Church,marriage, and legitimacy in the British West Indies (nineteenth and twentieth centuries)

The British West Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exhibit an extremely high proportion of non-marital unions as well as the highest rates of illegitimacy in the world. A large number of explanations have been proposed, including slavery, the West African heritage, the imbalance between sexes, and the low-wage economy. The present article introduces an additional factor: the degree of control exerted by the Christian churches on conjugal behavior. One consequence of the British West Indian variant of Christianization was a class-specific differentiation in how firmly orthodox forms of European Christianity came to be anchored in the indigenous populations. While the clergy of the Christian churches after 1838 exerted relatively strong control upon the white upper class and the colored and black middle class, their control was weaker over lower classes. This led to a class-specific differentiation in the institutionalization of the Christian European marriage model, which— after 1838—was fully adopted by the upper and middle classes, but only partially among the lower class.