bearing on the question is sometimes left implicit. Evaluative questions are answered from both sides but the judgement is asserted rather than argued. Source evaluation identifies bias but does not connect it to particular claims.
• Level 2 (8–14 / 3–5): Largely narrative or descriptive. Relevant material is present but organised as an account rather than an answer; the question is addressed only in the opening and closing sentences. Evidence is general — "the planters", "the Europeans" — with few specifics. One-sided treatment of evaluative questions. Comparison questions answered as two separate descriptions.
• Level 1 (1–7 / 1–2): Isolated accurate points with little organisation; substantial irrelevance or serious inaccuracy; assertion in place of evidence.

Sample Answers with Examiner Commentary

Question 4(b) — Sample Answers

Grade I (Distinction) answer (extract)

"The arithmetic of the table is the clearest possible statement of what Jamaican slavery was. Between 1700 and 1808 approximately 846,000 Africans were landed on the island. At the end of that period the enslaved population stood at 324,000. Even allowing for re-export to the Spanish colonies from an entrepôt island, a shortfall of this order cannot be explained by trade. It can only be explained by death.

The system failed to reproduce itself. Imports were deliberately skewed toward men, so the proportion of women of childbearing age was depressed from the outset. Among those women, hard field labour continued through pregnancy, nutrition was poor, and prolonged lactation and amenorrhoea lengthened the interval between births. Infant mortality, particularly from neonatal tetanus contracted in the first fortnight of life, was extraordinarily high. And planters made an explicit calculation: while the trade was open, a fully grown African could be purchased for less than the accumulated cost of rearing a child to working age. Purchase was cheaper than reproduction, and the system was organised accordingly.

The second column sharpens the point. Sugar exports rose from 6,700 tons a year to 71,000 — more than tenfold — while population rose roughly fourfold, so output per enslaved person rose sharply. This is not an incidental fact alongside the mortality; it is a cause of it. The rising sugar figure represents lengthened crop-time shifts, more hours at the mill and in the boiling house, and a work regime intensified precisely because the labour force could be replaced by purchase.

What this reveals is a system of extraction rather than of settlement. A society that consumes its labour force and replenishes it from outside has no interest in the conditions that permit human life to continue. The comparison with the United States South, where the enslaved population grew by natural increase, is decisive: the difference lies not in the humanity of the enslavers but in the crop and the calculation. It also explains why abolition of the trade in 1807 struck at the foundation of Jamaican slavery in a way it could not have done in Virginia — once purchase was closed, the planter was forced, for the first time, to have an interest in keeping people alive."

Mark: 15/15. Examiner commentary: A model Level 4 response. The candidate manipulates the data rather than quoting it, aggregating the import column to 846,000 and setting it against the terminal population — and raises the re-export qualification before drawing the inference, the mark of a candidate who understands the source's limits. The demographic explanation is a genuine causal chain from sex ratio through fertility to infant mortality, closing with the planter's economic calculation, which is the analytical heart of the question. The treatment of the sugar column is outstanding: the candidate refuses to read it as a parallel trend and argues it as a cause of the mortality. The final paragraph answers the "character of the system" element explicitly, and the United States comparison and the 1807 point sharpen the argument rather than ornament it. Full marks.

Grade III (Pass) answer (extract)

"The table shows that many Africans were brought to Jamaica but the population did not grow as much. This is because conditions on the sugar estates were very harsh and many enslaved people died. They worked long hours in the fields and in the boiling house and were whipped by the drivers. Many also died on the Middle Passage and soon after arriving because they were not used to the conditions. In 1700–1720 96,000 were landed but the population was only 74,000, and by 1790–1808 216,000 were landed and the population was 324,000. This shows that the slave system was cruel and the planters did not care about the enslaved people."

Mark: 8/15. Examiner commentary: Level 3, and the reasons it goes no higher are instructive. The core point — that mortality exceeded births — is correct, and harsh conditions and seasoning mortality are properly identified. But the data is quoted rather than used: the candidate reproduces two rows without aggregating the import column, so never confronts the scale of the shortfall, and the sugar export column is ignored entirely, forfeiting the intensification argument. There is no demographic analysis — nothing on sex ratio, fertility or infant mortality — and no mention of the planter's calculation that purchase was cheaper than rearing, which is the point the question is built around. The closing "the planters did not care" substitutes moral assertion for analysis of the system's character.

Question 5(b) — Sample Answers

Grade II (Merit) answer (extract)

"Many freed people did choose to leave the estates. They wanted to be free of the gang system and the driver, and women in particular stopped doing field work so they could look after their families and their provision grounds. In Jamaica the Baptist missionaries such as Knibb helped them to buy land and set up free villages like Sligoville, and in British Guiana whole groups of labourers pooled their money to buy abandoned estates.

But it is also true that the planters pushed them out. They charged rent for the houses and provision grounds which the enslaved had always used for nothing, and if a labourer would not work on the estate he and his family were evicted. Wages were low and were cut, and taxes were placed on the things the freed people needed. So the freed people were often driven away rather than leaving of their own accord.

Overall both things happened, and it depended on the situation of each estate."

Mark: 16/25. Examiner commentary: Secure Level 3 and close to the boundary. Both sides are present, the free village movement is properly evidenced with named examples, and the rent-and-eviction mechanism is accurately described. Two things hold it down. The question requires consideration of territories with and without available land, and this answer confines itself to Jamaica and British Guiana; Barbados, Antigua and St Kitts are absent, and with them the comparison that discriminates on this question — that where land was unavailable the freed continued to labour on the estates, which refutes the planters' claim that they were unwilling to work. And the conclusion, "both things happened", is an evasion rather than a judgement: the top band requires the candidate to argue that choice and compulsion were not alternatives, since planters responded to the exercise of choice by legislating and pricing it away.

How Unit 1 is assessed

Paper 02 carries 75 marks and contributes the largest single share of the Unit 1 external assessment, alongside Paper 01 and the Internal Assessment research paper. Three questions are answered, one from each Module, so no Module can be neglected. Grades are reported Grade I – Grade VII, with Grade I the highest.

Three habits separate the top band. First, answer the question asked: most marks are lost not to ignorance but to relevance, and a candidate who knows Apprenticeship thoroughly but writes an account of it will score in Level 2 on a question about whether the freed chose to leave the estates. Every paragraph should carry a sentence connecting its evidence to the proposition under discussion. Second, evidence must be specific — "the planters passed laws to stop them leaving" is worth little, while naming the tenancy-at-will system, the raising of minimum lot sizes and the taxes on carts and provision-ground produce is worth a great deal. Third, on source questions, bias is not a verdict: stating that a friar or a magistrate was biased earns nothing on its own, and the marks lie in showing which particular claim the author's purpose is likely to have distorted, which claims are corroborated elsewhere, and what the source is therefore good evidence for. A source may be openly polemical and still be the best evidence available on the mechanism it describes.