Читать книгу The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson - Страница 11

The Sociology of Slavery was not simply my first scholarly book, but the academic and deeper intellectual as well as sources of all my later works on slavery, race and freedom. The slave plantations and their post-emancipation incarnations have profoundly influenced Jamaican society. For me, their presence could not have been more personal and pervasive. When I was four years old, my mother and I moved to Lionel Town in the centre of one of the island’s main sugar-producing areas. The only adequate preprimary school in the area was located in the church hall of a once elegant Anglican church in a bleak village called the Alley, once known, incredibly, as the Paris of Jamaica in the 18th century, and I was sent to live in the home of a family friend who was a foreman on the Monymusk estate, one of the island’s oldest, owned in the mid-18th century by Sir Archibald Grant who also owned a slaving station in West Africa that directly provided the estate with its enslaved. The house was located literally in the midst of the cane fields. A narrow dirt track ran from alongside it through a dark, dirt-poor village of wattle and daub huts, the former habitation of enslaved workers, in which the Indians, who had been brought over from India to replace them, still lived. The emaciated stiff bodies of the men clad in dhoti loincloth, the dull glow of the women’s hollowed eyes as they stared back at me and the other Black children, squatting before their rice pots above the wood fire on the ground, left an indelible impression on me. In hushed tones, the older children would often tell me: ‘Dat’s where di slave dem used to live.’ We moved to May Pen for my primary school, the then small capital town of Clarendon, once surrounded by sugar plantations and cattle pens: Sevens, Halse Hall, Suttons, Moreland, Amity Hall, New Yarmouth, Parnassus, only a few, like Monymusk, still going strong, most marked by the ruins of great houses shrouded in thorny bush – Bog, Parrins, Carlisle, Paradise, Exeter and Banks. From my childhood I began to wonder what life was like for the enslaved whose violently enforced labour made it all possible, imaginings made vivid by the scary duppy stories, told at dusk, by the older children and grandparents of the ghosts of the enslaved still haunting the eerily hot spaces around the silk cotton trees of the lonely country roads leading from the town.

West Indian history had just begun to find a place amid the imperial history that still dominated the colonial curriculum of my primary school with its Royal Readers, as well as my secondary education, focused on British history and literature, and I seized every chance to study it. My very first research project was a study of the Morant Bay rebellion, the revolt of former Jamaica enslaved in 1865 that was ferociously put down by the colonial authorities, savagely aided by the Maroons. It won the national essay prize of the Jamaica History Teachers’ association in 1957 and confirmed my decision to study history should I win a scholarship to the recently formed University College of the West Indies. I did win a scholarship to the university, but to my great disbelief, in a typical act of learned imperial arrogance, the Black, Naipaulian mimic men who then ran the university ordered me to major in economics, which was being instituted for the first time in my freshman year and did not have enough applicants, my pleas and those of my distraught high-school history master simply brushed aside. Fortunately, the Economics Department was really an inter-disciplinary group dominated by two eminent social anthropologists, R. T. Smith and M. G. Smith, the sociologist Lloyd Brathwaite, and the demographer George Roberts. All recognized the centrality of history and enslavement for any understanding of the Caribbean. This included the economists of the department, George Cumper and, later, George Beckford. Indeed, Beckford saw the slave plantation and its later developments as so critical for any understanding of West Indian economy that he developed, along with the economist Lloyd Best, what became known as the ‘Plantation Model’ of the Caribbean economy and society. In addition to these interdisciplinary scholars, with whom I was later to work in the New World Group of Caribbean intellectuals, I developed strong friendships with fellow students who shared my historical view of Caribbean scholarship, particularly the political economist Norman Girvan and the historian Walter Rodney.

There were, however, other forces that pulled me to an engagement with European thought and culture, both in my study of slavery and on the development of Europe’s culture of freedom. I arrived in London to begin my research on slavery in 1962, in what was to be the most exciting decade in the modern cultural history of Britain. I soon became deeply immersed in three networks of friends and fellow intellectuals: the West Indian student community, focused on the West Indian Student Centre in Collingham Gardens, Earls Court; the newly emerged New Left Review group that had broken off from the old Oxford New Left; and the literary group of West Indian writers and artists that came to be known as the Caribbean Artists’ Movement, founded mainly by the poet-historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, its first meeting being held at my flat in London.² My involvement with the West Indian Students’ Union mainly kept alive my engagement with the broader West Indian society, in much the same way that the University of the West Indies (UWI) had earlier done, and my commitment to return to Jamaica to give back and help in its post-colonial development, a necessary pull, in view of the nearly irresistible temptations of intellectual and cultural life in Britain of the sixties.

My involvement with the new New Left Review group (which had emerged in 1960 from the merger of E. P. Thompson’s New Reasoner and Stuart Hall’s Universities and New Left Review) came not long after the Perry Anderson take-over that basically sidelined Thompson and the older post-communist left that had started it. I became deeply involved with the group, eventually joining its editorial board, through my relationship with Robin Blackburn, whom I met during his freshman year at LSE after he had been sent down from Oxford. I was soon immersed in the many strands of Marxist thought of the period. Although Blackburn was later to write major studies on slavery and abolition, in his early years he showed little interest in the subject. To the degree that slavery was ever mentioned, it was focused exclusively on the Marxian theory of the slave mode of production, on which Perry Anderson was to later write at length.³ Nonetheless, my later deep involvement with the origins and development of European culture and the role of slavery in the emergence and persistence of its central value, freedom, originated in those intense discussions on the crisis of the left, and the problem of where in the world was Europe going, which preoccupied us in our fortnightly evening sessions. Interestingly, only one member of the circle of intellectuals we cultivated ever expressed any interest in the archival work I was doing on slavery in Jamaica at the time and that was the existential psychologist R. D. Laing, then the rising star of the anti-psychiatry movement who, after one of our meetings when I had vainly raised the subject of the real enslaved of 18th-century Jamaica in contrast to the abstraction of the slave mode of production, pulled me aside and asked what I had learned from my studies about the existential reality of slavery. My answer intrigued him, and I was both surprised and flattered when, a few days later, he invited me to address his experimental group of residential schizophrenic patients and their therapists at Kingsley Hall in Bromley, East London. It was my very first public lecture on slavery, drawing on my dissertation research, my audience, apart from Laing and the other resident psychotherapist, Joseph Berke, being a deeply attentive group of English psychotics, among whom was the then unknown English painter, Mary Barnes who, after the talk, led me by the hand on a guided tour of her grease crayon paintings. Their questions, and the fact that they found the subject so personally engaging, led me to focus more on the problem of the social psychology of slavery that appears in Chapter 6 of The Sociology of Slavery.

There was one other important personal experience in England that greatly influenced the writing of The Sociology of Slavery. Not long after we arrived in England, Norman Girvan, Walter Rodney and I received a note from C. L. R James, summoning us to a weekly meeting with him at his London apartment (we never figured out how James came to know of our existence). We obeyed, of course, read every item on the reading list he sent us and, for the better part of a university term, we literally sat at the feet of the great man – there were not enough chairs in his modest flat, but the seating arrangement was symbolically appropriate – and listened to his interpretation of Marxism, with its strongly Trotskyite slant. James, of course, had been a friend of Trotsky, so the three of us were simply awed at the fact that we were getting the true vision of Marxist theory from someone who had got it from the horse’s mouth of one of Marxism’s founding fathers. Interestingly, James made no attempt to change my approach to the study of slavery in Jamaica, grounded theoretically more in Hobbes than Marx and, indeed, encouraged me to probe as deeply as I could into the lives and mode of survival of the enslaved. His deep interest in Caribbean society superseded any theoretical interest he may have had when discussing my work with me. Never once did he raise the subject of the slave mode of production. He had only recently returned from Trinidad, where he had been deeply involved with the decolonization movement before his final split with Eric Williams and was writing the appendix to the 1963 edition of the Black Jacobins,⁴ entitled, ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’, to which he occasionally referred during our meetings.

The contrast with my New Left associates could not have been greater. We both agreed that, as West Indians, all our problems and cultural distinctiveness originated in slavery and the succeeding colonial situation. At the time, James was also writing one of his great classic studies, Beyond a Boundary, on the role of cricket in West Indian culture; his very grounded treatment of the subject was similar to my own approach to Jamaican slavery and underdevelopment. James was also instrumental in the publication of my first novel, The Children of Sisyphus, which he recommended to his publisher, without even asking me, after reading the manuscript that I had nervously left with him after one of our meetings, later writing a long and very favourable review article on it.⁵ My admiration, and gratitude for all I had learned from him during those Friday evening listenings, was partly expressed in the dedication of The Sociology of Slavery to him.

The Sociology of Slavery was the first book-length study of Jamaican slavery and slave society. It is also among the first studies in English to focus in its entirety on the culture, social organization, cultural life and attitudes and modes of resistance of the enslaved, in the New World. There were, of course, many book-length and other studies on Jamaica before, but they were focused mainly on other aspects of the society – its politics, economy, demography, flora and fauna, climate, the white ruling class and so on, or general studies with a chapter on slavery in general. Oddly, even the more recent scholars of Jamaican history who immediately preceded me seemed to have deliberately avoided any direct treatment of the subject. Douglas Hall, for many years chair of history at UWI, wrote his dissertation and most important work, Free Jamaica,⁶ on the immediate post-emancipation period, the same relatively brief period covered by Philip Curtin⁷ in his published dissertation, Two Jamaicas. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins (first published in 1938), Eric Williams’ The Negro in the Caribbean (1942)⁸ and Capitalism and Slavery (1944),⁹ and Elsa Goveia’s Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,¹⁰ which appeared two years before The Sociology of Slavery, this avoidance of slaving and the enslaved as the focus of research, was true of all the English-speaking historians writing on the West Indies. Reference was, of course, made to the enslaved in many of these earlier studies, but rarely to their way of life, and no one had written a book-length study. I drew on the most important of these studies, especially Lowell Joseph Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833,¹¹ Frank W. Pitman’s The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763,¹² George Roberts’¹³ Population of Jamaica, and M. G. Smith’s paper on the early 19th-century British Caribbean.¹⁴ The authors of the latter two were my undergraduate teachers, and Smith’s paper was of special importance in pointing the way towards how a sociologist would approach the study of slavery. Although he wrote nothing on slavery in Jamaica, another of my teachers, the British anthropologist, Raymond Smith, was important in my study of the enslaved family, since I adapted his theory of the developmental cycle of the household, which he had derived for the anthropologist, Meyer Fortes, in writing about the subject.

It is hard to imagine it now, but before The Sociology of Slavery, with the partial exception of Kenneth Stampp, there was not a single book-length study in English focused on the social and cultural practices of the enslaved and their responses to their enslavement, by any professional historian writing on the West Indies and North America. U. B. Phillips, the dominant, white-supremacist historian on U.S. slavery up to the middle of the century, wrote on aspects of enslaved life, especially in his slightly less racist, Life and Labor in the Old South,¹⁵ but as part of his wider pro-Southern study of the slave South, as were similar chapters in the broader studies of plantation slavery in Mississippi by Charles Sydnor.¹⁶ A change occurred among white scholars following the civil rights revolution, especially in the revisionist work of Kenneth Stampp,¹⁷ which challenged the prevailing pro-Southern works of U. B. Phillips and others; and there was the important comparative works by Tannenbaum¹⁸ and Klein.¹⁹ While anti-slavery and sympathetic to the enslaved, none of these works by white historians was wholly focused on the life of the enslaved and culture although Stampp’s book was exceptional in devoting over a third of the volume to these subjects. Both Tannenbaum’s and Klein’s works were concerned primarily with the question of the differences between Latin American and U.S. slavery. Stanley Elkins’²⁰ work, which compared slavery with the Nazi concentration camp in arguing that there was more than a core of truth in the infantilized image of blacks reflected in the slaveholder’s Sambo stereotype, was indeed focused on the life and thoughts of the enslaved and, while his comparison with the Nazi concentration camps was not as far off the mark as so many critics claimed, he erred, not so much in identifying similarities in the psychological responses of Jewish inmates and slaves but in his interpretation of the meanings and significance of these behavioural and psychological strategies of the enslaved. The work was published in 1959 and still in vogue when I was researching The Sociology of Slavery. Indeed, my critique of the work’s basic argument was among the first to be published and became the concluding chapter of Ann J. Lane’s collection of critical writings on the Elkins book.²¹

The situation was different among the pre-civil rights era of Black American intellectuals, historians and sociologists, among whom the experience of slavery and its consequences for later Black life was of great importance and figured prominently in their debate with racist scholars in the Jim Crow South. I read many of these Black scholars as an undergraduate, partly at the urging of one of my teachers, Lloyd Brathwaite. A passage from a paper written in 1898 eloquently expressed DuBois’ views on what was missing in the study of slavery: that while a great deal had been written on the legal and political aspects of the subject, ‘of the slave himself, of his group life and social institutions, of remaining traces of his African tribal life, of his amusements, his conversion to Christianity, his acquiring of the English tongue … of his whole reaction against his environment, of all this we hear little or nothing, and would apparently be expected to believe that the Negro arose from the dead in 1863’.²² Sixty-four years later, that is exactly how I felt about the study of the Jamaican past as I prepared to enter the archives of the British Records Office and British Museum.

Not long after The Sociology of Slavery was published, the situation changed dramatically and a tide of scholarly works on Jamaica appeared. These works fall into two broad categories, which may be called dominion and doulotic studies. Dominion studies are those primarily concerned with the rule and rulers of the island; the nature of its macro-level socio-political system and economy, in the context of which its enslaved, as human capital, are considered; and, in keeping with one common meaning of the term, studies on the island’s existence as ‘a country that was part of the British empire but had its own government’ (Merriam-Webster). Doulotic studies are those mainly concerned with the island’s enslaved population, seen from the enslaved’s perspective, their demographic development and modes of socio-cultural survival, resistance, and adjustment to the system; the micro-level relations of domination between enslaver and enslaved; the meso-level nature and conflicts within the plantations, pens and other localized units of production, as systems of total domination; and the functioning of slavery as an institutional process.²³

Jamaica has been fortunate in having outstanding scholars who have written major works from one or other, or both, of these perspectives. B. W. Higman surely ranks near, or at the top, of scholars who work on West Indian slavery with a special focus on Jamaica, with works from both perspectives. His monumental study of the historical demography of the West Indies serves scholars working from both perspectives and will continue to do so for years to come.²⁴ For decades, before retiring to Australia, he worked in Jamaica, producing world-class scholarship on Jamaican and West Indian slavery, from his base at the University of the West Indies where he trained generations of West Indian historians. His meso-level work on Montpellier plantation²⁵ shifts the focus to the doulotic and the 18th century and stands comparison with the Jamaican part of Dunn’s masterpiece comparing plantations in Jamaica and Virginia.²⁶ I hasten to add that I disagree with several findings in Higman’s works, especially his revisionist view of the enslaved’s familial relations, which was too influenced by U.S. cliometric studies, and his rather too sanguine view of the system as a whole but, having already published these disagreements, there is no need to repeat them here.²⁷ Approaching Higman’s and Dunn’s doulotic works in depth and quality are those of Trevor Burnard who has fast become the most prolific student of Jamaican slavery, writing from both perspectives. His study of Thomas Thistlewood’s relations with his enslaved workers²⁸ brings the study of Jamaican slavery down from that of the meso-level unit of the plantation to the micro-level of what Marx called the ‘relation of domination’, a term I borrowed for my own comparative study of slavery. If there ever were any doubts about the conclusion I arrived at in The Sociology of Slavery, that Jamaican slave society was a Hobbesian state of savage exploitation and, with the possible exception of the enslaved in the Laurion silver mines of ancient Attica, the most brutal in all history, Burnard’s probing re-examination²⁹ of Thistlewood’s world has disabused us of them. An impressive body of work is further illuminating the doulotic perspective on the system, a rigorous recent example of which being Justin Robert’s³⁰ comparative study of the kinds and intensities of labour activities and the sickness and mortality rates of the enslaved in Jamaica, Barbados and Virginia, which nicely complement’s Dunn’s comparative work.

An important and growing number of works have brought sex and gender to the forefront of doulotic studies.³¹ The Sociology of Slavery was the first modern book on Jamaica, and the second (after Goveia) on the West Indies more broadly, to discuss at length the triple exploitation of enslaved women on the plantation – their disproportionate representation in the fields and limited occupational opportunities, the sexual abuse of their bodies, the burdens of reproduction – and their sometimes anti-natalist attitudes as a form of resistance against the system.³² I wouldn’t presume to think that my work influenced the many fine studies on women in Jamaican slavery that followed it,³³ but this I can say: the study of their plight in Jamaica was first explored in The Sociology of Slavery. While this emphasis on gender is to be applauded, I am somewhat concerned with the overemphasis of most of these works on the late abolitionist era of slavery. In this regard, the works of Kathleen Wilson,³⁴ Katie Donington³⁵ and Diana Paton³⁶ show that there is no shortage of data for the study of gender in the early 18th-century period of the society. Some authors have also been inclined to defend the sexual virtue and heroism of enslaved women, and their presumed propensity for the nuclear family, as if their survival under the genocidal and rapine conditions of slave life were not enough.

Rhoda Reddock’s bracing Marxist–feminist studies have stoutly challenged this historiographic line.³⁷ The attempt to impose the Western nuclear family on West Indian working-class women, she shows, has failed, both during and after slavery by missionaries and middle-class do-gooders, and one lesson she draws from her comparative study of Caribbean slavery is that ‘Love of motherhood was neither natural nor universal.’³⁸ The works of Randy M. Brown,³⁹ mainly on Berbice, of Patricia Mohammed⁴⁰ on Jamaica, and of Kamala Kempadoo on the Caribbean,⁴¹ have forcefully advanced this realistic and unsentimental feminist agenda, which recognizes that among poor and working-class Caribbean women from the period of slavery until today, as Kempadoo well puts it: ‘Sexuality is strongly linked to survival strategies of making do, as well as to consumption, which in itself is often seen as a prerequisite for survival. It is not always conflated with intimacy or love, nor necessarily, when economically organized, seen to violate boundaries between the public and private.’⁴² My work on Jamaican slavery, as well my ethnographic field studies of the Kingston poor in the early 1970s, fully bear this out, and I make no apologies for pointing out that sex work was one of the strategies of survival by enslaved women in the misogynistic nightmare of Jamaican slave society. Slavery was drenched in violence, rape an integral part, and tragically, the violence of the enslaver against the enslaved seeped down like a viper’s poison through the veins of the entire system, deep into the relations among the enslaved themselves, especially between older, more advantaged enslaved men and women, intimate violence that we still live with in the West Indies, especially Jamaica, where violence against women, members of the LGBTQ community, and other vulnerable groups, is endemic.

The works of Michael Craton deserve mention in any review of the literature on Jamaican and broader Caribbean slavery, if for no other reason than its prolificity, especially his works on Worthy Park. The Sociology of Slavery was the first work to use materials on Worthy Park. I had been told of their existence by a friend who had worked in the offices of the estate and, when I visited it in 1964, I was provided with a box of materials on the enslaved and space to work on them. I had expected more from what my friend had told me, but thankfully made the most of what I had been handed. I was very surprised when I read the announcement of a book on the plantation in late 1969, to be published the following year.⁴³ I was then a lecturer at the University of the West Indies and a colleague of the distinguished Jamaican economist, George Beckford. We immediately developed a joint research project focusing on the historical development and present socio-economic structure of the plantation, went to Worthy Park and sought permission from the owners to conduct our research. We were flatly denied access to the family papers and most of the archives, although told that we could do what we wanted with the workers.⁴⁴ Eight years after the first, dominion-type study, Craton’s large doulotic study of the plantation appeared.⁴⁵ Craton and Walvin are not to be blamed for the denial of access to us of the estate’s papers, which was quite consistent with the racist attitudes of the Jamaican planter class. Although critical of the repeated unctuous posturing towards favoured members of the Caribbean academic community, and several analytic flaws, my review of the work was generally favourable, my judgment being that he was ‘not only a first-rate historian but acute observer of contemporary mores’.⁴⁶ Unfortunately, that view had to be changed after it became evident from later works that Craton was a repeatedly dishonest scholar. Sidney Mintz, the eminent, well-tempered Caribbeanist, has upbraided him for his habit of appropriating ‘concepts developed and legitimized by other scholars whose works are well known’, while citing them for trivial contributions many pages later, as in his appropriation of the Australian anthropologist Peter Wilson’s concepts of reputation and respectability in Eastern Caribbean peasant life.⁴⁷ Mintz is also unsparing in pointing out Craton’s other academic flaws and pretensions in the course of a devastating critique of his book on slave revolts, noting passages that are ‘ill-informed or evasive’, ‘misleading’, and the ‘insouciant use of concepts unfamiliar to the author’. In another work Craton subjected Mintz himself to this duplicity, prominently entitling a paper on slave revolts ‘Proto-Peasant Revolts?’ The concept of the Caribbean slave as a proto-peasant was conceived and fully developed by Mintz and well known to Caribbeanists but unlikely to be known to the readers of Past and Present, who would only be informed near the end of the paper that Mintz had ‘coined’ the term without citing the Mintz paper, where it was clearly evident that he had done more than simply ‘coined’ the term, instead citing a paper Mintz had co-authored with Douglas Hall.⁴⁸ Perhaps the most egregious act of academic deceit committed by Craton was his report of my interpretation of the personality of the Jamaican enslaved in their interaction with their enslavers, discussed at length in Chapter 6, Section 5 of The Sociology of Slavery.There I pointed out that there was a stereotype of the enslaved known as ‘Quashee’ in Jamaica, equivalent to the U.S. slaveholders’ infantilized stereotype of the African American enslaved, known as ‘Sambo’, that had recently been made famous, for many infamous, by the American historian Stanley Elkins. My argument, which in one crucial respect was critical of Elkins, was that Quashee, far from reflecting the true nature of the enslaved, was a case of the enslaved ‘playing fool to catch wise’, in the words of a famous Jamaican proverb and was, in fact, a psychological mode of resistance or what James C. Scott later called a ‘weapon of the weak’ in a work that correctly cites my view of the subject.⁴⁹ Incredibly, Craton reported in one of his papers that: ‘Patterson describes the Quashy as a slave who fulfils the masters’ degrading stereotype of the Negro; lazy, deceitful, temperamental, childlike if not dog-like’ – an interpretation apparently reinforced by the modern Jamaican epithet ‘Quashy Fool’ for what Englishmen would call ‘an ignorant peasant’.⁵⁰ This is the exact opposite of my argument, which, as pointed out earlier, was included in a well-known collection of critical works on Elkins!⁵¹ What does one make of a scholar who writes many presumably major works yet is so repeatedly dishonest? I leave it to the community of historians of Caribbean slavery to decide.

The Sociology of Slavery concentrated on the sugar plantation sector of Jamaica’s slave system and, while no one doubts that sugar dominated the entire economy and social order to the very end, it is a reasonable complaint that the work neglected the sectors of the economy not in sugar, especially those sectors producing coffee, livestock and other produce. The works of Higman,⁵² Shepherd⁵³ and Monteith⁵⁴ have greatly illuminated these sectors. Higman⁵⁵ showed that in 1832 the sugar plantations contributed 58.5 per cent of the island’s total income, compared with 12.6 per cent from the coffee plantations and 10.4 per cent from livestock pens.

My reason for not paying more attention to these sectors points to an important division in doulotic studies of slavery in Jamaica, recently highlighted by Burnard,⁵⁶ a division based on temporality. There were profound differences between the state of affairs in Jamaica between the century and a half prior to the abolitionist movement leading to the ending of the slave trade in 1807 and what came afterwards. The Sociology of Slavery covered the entire period of slavery but was firmly rooted in the classic earlier period of 145 years, fully 80 per cent of the entire period of slavery, for most of which the sugar plantation was indeed predominant and the vast majority of enslaved toiled on them. It was also when the system was at its most ruthless and, as Burnard notes, and I completely agree, ‘All of us working on slavery in the period before abolitionism struggle with the realization that enslaved people’s lives were miserable and stunted in ways that make it hard to see how Jamaican slaves could have led any sort of lives that held any meaning for them.’⁵⁷ Indeed, one may well turn the issue around and question the overwhelming emphasis on the last forty years of slavery by the majority of studies on the subject, not only those on gender as previously noted. This was the period of abolitionist activism, with the planters’ backs increasingly up against the wall in an ideological battle that they eventually lost. During this period, in response to the relentless criticisms of the horrors of the system they had created, they desperately tried to ameliorate it. After the ending of the slave trade the amelioration intensified, not simply in response to abolitionist rhetoric, but out of the stark realization by the slaveholders that if they were to procure more enslaved persons, they had to induce them to reproduce. How reasonable is it then, to base one’s account of slavery in Jamaica on this last-gasp period of transition, to the neglect of the previous 80 per cent of the history of the system, which was the classic period of unrestrained wealth-generation based on the merciless exploitation of the enslaved and the protracted genocide of their recruitment, replacement and growth, made possible by the slave trade.⁵⁸

Perhaps not. This is like confining a study of the history of racism and the economic exploitation of blacks in America to the post-civil rights era. And yet, remarkably, the great majority of works on slavery in Jamaica are confined to this period. What accounts for this bias? A clue to the answer is the apocryphal story of the drunkard who lost the keys to his home in the dark but kept looking for them under the streetlight, because that’s where the light was. The data on Jamaica during the period of abolition are exceedingly, and temptingly, rich, accounting for the large number of historians of many nationalities attracted to the study of this period of the island’s slavery. That’s where the light is. Alas, that’s not where the keys to most of the horrors are to be found.

Turning to dominion studies, the first post-war study from this perspective focused on the West Indies is Elsa Goveia’s pathbreaking work on the British Leeward Islands.⁵⁹ Her opening statement on the work is a good definition of what I am calling dominion studies: ‘The term “slave society” in the title of this book refers to the whole community based on slavery, including masters and freedmen as well as slaves. My object has been to study the political, economic and social organization of this society and the interrelationships of its component groups and to investigate how it was affected by its dependence on the institution of slavery.’ Goveia selected the Leeward Islands because they were among the most ‘mature’ of the British Caribbean societies and ‘analysis of its characteristics sheds light on the characteristics of plantation slavery and of “creole’’ society of the eighteenth century throughout the islands’.⁶⁰ Furthermore, it was Goveia who was first to apply the concept of creolization, which she did repeatedly throughout the work. Although she contrasted her position with mine in her review of The Sociology of Slavery⁶¹ in arguing that the Leeward Islands’ slave system was ‘highly organized and integrated’, our positions were really not that dissimilar, since I am in complete agreement with her that that integration was entirely ‘on the basis of racial inequality and subordination of the labouring majority of blacks to the minority of whites’. Our views on the destructive nature of slavery on the familial and sexual lives of the enslaved are identical,⁶² and my view that the slave system was best viewed as a collection of largely self-contained plantation units, certainly when viewed from the perspective of the enslaved – the essence of my doulotic approach – is identical to her own verdict that: ‘At the end of the eighteenth century each of the plantations … was itself a small world, and the field slave was trapped in this world, like a fly in a spider’s web.’⁶³ Our principal difference was that she approached the system from a dominion or macro-level perspective. But there was another: she was writing about the Leeward Islands, whereas I wrote about Jamaica, a larger and much more complex and unequal system, possibly the most pitilessly cruel and exploitative in modern history.

Higman has also written most extensively from the dominion perspective, as have an impressive number of other scholars. As I have already hinted, he somewhat normalizes the role of the white slaveholder class and the slave economic system, especially in his study of the managerial aspect of the plantation regime. His Plantation Jamaica:1750–1850⁶⁴ is an important and necessary work, but one reads it with some unease, a bit like reading a meticulous analysis of the Nazi Totenkopfverbände, the SS Death’s-Head Battalions that guarded and managed the concentration camps. Like all his other works, it is expertly crafted and thoroughly documented, and he is unsentimental in his approach to the subject, writing in the introduction:

Their business was exploitation and part of my task is to assess how efficiently they carried out that enterprise. It is only by taking this perspective that it is possible to understand the working of the larger system of plantation economy and the role of enslaved and free workers within the society. The people who did the hard work of the plantations remain essentially voiceless in the narrative, reduced to the tools of capital and themselves literally human capital. It is a harsh story.

Quite so. Nonetheless, other works such as Burnard’s are consistently more critical.⁶⁵ From the older generation one may single out those of Brathwaite,⁶⁶ Sheridan,⁶⁷ the Bridenbaughs,⁶⁸ Greene⁶⁹ and Dunn.⁷⁰ It may strike some as odd that I have classified Brathwaite’s work as a dominion study but, contrary to the popular view of the work as one focused on the life and culture of the slaves, it is largely devoted to the political, social and economic structure of the society and the role and attitude of the whites: only 59 of the text’s 312 pages directly examines the Black population. Brathwaite’s work is strongly influenced by Elsa Goveia’s study of the Leeward Islands, both in its attempt to interpret Jamaica during the same period of time as a systemic whole, and in his use of the creolization concept, neither of which is sufficiently acknowledged. In any case, his use of the concept of creolization is problematic in light of the still pluralistic and ‘disunited’ state of Jamaica and other West Indian societies emphasized by Goveia,⁷¹ the failure to distinguish localization from creolization, and the assumption that creolization entails assimilation and harmony, especially in sexual relations and racial mixing. His extraordinary view that it was ‘in the intimate area of sexual relations’ that ‘inter-cultural creolization took place’ by engendering a mixed group that helped ‘to integrate the society’,⁷² would certainly have been rejected by Goveia and, after the sickening revelations on Thomas Thistlewood⁷³ whose cruelty and insatiable sexual sadism Douglas Hall agrees was the norm in Jamaica,⁷⁴ must now be viewed with disbelief. The commonly held view that Brathwaite ‘coined and deployed the term creolization as a theory of Caribbean culture’, recently asserted by Kamugisha, is incorrect and puzzling.⁷⁵ The concept was long in use among linguists, and its extension to Caribbean cultural processes received its definitive theoretical formulation in a 1968 conference at the University of the West Indies (coming after Goveia’s empirical use of the term), described by the Finnish creole scholar Angela Bartens as ‘one of the major events which initiated the era of modern creolistics’,⁷⁶ a quarter of whose attendees were social scientists and historians, myself included, that Brathwaite would certainly have known about.⁷⁷

Prominent among earlier scholars who, in critical reaction against the acculturation studies of Herskovits, had clearly articulated a conception of the Caribbean as a space in which creolization was the norm, was Sidney Mintz, who spent a lifetime researching the problem and developing a theoretical framework for understanding it.⁷⁸ One prominent creole linguist who has extended her work from language to the socio-cultural domain of what she calls the ‘creole space’ is Bartens, whose book is an important contribution to the historical sociology of creolization that deserves greater attention among Caribbeanists.⁷⁹ Given its roots in the study of language, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most theoretically sophisticated and empirically informed works on the Jamaican creolization process is by the critically acclaimed British historian of French and Francophone Caribbean literature, Richard D. E. Burton.⁸⁰

Mary Turner’s⁸¹ thoroughly documented, well-written work on the island during the same period covered by Brathwaite, paints a more complex, conflict-ridden system from which the religious sphere was not spared. The works of Sheridan, the Bridenbaughs and Dunn are especially valuable in placing Jamaica within its broader West Indian context, the latter two emphasizing the failure of early British Jamaica as a social system.⁸² Greene’s recent study offers a wealth of information on a wide range of social and economic activities, land use and demographic patterns at an unusual level of detail, and for the period of the mid-18th century too often neglected in recent studies.⁸³

One quaint work on Jamaican slavery by the American historian Vincent Brown,⁸⁴ has left me and many historians from the region perplexed. According to Brown, the catastrophic mortality rate in Jamaica for both blacks and whites, far from hardening attitudes towards death, was the source of cultural creation, ‘the principal arena of social life and gave rise to its customs’. This is a polished production, well received, but it describes a world unfamiliar to nearly all of us who have closely studied Jamaican slave society. True, there were elaborate funeral rites among the enslaved, mainly adaptations of African mortuary rituals to the exigencies of the plantation dead yards in which death was celebrated, when given the chance, as a return passage to Africa, which I discussed at some length in The Sociology of Slavery (pp. 195–207). Brown argues, however, that death and its rituals were central to life and culture at all levels and among all ethno-racial groups in Jamaican slave society. I found no evidence of any such cultural preoccupation in my years of study of Jamaica, nor has any of the many outstanding historians mentioned above who have studied the period over the past century. To the contrary, insofar as the most reliable contemporary observers mention the subject, it was to comment on the callous indifference of the whites of all classes to death and dying. Lady Nugent, one of the most astute observers of the late period, repeatedly expressed distress and astonishment that ‘here no one appears to think or feel for those who are suffering from these frightful attacks’ (17th August 1801) and, two weeks later, ‘that the usual occurrence of a death had taken place. Poor Mr Sandiford had died at 4 o’clock this morning … but all around us appeared quite callous’, then on the 10th December that same year: ‘He disgusted me very much the other day, by making a joke of poor Lord Hugh’s death; but it is a common custom here.’ [emphasis added]⁸⁵ Thomas Thistlewood in his thirty-six years of living and keeping a diary on life in Jamaica offers not a single instance of any such preoccupation, the death of fellow whites such as the glutton who ‘eats as much as four moderate people would do’, treated as a matter-of-fact event that he had coming. The novelist Matthew Lewis, who had an extremely keen eye for anything unusual about Jamaican conventions and, as a celebrated gothic novelist, would certainly have been alert to unusual death customs among his fellow whites, comments informatively about the ‘African’ burial customs, obeah beliefs and ancestor worship of the blacks, but tells us nothing unusual about the whites’ responses to death.⁸⁶ The response to Lewis’ own death is revealing. As the most celebrated slaveholder of his time, one would have expected what Brown describes as ‘intense and significant political activity’ and familial mourning rituals around his death. Instead, few mourned the rich man’s death, the editor of the journal, Judith Terry, commenting: ‘Celebrity that he was, his death caused hardly a ripple.’⁸⁷ On this we can all agree: Professor Brown has forcefully restated the well-known fact that death was pervasive in Jamaican slave society.

One category of dominion studies concerns the development and role of the coloured or mixed racial group and of manumission in Jamaica, a subject first extensively explored by Goveia in her study of the Leeward Islands. The group was relatively small, but of increasing importance and influence from the late 18th century, attracting the racist venom of the island’s most educated and important 18th-century resident, Edward Long.⁸⁸ Jamaica’s, and other West Indians’, odd mix of hypodescent and hyperdescent rules of racial assignment, its notions of whiteness and racial purity combined with the peculiar eventual recognition of legal equality for the more prosperous of the mixed group, and the general ‘white bias’ of the society that lingers to this day,⁸⁹ originates in the interaction of coloured and whites and their joint contempt for blackness, enslaved or not. As the novelist and slaveholder Matthew Lewis perceptively observed: ‘nor can the separation of castes in India be more rigidly observed than that of complexional shades among the Creoles’.⁹⁰ A peculiar feature of Jamaican slave society, which it shared with its American counterpart, was its hostility to manumission throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Economist Ronald Finlay and I have shown that manumitted played a critical role in the maintenance and stability of most large-scale slave systems, especially where enslaved outnumbered the slaveholder population, playing important middlemen roles as well as reinforcing feelings of self-degradation among the enslaved.⁹¹ Although Jamaican white slaveholders recognized this, it is typical of the racist vehemence and notions of racial purity that they only reluctantly came to embrace this principle of self-preservation, a problem well explored in Newman’s recent study.⁹² A substantial literature has emerged on the subject since Goveia and Brathwaite’s works.⁹³ While the strong emphasis on the abolitionist period may be justified on the grounds that this was when the group grew substantially in numbers and importance, there is still much to be written on the subject in the early and classic 18th-century periods of the society, as the works of Livesay, Burnard and Newman have clearly demonstrated.⁹⁴

A growing number of first-rate works from younger scholars indicate that the historiography of dominion studies on Jamaica continues to thrive, most notably those by Petley,⁹⁵ Ryden,⁹⁶ Smith⁹⁷ and Graham.⁹⁸ A recent trend is to locate Jamaican dominion studies within the broader context of the Atlantic framework of historical scholarship, what has been called the ‘Atlanticization’ of slavery studies, from which has emerged a vast body of scholarship. Eric Williams’ enormously influential work is, of course, the classic study in this area,⁹⁹ which has generated a huge literature of critics and defenders.¹⁰⁰ As a comparative historical sociologist I can hardly complain about this development although it is worth bearing in mind the words of one of Jamaica’s most eminent historians, Franklin Knight, who cautioned that such studies should never lose sight of the fact that the Caribbean society being studied should steadfastly remain ‘the main event’.¹⁰¹

One fascinating aspect of dominion slave studies is the examination of Jamaica’s, and the wider West Indian, role in the formation of British national, gender and familial identities by scholars of British cultural and imperial studies, especially Catherine Hall and her collaborators,¹⁰² Kathleen Wilson,¹⁰³ Susan Amussen¹⁰⁴ and Katie Donington.¹⁰⁵ The last three works are of special value in their focus on the 17th and 18th centuries and transgenerational developments, taking temporality seriously in their historical analysis. An important and necessary dimension of these studies are those making the case for reparations in light of what is now acknowledged as a crime against humanity, most notably those of Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd.¹⁰⁶

The studies discussed above have all greatly enriched our knowledge of enslavement in Jamaica and the broader West Indies. However, the single most important development in the study of modern slavery in the Atlantic since the 1960s, with important implications for our understanding of Jamaican slave society, concerns the Atlantic slave trade. Important studies had been published on the trade from the early 1930s,¹⁰⁷ with a surge in the late fifties and sixties, prompted in part by the Civil Rights movement in America and the rise in the study of African history with the post-war decolonization movements. I made full use of those earlier works in Chapter 5 of The Sociology of Slavery, ‘The Tribal Origins of the Jamaican Slaves’.¹⁰⁸ However, the publication of Curtin’s seminal work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, in 1972,¹⁰⁹ marked a fundamental turning point in the study of the slave trade, and of Atlantic History more generally, bringing methodological rigour and synthetic integration to the subject that overturned long established views about the nature and extent of the trade.¹¹⁰ The most significant of his findings was the point estimate of the total number of slaves imported to the New World at 9,566,000, complete with a margin of error of between +9.8 and −16.4 per cent. This greatly reduced the guestimates that prevailed at the time, some as high as thirty million transported from Africa. Of special interest to me were Curtin’s estimates of the contribution of the different regions of Africa to the slave trade, the number and proportions of slaves who went to the different regions of the Americas, especially the Caribbean, and the numbers exported over time. Curtin’s work was based entirely on secondary sources, among which was The Sociology of Slavery. Indeed, one of the more important sections of the book, Chapter 5 on the English slave trade in the 18th century, relied substantially on The Sociology of Slavery and LePage’s Jamaican Creole¹¹¹ for its main conclusions on the cross tabulation of the changing ethnic origins of the captives through time.¹¹² Curtin’s work stimulated a flood of studies, which continues to the present. A critical review of the work by Inikori not only pinpointed some of its main limitations but argued, correctly, that Curtin’s estimates were too low and required a ‘substantial upward revision’.¹¹³

The next major turning point was the shift towards primary sources and more precise quantification by scholars such as David Eltis, David Richardson, Herbet S. Klein, Henry Gemery, Jan Hogendorn, John Thornton, J. E. Inikori, among many others. The third main development came with the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-Atlantic slave trade databases. This enormously valuable resource, called ‘the gold standard of digital humanities’, originating in earlier work by Herbert Klein, Jean Mettas, Serge and Michelle Daget and David Richardson, evolved into a single multisource dataset through the joint work of David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt and David Richardson, who received critical support in the formative stage of the project from Harvard’s W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research (and later the Harvard Hutchin’s Center), with later support from funding agencies and universities, especially Emory where it was located for twenty years after leaving Harvard,¹¹⁴ and now Rice University, to which it moved in 2021.

There are now 36,000 trans-Atlantic voyages in the database, each of which carried an average of 304 captives. One important correction emerging from the database concerns Curtin’s original estimate of 9.5 million Africans transported from Africa. The database indicates that Inikori was correct in his assessment that Curtin had substantially underestimated the extent of the trade: the most recent estimate, based on far better primary sources and careful quantification, is that at least 12,520,000 African captives were forced from Africa for the Americas, with a possible upper limit of 15.4 million enslaved, which means that there were between 24 and 62 per cent more enslaved Africans transported than Curtin’s point estimate. At the two extremes of these estimates – Curtin’s eight million and the current database’s 15.4 million – Curtin may have underestimated the traffic by nearly 100 per cent. Since new voyages are being added continuously to the database, the correction is likely to be higher. Staying with the database’s lower estimate, of the 12.5 million who left, 10.7 million disembarked mainly in the Americas, with an average of 265 Africans. Some 633 voyages (1.8%) were lost at sea or captured, or experienced some other fate, including slave revolts.¹¹⁵

Curtin had already noted that a disproportionate number of slaves landed in the Caribbean. However, for students of West Indian enslavement, and for Jamaica in particular, the database indicates that, in both proportionate and absolute terms, the numbers going to Jamaica were staggering. The new map, from the project’s valuable set of Introductory Maps,¹¹⁶ visually indicates the extraordinary numbers that went to the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, when compared with North America. Having carefully followed the development of the database over the years, I have repeatedly drawn on it to update the estimated numbers going to Jamaica and the regions from which the Africans arriving in the island came.

How do these recent figures compare with my estimates of over 55 years ago? In the first place, far more slaves went to Jamaica than any of us, including Curtin, suspected at the time. I was, however, more concerned with the proportion of slaves contributed by different regions of Africa, given my primary interest in tracing the tribal and cultural origins of the Jamaican enslaved, reflected in the title of Chapter 5. In this regard, apart from the very earliest period,1655–1700, my proportional estimates have held up reasonably well. In broad terms, I had estimated that during the first half of the period of slavery the single largest group of slaves would have come from what was called the Gold Coast (now Ghana), the second largest from the Slave Coast and the Bight of Benin (now Nigeria), and that during most of the second half of the eighteenth century the largest contingent came from Nigeria, but that ‘during the last seventeen years of the trade there was a striking reappearance of slaves from Southwestern Africa, particularly from the region of the Congo’ (p. 144). This is broadly what the Atlantic database shows, although the decennial estimates differed, especially during the 17th century.

Table 0. Number of Slaves Disembarked in Jamaica from Embarkation Regions of Africa, 1601–1840

Table composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data Base, https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

One pleasant surprise is the degree to which slaves from Ghana dominated the period between 1700 and 1740. I had argued, along with the creole linguists, that this was the period in which the creole language and Afro-Jamaican culture was at its most formative stage and the major presence of slaves from Ghana during this time would have meant that their impact would remain lasting, even if their numbers were later surpassed by enslaved persons from Nigeria. This argument is now strengthened.

However, not everything went my way with these latest data. The biggest surprise is the fact that during the 17th century 6,853 of the Jamaican enslaved came from South East Africa! No one saw anything like this during the 20th century. Indeed, it was considered a near certainty that hardly anyone came from South East Africa to the islands, or to North America (what the Portuguese slavers were up to in South America and Southern Africa was anybody’s guess at that time). That clearly was not the case. However, they were soon overwhelmed by slaves from West Africa and there is no trace of their cultures or languages in the creole culture of Jamaica, then or now.

In the next section I will return to these latest findings on the demographic history of Jamaica and their startling implication that the history of enslavement in the island was one of protracted or slow-moving genocide on a scale that approaches the Jewish holocaust in Nazi Germany.

The Sociology of Slavery was the work that launched my career as a historical sociologist. As such, beyond the personal desire, rooted in my upbringing and history, to understand what had produced me and my society, it was motivated by an important theoretical problem in sociology that had been posed by the leading sociologist of my youth, Talcott Parsons, which was: how is society possible, or more basically, how does social order come about?¹¹⁷ For Parsons, that problem was first explored explicitly by Hobbes, who in Leviathan¹¹⁸ famously posed the problem with his depiction of the state of nature as one of war of all against all, in which there was ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’ and life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, the solution to which was submission to the absolute authority of the state or Leviathan. Parsons rejected Hobbes’ solution in favour of his normative theory of action in which individuals come to accept the demands of social life through their internalization of cultural norms.¹¹⁹ Even as an undergraduate forced to imbibe this functionalist dogma, I had developed deep scepticism about the Parsonian solution. It was evident to me then that this simply begged the question: yes, order is possible because of internalized culture, and I have subsequently spent a good deal of intellectual effort trying to figure out how culture persists,¹²⁰ but where did this culture come from?

Parsons did have the salutary effect of leading me to Hobbes, whose Leviathan I read as avidly as Camus and Marx during my final undergraduate year. At the LSE Sociology department where I arrived in the fall of 1962, I had to justify why my thesis was not going to be merely another history of ‘facts and more damn facts’ to my doctoral supervisor, David Glass, Britain’s most eminent demographer. Hobbes, as is well known, had stated that slavery was a clear case of a state of nature, his views on the subject informed by ancient classical slavery. My answer was that Jamaican slavery came closest to an existentially real case study of a society in which life was indeed nasty, brutish and short and, with its endless series of revolts by the enslaved, racial and ethnic divisions, rapes, suicides, homicides, gibbeting, bilboeing, flight, and merciless use of the whip, a state of war of all against all. The interesting thing about Hobbes, I pointed out, was that he imagined this state of nature to have existed not simply in the condition of preliterate societies (those imagined ‘savage people in many places of America’) but in the descent of civilized people back into this savage state. He had in mind the English Civil War. North America, like Barbados was still mainly British white colonies of settlement when the Leviathan was published (1651) and Jamaica was not captured by the British until four years after this. Nonetheless, I argued that a far better case study was 18th-century Jamaica, in which civilized Britons, after a few weeks’ sojourn, erupted into near complete savagery in their ruthless relations of domination with the enslaved, in the course of which, as Dunn would later write, they ‘lived fast, spent recklessly, played desperately and died young’,¹²¹ which Hobbes would, in all likelihood, have agreed came close to his imagined state of declension to warring savagery.¹²² My thesis topic was accepted, although it helped that no one at LSE thought much of Talcott Parsons, in spite of his preeminence in America and Germany. What I wrote in the preface to the first edition was the gist of my thesis statement: ‘Few systems indeed have ever come closer to the brink of the Hobbesian state of nature and, as such, the sociologist researching this society is faced with the fascinating situation of examining on a concrete level the most basic question of his discipline.’¹²³ Nonetheless, the system did persist, for all the savagery, for 183 years, so the research problem that naturally followed from this was: how was such a system able to survive for all that time? In answering this theoretical question, I would also be addressing the even more important substantive problem that had troubled me from my childhood, and so intrigued R. D. Laing and his patients: what was it really like for my ancestors? How did they survive the long ordeal of British slavery?

I did address this issue in the penultimate chapter on resistance (see especially pp. 280–3) and considered the detailed account in the book as a whole to be all the answer that was needed, but, with hindsight, perhaps it should have been spelled out more explicitly. The simple answer to the theoretical question is that Hobbes was right. Might, a monopoly of the superior instruments of violence, always prevails, and this might the Hobbesian retro-savages who ruled the island had to their great advantage. As Elsa Goveia had earlier observed of the Leeward Islands,¹²⁴ and Burnard much later of Jamaica: ‘White Jamaicans survived because they mastered the real and symbolic instruments of violence. And power in the Caribbean is closely connected with trauma.’¹²⁵ However, Hobbes’ conception of the Leviathan was not one solely of raw power. People, by virtue of being rational beings, he argued, recognized as a practical ‘law of nature’ that ‘peace is good and therefore also the way or means of peace are good’, which led them to form a covenant with each other to obey a common authority, a Leviathan, established through what he called ‘sovereignty by institutions’, that ensured peace, effective government and civilized living. Raw power that fails to ensure peace forfeits the obligation to obey and is the limit Hobbes placed on the Leviathan (some commentators think, contradictorily). My gloss on Hobbes’ theory is that Jamaican slave society, while it used the monopoly of might to ensure its genocidal and exploitative rule and prevent successful revolt, it never solidified its rule through ‘sovereignty by institutions’ and hence never won the obligation to obey from the enslaved population.¹²⁶ As Jimmy, the ‘very impudent’ Ashanti enslaved by Thistlewood, told him to his face in 1771: ‘If this be living he did not care whether he lived or died.’¹²⁷ I therefore interpreted the slaveholding class as a proto-Leviathan ruling over a sociological nightmare of doulotic capitalism, brutality, resentment and instability, held together just enough by brute force to produce enormous wealth for a few, the most powerful of whom lived in absentee safety and luxury, the majority biding their time in a system where life remained nasty, brutish and short. There was no better expression of this ruling-class degeneracy than the casualness with which sex, venereal disease and death were viewed, as indicated earlier.

In the absence of any sense of voluntary obligation to obey, resentment and resistance was endemic. Jamaica, in fact, had the highest record of doulotic resistance in the Americas, and possibly in all history, and the last chapter of the work examined this extraordinary record, which I later expanded in a lengthy paper on Jamaican doulotic revolts, one of the two main sequels to The Sociology of Slavery.¹²⁸ It has been said repeatedly that the great Haitian revolt of the enslaved was the first and only successful such revolt in human history. More recently, one of the island’s many doulotic rebellions, known as Tacky’s revolt, has been hailed as the greatest of the island’s many rebellions.¹²⁹ Both these statements are incorrect. As I argued in the work’s final chapter, and at far greater length in my paper on doulotic revolts, the British conquest of Jamaica in 1655 was followed by a long series of interconnected revolts of the enslaved, known collectively as the First Maroon War, that lasted from 1656 until 1739. Collectively, this was, on several occasions, a far greater threat to the Jamaican slave system than Tacky’s revolt. There has been a misguided attempt by some historians to view the First Maroon War as something separate from revolts by the enslaved, especially by Michael Craton, whose work on the subject is a compendium of facts on rebellions in the West Indies with a muddled attempt to explain them,¹³⁰ and even Burnard errs in this assumption, claiming that: ‘In terms of its shock to the imperial system, only the American Revolution surpassed Tacky’s War in the eighteenth century.’¹³¹ My close examination of the record of earlier revolts shows this to be flatly not the case. The Maroon communities were constantly sourced by runaways and rebels from the plantations who were inspired to revolt by their presence, even after their treacherous siding with the whites against future rebellions, as Thistlewood’s entry in his diary of 1st August 1760, in the midst of Tacky’s revolt, makes clear: ‘Dr Miller says the rebels give out they will … fire all the plantations they can, till they force the whites to give them free like Cudjoe’s Negroes.’ [emphasis added]¹³² I document at some length the interaction between the enslaved and the guerrilla encampments. Making a hard and fast distinction between enslaved and Maroon rebellions during this period is as spurious as sharply distinguishing between the Viet Cong guerrilla movement and Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation front in the Vietnamese wars against the French and Americans.¹³³ There is no doubt that these interconnected revolts posed a far greater threat to white rule than Tacky’s revolt ever did. Indeed, the rebels repeatedly forced the whites to abandon plantations in the frontier regions that the planters badly wanted to establish, since land on the southern coast had been completely taken up.¹³⁴ Significantly, in all the reports of the governors writing on the deteriorating situation, and in the frantic deliberations of the Legislature on the crisis, their references were always to ‘the bad success of the parties sent out against the slaves in rebellion’ [emphasis added].¹³⁵ In the end, the slaveholders did something quite remarkable: at the suggestion of the British government they swallowed their pride, sued for peace, and signed a treaty that granted the rebels full sovereignty over their territory as a state within a state. That was victory! It had never happened before in any known pre-existing slave society, although enslavers were to offer terms after this in other slave societies, though nothing as complete and lastingly recognized as this.¹³⁶ Hence it deserves the description as the first successful revolt of the enslaved in history.Tacky’s revolt certainly frightened the whites, but that was all. It never came close to a threat to the system of slavery, and ended in disaster and carnage for the rebels, along with hundreds of innocent enslaved and, as Trevor Burnard recently noted,¹³⁷ was followed immediately by a doubling down by the British slaveholders in their viciousness, as well as the spectacular rise of the 18th-century economy to heights that saw this small island with per capita incomes that far exceeded those of North America. By the 1790s, although Jamaica’s enslaved were well aware of the Haitian revolution, they indicated no signs of following suit (though this was to change during the 19th century), for the simple reason that the proto-Leviathan power of the whites was so overwhelming. As Geggus points out: ‘As always, the brutality and humiliations of bondage had to be weighed against the risks of resistance. In the absence of circumstances realistically favouring rebellion, the enslaved in Jamaica and many other places simply took pride, it seems, in what was happening in the French colony and showed their awareness by what whites everywhere called “insolence”.¹³⁸ Tacky’s revolt was also inconsequential, both in terms of white dread and its consequences, when compared with Jamaica’s other great doulotic revolt, that of the Baptist War led by Daddy Samuel Sharpe in 1831, which had a decisive influence on the British Parliament’s decision to pass the act abolishing slavery, the revolt meticulously examined in Tom Zoellner’s beautifully written recent study.¹³⁹

So, how did the system not only survive this and the other revolts that followed, but thrived to unprecedented heights of economic success throughout the 18th century. One reason for the success of the whites during and after Tacky’s revolt, after coming so close to disaster in the First Maroon War, was one clause in the treaty they signed with Cudjoe, the leader of the rebels, in 1739, who agreed to return all enslaved runaways and aid the colonialists in all future revolts. And they did, starting with Tacky, who was felled by the bullet of a Maroon marksman. Cudjoe’s betrayal had tragic consequences for all future resistance. It was an act of monumental betrayal, a case of snatching treachery from the jaws of heroism. Jamaica’s enslaved continued to rebel throughout the period of slavery at a rate greater than any other known slave system. However, for the entire period of slavery after 1739 the treachery of the Maroons meant that all future revolts were doomed to failure, as were most acts of that other main form of resistance, running away, the Maroons being paid a bounty for returning them.¹⁴⁰ In an admirable paper, Kathleen Wilson has suggested that the Maroons ‘engaged in a double-edge performance of freedom’, in Jamaican slave society.¹⁴¹ By the late 18th century, however, they had ceased to be ambiguous role models for the enslaved. The last and greatest slave revolt would be inspired by secular ideas picked from the discarded newspapers of the enslavers and the spirit of liberation buried in Christianity.¹⁴²

Behind the Maroon betrayal was an important tactic of the slaveholder proto-Leviathan of which Hobbes would have fully approved: divide and rule, a tactic also emphasized by Goveia.¹⁴³ The colonialists deployed it with devastating effectiveness against the enslaved. They did so in buying and distributing captives from different tribes on the plantations and encouraging their traditional hostilities; in encouraging the division between creole or locally born and those brought from Africa who, from the early 18th century were being contemptuously derided as ‘salt-water-neagas’ and ‘Guinea-birds’ by the creoles; in the division between skilled/elite and gang enslaved; between house slave and field enslaved; between dark skin, sambo skin, mulatto skin, mustee skin, and mustifino near-but-not-quite-there white skin; between men and women; between men and men over women; between women and women over men; between the faithful hoping for favour and freedom who betrayed the rebels plotting revolts running away and poisonings. In his superb recent study, Christer Petley documents how Simon Taylor, the richest planter in Jamaica of his day (the late 1700s) deftly divided the 2248 enslaved on his four plantations and eight pens, balancing one set against another by which means he exercised near perfect control.¹⁴⁴

The system also survived because the enslaved were able to eke out social and cultural spaces in those areas that were irrelevant to the interests of the whites. In the few hours between work and sleep, on the provision grounds where they were made to feed themselves, precariously,¹⁴⁵ and in the Sunday markets, and the saturnalia of Christmas, the enslaved welded from the fragments of African culture, the exegeses of the Caribbean environment, and the scraps of white culture forced upon them, the beginnings of Afro-Jamaican creole culture. Most of The Sociology of Slavery was devoted to these creole cultural constructions – a point that must be emphasized in view of those who have ignorantly claimed that I have neglected the life, real death and agency of the enslaved – and this was in many ways its most important substantive contribution, especially the search for the tribal origins of the Jamaicans (now updated in Table 1, above) and the African roots of their religious, witchcraft and obeah beliefs, their celebratory death rituals, their music, dances, seasonal festivals, and their Afro-Jamaican dietary and agricultural practices. The work, as indicated earlier, also examined sex and family life under conditions of pervasive physical terror, the spectre of starvation, and extreme sexual violence from both the whites and more privileged enslaved lackeys. The book, in fact, initiated the study of Afro-Jamaican social and cultural creolization, drawing on the work of earlier historical ethnography of the broader Caribbean,¹⁴⁶ and of Africa, such as those by Herskovits, Mintz and Murdock, a process that I theorized in later works building on this baseline study.¹⁴⁷

In the final analysis, the simplest explanation is, as Hobbes pointed out, that most people ‘shun death’. And death was everywhere in Jamaican slave society as I was among the first to show both in The Sociology of Slavery and its literary sequel, Die the Long Day¹⁴⁸ – the physical death they tried to shun, the social death that they could not. I have repeatedly used the term protracted or slow-moving genocide to explain the demographic and social situation of the Black population of Jamaica during the period of slavery. This is not a metaphor. With the data from the Atlantic Slave trade database now available, it is possible to calculate more precisely the real death toll of Jamaican slavery by using a simple counterfactual strategy.

To do so, what we need is another suitably distinct slave society that shows us what might have been possible – a counterfactual – had the British proto-Leviathan in Jamaica not pursued the Hobbesian demographic strategy of buying, mercilessly overexploiting and replacing their enslaved from the slave trade. The demographic experience of the enslaved in North America provides just such a counterfactual case.¹⁴⁹ American slaveholders bargained from early on that it made more sense to reproduce their enslaved population than rely entirely on the slave trade, and by the early 18th century they had succeeded in doing so, the creole enslaved population well in excess of the Africans by that time. To be sure, they were no angels for, as Tadman has shown, this choice was made easier for them by virtue of the fact that the crops from which they made their wealth was not sugar, that, indeed, where they were sugar planters, as in Louisiana, they were just as inhumanly vicious as their Jamaican counterpart, with similarly lethal demographic consequences.¹⁵⁰ Richard Dunn has given us an indelible meso-level demographic analysis of these ‘two radically different slave systems in action’, wherein the Jamaican planters treated the enslaved ‘as disposable cogs in a machine: importing slaves from Africa, working them too hard, feeding them too little, exposing them to debilitating disease, and routinely importing new Africans to replace those who died’, in contrast with the demographic growth of the enslaved in Virginia.¹⁵¹

Two arguments against this counterfactual strategy must be considered. The first, that environmental and epidemiological factors prevented such a reproductive approach by the Jamaican planters, can be dismissed with one word: Barbados – with a very similar West Indian environment, which was so successful at reproduction that it was capable of providing other eastern Caribbean islands with enslaved and ex-enslaved before and after abolition; indeed, there were even concerns among some Barbadian planters that their small island risked overpopulation.¹⁵² Furthermore, it appears that the disease environment of the U.S. South was not that much better for the enslaved than that which prevailed in Jamaica, reflected in the fact that mortality rates were not very different, although there is some question about this.¹⁵³ The second argument, that the American slaveholders were both more willing and better able to feed their enslaved because of their large farming community does not hold up. Tadman has shown that there were huge mortality differences between blacks and whites and that the more favourable reproduction rate of American blacks to those in the Caribbean came at great cost to the former. In other words, it was not all that costly to American planters to ensure the much greater reproduction of the enslaved. The difference is explained in terms of the extremely exploitative demands of the sugar plantation system, where more profits could be made by relying on the slave trade both to increase the population and provide more males than females. Furthermore, as many works have now shown, Jamaica was an integral part of the Atlantic economic system for the entire period of slavery and bought much of its staples and food from America. Additionally, profit margins in Jamaica far exceeded those of the American slave South. From Burnard’s calculations, in the late 18th century the wealth of Southern planters ‘paled beside that of Jamaica’, and ‘the average White in Jamaica was 36.6 times as wealthy as the average White in the Thirteen Colonies’.¹⁵⁴ Therefore, had they so desired, the Jamaican planters could easily have bought more food and other necessities to pursue a successful reproductive strategy, as Barbadian slaveholders successfully did, instead of overworking and underfeeding them.¹⁵⁵ On the evidence of the planters themselves, the cost of rearing an enslaved person to the age of fourteen in 1831–2, was not much higher in Jamaica than Barbados: 112 sterling, compared to 109 sterling in Barbados, much lower than other slave colonies such as Trinidad, where it was 162 sterling.¹⁵⁶ Given that Jamaica is over 25 times the size of Barbados, with far more resources complementing the plantation system than in mono-crop Barbados (cattle pens, numerous rivers for irrigation and mill-power, protected harbours, relatively abundant forests, several commercial centres, and its large export-oriented coffee sector, which very likely exercised a positive joint demand for the dominant sugar crop, given that consumption of the former strongly activated the need to consume the latter in the British and American markets), with a more rational, less blindly exploitative strategy, it could easily have far exceeded Barbados’, and replicated America’s reproductive performance.¹⁵⁷ Instead, planter economic calculations resulted in a slave system where ‘the lives of the enslaved population in Jamaica were the most miserable in the Atlantic World, especially in the first half of the eighteenth century, when … the great majority of slaves were traumatized, brutalized and alienated migrants from Africa’.¹⁵⁸

It must be concluded, then, that the demographic strategy of the Jamaican slaveholder was one of clear choice. As the demographic historian Kenneth Kiple notes, ‘as long as a master had control over a slave’s life, he controlled to a large extent what he consumed’, and obviously his physical survival.¹⁵⁹ As I was among the first to point out,¹⁶⁰ and Kiple later specified at length, Jamaican slaves spent their lives hungry and malnourished, on the verge of starvation, with numerous nutritional diseases resulting in endemic bone and dental problems, debilitating mood swings, pellagra, beriberi due to widespread thiamine deficiency, dropsy, dirt-eating, which was a desperate response to calcium and other mineral deficiencies, all of which weighed especially hard on children, whom ‘malnutrition tormented twice, working much of its debilitating and often deadly effects through poor maternal nutrition before even touching the child via his own nutritional intake’.¹⁶¹

One final argument against this conclusion needs attention, given the academic distinction of its authors. Stanley Engerman and Herbert Klein¹⁶² have argued that it was not conditions in the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, or planter attitudes, that accounted for the failure of the Jamaican population to reproduce. They claim that mortality rates in the U.S. were similar to those of Jamaica and that fertility rates largely account for the demographic difference. The crucial factor explaining these fertility differences were the distinctive lactation practices of the Africans brought over to Jamaica, its key feature being prolonged breast-feeding. Because Africans constituted a much larger proportion of the Jamaican population throughout the period of slavery than of the U.S. Black population, they argue, this factor largely explains the huge difference in survival and reproduction rates. In simple terms, an African cultural pattern is to be blamed for the demographic disaster in Jamaica, not the attitudes of the planters or their brutal treatment of the enslaved. There are numerous problems with this argument, beginning with the quality of their data, leading the authors to admit in the end that it is ‘highly speculative’. One major hurdle is Barbados, which, with similar lactation practices as Jamaica, had a rate of reproduction more like America’s.¹⁶³ Another was the severe understatement of infant deaths in the registration data on which they relied,¹⁶⁴ which leads one to question whether Jamaican and U.S. mortality rates were that similar. Furthermore, as Kiple has pointed out, while the fat and protein quality of the milk of lactating African women is lower than in the U.S., studies have shown that prolonged breast feeding offered the best chance of survival for the child since ‘it at least contains a high-quality protein that the child will be without when he is finally weaned’.¹⁶⁵ Thus, far from accounting for the lower rate of reproduction, the lactation practices of Jamaican enslaved women may well have prevented a disastrous situation from being even more catastrophic by delaying the moment when the enslaved child was weaned into the deathly environment of malnutrition and planter indifference, if not downright hostility, throughout the period of the slave trade. Slave women may also well have prolonged lactation as a form of birth control to prevent bringing children into the horrors of the plantation, and to provide opportunities for relief from the dawn to dusk burden of field labour, not to mention the sexual predation of the whites and slave drivers. Verene Shepherd referred to this as the enslaved women’s effort to free their ‘enchained wombs’.¹⁶⁶ Not considered, too, is the fact that sexual assault was a source of chronic venereal diseases, causing widespread sterility. On Thistlewood’s estate, almost every woman of childbearing age had gonorrhea, Africans infected within days of arrival in the island¹⁶⁷ and there is every reason to believe that this was the case throughout the island. It is now established medical fact that, among women, untreated gonorrhea causes pelvic inflammatory disease that permanently damages the reproductive system, leading to infertility, in addition to stillbirth or miscarriage.¹⁶⁸ It also causes epididymitis in men which also leads to infertility. Kenneth Morgan, in an otherwise sound piece, has played this down, confounding it with the spurious issue of slave women’s morality.¹⁶⁹ The real issue, however, was the chronic raping of enslaved women. As Burnard correctly points out: ‘White men molested slave women in part because they could do so without fear of social consequence and in part because they constantly needed to show slaves the extent of their dominance. The institutional dominance of white men had to be translated into personal dominance.’¹⁷⁰ In doing so they rapidly spread the more virulent strain of gonorrhea they brought from Europe, to the detriment of the fertility of enslaved women.

Another kind of evidence demolishes this attempt to blame African lactation practices for Jamaica’s demographic disaster. Tadman¹⁷¹ has shown that in the Louisiana sugar belt of the slave South, where the lactation practices of the enslaved were similar to those of other North American enslaved as well as their white enslavers, a similar pattern of massive demographic decline is found, resulting from the same combination of inhumane treatment and imbalanced sex-ratios. The horrendous overworking of women on the Louisiana cane fields reduced their fertility, reinforcing Dunn’s argument that ‘the sugar labor performed by the Mesopotamia women [of Jamaica] in their prime childbearing years was the main cause of their low birthrate’.¹⁷² This heavy toll on fertility, argues Tadman, combined with the ability to replace the dead by buying a male-dominated workforce from the older slave states, was the lethal combination accounting for the catastrophic demographic decline of the Jamaican population, not African lactation practices, not even yellow fever.¹⁷³

Perhaps the strongest evidence that it was the peculiar savagery of the condition of enslavement in Jamaica that most accounts for the demographic decline is how swiftly the Jamaican population began to reproduce almost immediately after abolition, in spite of persisting African-type lactation practices among the formerly enslaved African and creole blacks (who had similar practices) and has never stopped growing.¹⁷⁴ Ironically, recent studies have shown that the decline of traditional breast-feeding practices among Jamaican and other West Indian peasant and urban working-class women since the 1950s, and their replacement with commercially promoted infant formulas, has led to a disastrous increase in infant malnutrition, illnesses and mortality.¹⁷⁵

This being so, consider Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of slaves taken to Jamaica and the North American mainland by decade between 1651 and 1830. Between 1651 and 1660, North America received far more slaves than Jamaica. In 1655 Jamaica was taken by the British from the Spanish and, instantly, everything changed. Between five and ten times more slaves were delivered to Jamaica than to North America during the six decades after 1660, and the last three decades of the 18th century and more than twice as many in the middle decades in between. Figure 2 shows the cumulative effect in absolute numbers: between 1650 and 1830, a total of 1,017,109 Africans were disembarked in Jamaica, while only 388,233 were taken to North America.¹⁷⁶ However, in 1830 there were 2,009,048 enslaved in America and, including free blacks, some 2,328,642 Black souls. At that time, there were only 319,074 enslaved in Jamaica and, all told, 359,147 people of some Black ancestry.

What this astonishing difference amounts to is this: had Africans and their descendants experienced the same rate of increase in Jamaica as had occurred in North America, the theoretically possible 1830 enslaved population in the island would have been 5,262,522 and its total Black population (including free coloured or people of mixed ancestry) would have been 6,100,620. Taking account of the 359,147 survivors in 1830, and using North American slavery as a counterfactual yardstick, we must conclude that there were 5,741,473 missing Black Jamaicans in 1830, which is a measure of British protracted genocide of Black people in the island between 1655 and 1830. To express this in the stronger causal terms of a counterfactual conditional: had it not been for the distinctive features of Jamaican slavery, 5,741,473 Jamaican lives would not have been lost. (My estimate, I hasten to add, is confined to the Jamaican enslaved population, both the Africans brought there and their descendants, with no implications for African lives lost in Africa.)¹⁷⁷ This figure, we might note, is not much smaller than the six million Jews eliminated in the Nazi holocaust. Jamaican slavery, we conclude, was a clear case of genocide.

Figure 1. Relative Percentages of Slaves Disembarked in Jamaica and North America

Figure 2. A Counterfactual Picture of Jamaican Genocide: Jamaican & North American Slavery Compared, 1650–1830

Graphs composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

To be sure, there are varieties of genocide.¹⁷⁸ The British genocide of Blacks in Jamaica took place over 183 years rather than the twelve years of the Nazi holocaust and 2–4 years of the Ottoman genocide of at least 1.1 million Armenians between 1915 and 1919. This suggests a distinction between protracted or slow-moving and concentrated genocide. Several scholars have drawn attention to the differences and similarities between slavery and the Jewish genocide ‘without lapsing into facile equation or producing crude hierarchies of suffering’, as A. Dirk Moses aptly puts it.¹⁷⁹ Some, such as Drescher and Hirsch have emphasized the differences.¹⁸⁰ Others, without underplaying the differences, have pointed to similarities, several drawing on my concept of social death in addressing the parallels. In her definitive study of life in Nazi Germany, Kaplan repeatedly describes the pre-destruction period leading up to the death camps as a condition of social death for the Jews living in Germany: ‘In the 1930s Nazi Germany succeeded in enforcing social death on its Jews – excommunicating them, subjecting them to inferior status, and relegating them to a perpetual state of dishonour.’¹⁸¹ Daniel Goldhagen, writing about the same time, made a similar point, arguing that while German Jews were indeed totally dominated, natally alienated and dishonoured, the distinctive features of social death, the critical distinction lay in the fact that the slaveholder found value in the body of the enslaved, while the Nazi terrorist sought the elimination of Jewish bodies.¹⁸² More recently, Claudia Card has argued that my concept of social death is ‘central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural)’ and that it is what ‘distinguishes genocide from other mass murders’.¹⁸³ Card focuses on the fact that a people’s social identity, based on their distinctive way of life, is what gives meaning to their existence, and destroying this is what most critically defines genocide: ‘Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence. Putting social death at the centre takes the focus off individual choice, individual goals, individual careers and body counts, and puts it on relationships that create community and set the context that gives meaning to choices and goals.’¹⁸⁴ In making this philosophical move, Card was actually returning to the pioneering student of the subject, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, and for whom ‘the destruction of cultural symbols is genocide’, as well as actions that ‘menace the existence of the social group which exists by virtue of its common culture’. It also, of course, involved ‘the criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanently a human group’.¹⁸⁵ The fact that it does not do so completely does not make it any less genocidal, since ‘Lemkin made clear that total extermination was not necessary for genocide to occur.’¹⁸⁶ Some Jews survived. Some Jamaicans survived.

From all this, it is clear that what happened in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838 was genocide in every sense of the term, for what we find is both ethno-cultural destruction, physical brutalization and the denial of existence to 5,741,473 souls. While both were genocide, there are three differences between the Nazi and the Jamaican holocaust. The first is temporal, the fact that the Jewish social death lasted for twelve years (1933 to 1945) while that of Jamaicans lasted for 183 years of deracination, the loss of connection with their past, of any recognized sense of any rights in or belonging to the land of their birth, to their own children and parents, to their very selves and bodies. The second, already mentioned, that the Jewish physical elimination was concentrated over a short period of four years, while that of Jamaicans lasted for 183 years in the drip, drip, drip of shortened lives and curtailed fertility, so tortured and degraded that death was vociferously celebrated as ‘a welcome relief from the calamities of life and a passport to the never-to-be-forgotten scenes of their nativity’.¹⁸⁷ The third concerns the nature of the elimination, and is likely the most contentious: in the case of the Jews, actual living bodies were destroyed; in the case of the Jamaicans, in addition to the abbreviated lives and outright individual murders, mass executions and suicides, potential living bodies were preventively destroyed – lives that would almost certainly have happened, should by any and all human standards have eventuated, under the quite reasonable counterfactual condition. The absence of these 5,741,473 Jamaican lives is not a hypothetical. It was a deliberate curtailment. Like female gendercide, the deliberate preventive obliteration of up to 117 million females mainly through sex-selective termination of pregnancies,¹⁸⁸ it was a crime against humanity. The comparison with gendercide is clarifying in that it emphasizes the fact that genocide need not involve deliberate killings, actual bodies, or concerted mass murder (although these frequently happened in Jamaica, especially after real and attempted plots of rebellion, as well as in gendercide with infanticide). As Warren points out: ‘not all instances of genocide involve direct or deliberate killing. Deaths or cultural disintegration deliberately or negligently brought about through starvation, disease or neglect may also be genocidal. Indeed, some acts of genocide do not involve any deaths at all, but rather consist in the wrongful denial of the right to reproduce.’ [emphasis added]¹⁸⁹ To repeat, for 183 years, Jamaicans had their ancestral memories, and traditional cultures destroyed, their actual lives ravaged, ruthlessly exploited and severely shortened, their familial bonds shattered, their bodies casually raped with impunity and infected with life-shortening diseases, their reproductive rights denied, leading to the accumulation of 5,741,473 missing persons. One can think of few more heinous cases of a crime against humanity.

When British slavery was finally abolished in 1838, Jamaicans, as we have noted, had experienced it for 183 years. I write this introduction in 2021, exactly 183 years after the abolition. The island has never fully recovered from the uniquely violent decimation of that first half of its history. ‘One of the characteristics of traumatic memory’, Dan Stone has written, ‘is that it cannot be suppressed at will’, and societies remain scarred long after its experience.¹⁹⁰ The Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Andrew Holness, in his 2021 Emancipation Day speech commemorating the abolition of slavery in the island, noted the facts that it has been 183 years since abolition, and the role that the last great rebellion of the enslaved, led by National Hero, the Rt Excellent Samuel Sharpe,¹⁹¹ played in helping to bring it about. But then he added something with which his entire nation would have somberly agreed: ‘The use of violence has followed us from our history.’¹⁹² Today, Jamaica remains one of the most violent nations on earth, as it was in the eighteenth century, with a homicide rate that places it in the top five of all nations, and a rate of femicide, the murder of women, consistently at the very top of the world’s nations.¹⁹³ The dead yards of the nation’s slums¹⁹⁴ bear ghoulish witness to the plantation dead yards of that first half of its existence.¹⁹⁵ For Jamaica, ‘the politics of post-genocidal memories are matters of life and death’.¹⁹⁶

That first half of our history has never been fully told. If the truth be known, it can never be fully known. Genocide, fast or slow moving, is unknowable. Unimaginable. We try as historians and sociologists to fathom and feel its horror, its sorrow, its unrelenting grief, its preternatural evil. But in its hollowing banality,¹⁹⁷ it defies all understanding. Having reached the limits of historical and sociological understanding I tried to imagine that first half of our past in the literary sequel to The Sociology of Slavery, my novel, Die the Long Day,¹⁹⁸ which drew on the materials I had collected for the earlier work to re-create a day of death and celebratory mourning on an 18th-century slave plantation. During the mourning for the murdered heroine (butchered by the Maroons at the request of the white overseer), an old Fanti woman, slightly crazed, wanders amidst the mourners, repeatedly wailing in a voice as dark as death, a dirge that was all she had remembered from her deracinated African past. It went like this:

Do not say anything,

O Mother, Sister,

Do not say anything.

For anything you say, will be too much,

And nothing you say, will be enough.

Orlando Patterson,

Harvard University

1 1. My warmest thanks to Professors Loïc Wacquant and Chris Muller for encouraging the publication of this new edition and for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the introduction for their very useful comments.

2 2. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History, New Beacon Books, 1992.

3 3. My last contribution to New Left Review included a strong critique of one of the most abstruse, though well-received versions of the slave mode of production by Barry Hindness and Paul Hirst, 1975, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Routledge. See my ‘Slavery in Human History’, New Left Review, 1/117, Sept./Oct. 1979, pp. 31–67.

4 4. C. L. R. James, 1938, 1963, The Black Jacobins, New York, Random House, Inc.

5 5. C. L. R. James, 1964, ‘Rastafari at Home and Abroad’, Review of Orlando Patterson, The Children of Sisyphus, New Left Review, Vol. 1/25.

6 6. Douglas Hall, 1959, Free Jamaica, 1838–1865. Yale University Press. In 1962, Hall published a very general paper on slavery, in the course of thirteen pages dealing with the socio-economic dilemmas of the planters, the economic effects of emancipation, and the consequences of slavery and post-emancipation society for his day. Hall, 1962, ‘Slaves and Slavery in the British West Indies’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 305–18. Nearly three decades later, he published a well-edited edition of the Thistlewood diary, crafted in his thorough and understated style, that introduced Caribbean scholars to this important diary.

7 7. Philip Curtin, 1968, Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865, Praeger.

8 8. Eric Williams, 1942, 1970, The Negro in the Caribbean, Haskell House.

9 9. Eric Williams, 1944, 2021, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press.

10 10. Elsa Goveia, 1965, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,Yale University Press.

11 11. Lowell Joseph Ragatz, 1928, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833,The Century Company.

12 12. Frank W. Pitman, 2017, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763,Yale University Press.

13 13. George W. Roberts, 1957, The Population of Jamaica, Cambridge University Press.

14 14. M. G. Smith, 1965, ‘Some Aspects of Social Structure in the British Caribbean about 1820’, in his The Plural Society in the British West Indies, University of California Press.

15 15. U. B. Phillips, 1929, Life and Labor in the Old South, Little, Brown.

16 16. Charles Sydnor, 1933, Slavery in Mississippi, D. Appleton-Century.

17 17. Kenneth Stampp, 1956, The Peculiar Institution, Knopf-Doubleday.

18 18. Frank Tannenbaum, 1946, Slave and Citizen, Alfred Knopf.

19 19. Herbert Klein, 1967, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba, University of Chicago Press.

20 20. Stanley Elkins, 1959, Slavery, University of Chicago Press.

21 21. Ann J. Lane, 1971, The Debate Over Slavery, University of Illinois Press.I will have more to say below on just where Elkins erred.

22 22. W. E. B. DuBois, ‘The Study of the Negro Problems’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 11, 1898, cited in J. D. Smith, ‘A Different View of Slavery: Black Historians Attack the Proslavery Argument, 1890–1920’, Journal of Negro History, 1980, Vol. 65, No. 4.

23 23. The term comes from the Greek doulosis, meaning enslavement, derived from doulos, ‘slave’. I use the spelling ‘doulotic’ to distinguish it from the related term ‘dulotic’ used in social biology for a species of enslaving ants.

24 24. B. W. Higman, 1984, Slave Population of the British Caribbean, 1807–1838, Johns Hopkins University Press.

25 25. B. W. Higman, 1998, Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912, University Press of the West Indies.

26 26. Richard S. Dunn, 2014, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, Harvard University Press.

27 27. See Orlando Patterson, ‘Recent Studies on Caribbean Slavery and the Slave Trade’, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1982. For my more detailed critique of Higman’s interpretation of the slave family, see my paper: ‘Persistence, Continuity, and Change in the Jamaican Working-Class Family’, Journal of Family History,Vol. 7, No. 2, 1982, pp. 135–61.

28 28. Trevor Burnard, 2004, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo Jamaican World, University of North Carolina Press.

29 29. It is interesting that, fifteen years before Burnard’s academic blockbuster, the Jamaican historian Douglas Hall had produced a valuable edited version of Thistlewood’s diary, noted earlier: In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, Macmillan Press. Given the explosive nature of the subject and its implications for the study of Jamaican slavery, and slavery in general, Hall’s understated editing may have prevented his work from reaching a wider audience. In a later study Hall’s detachment from Thistlewood’s gross inhumanities may have been taken too far in his admiring discussion of the enslaver’s botanic and gardening interests, occasionally referring respectfully to him as ‘Mr Thistlewood’. It was a bit odd, like writing about the Marquis de Sade’s curious reflections on the literary merits of Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis’ gothic writings without ever mentioning the fact that he was, well, a sadist. See Douglas Hall, 2001, ‘Planters, Farmers and Gardeners in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,’ in B. Moore, B. W. Higman, C. Campbell and P. Bryan, eds, Slavery, Freedom and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society, University of the West Indies Press, pp. 97–114.

30 30. Justin Roberts, 2018, Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807, Cambridge University Press.

31 31. For an assessment, see Hilary Beckles, ‘Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery’, in Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, Barbara Bailey, eds, 1995. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 111–24. Although primarily on Barbados, his work on enslaved women in that island has important comparative relevance to Jamaica: Beckles, 1989, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press; See also, Marietta Morrissey, 1989, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean, University Press of Kansas; Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, ‘Introduction: Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective’ in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, Durham, N.C., 2005, pp. 1–34; Barbara Bush, 1990, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, Indiana University Press.

32 32. See The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 61, 106–12, 157.

33 33. Lucille Mathurin Mair was the pioneer of gender studies of Jamaican and West Indian slavery, on which see her very influential 1974 dissertation, eventually published in 2006 as A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–844, University of the West Indies Press. Mair drew on The Sociology of Slavery in her interesting theory that gender attitudes and the disproportionate use of women in the fields may have retarded technological development on Jamaican slave plantations. See her chapter: ‘Women Field Workers in Jamaica during Slavery’, in B. Moore, B. W. Higman, C. Campbell and P. Bryan, Slavery, Freedom and Gender: The Dynamics of Caribbean Society, 2001, pp. 184–5.See also Diana Paton, 2004, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, Duke University Press. See also Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds, 2005, Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, Duke University Press; Marietta Morrissey, 1986, ‘Women’s Work, Family Formation, and Reproduction among Caribbean Slaves’, Review, Winter, 1986, Vol. 9, No. 3; Sasha Turner, 2019, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica, University of Pennsylvania Press; Barbara Bush, 1990, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838, Heinemann Publishers; Verene Shepherd, op. cit., p. 2002.

34 34. Kathleen Wilson, 2003, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, Routledge.

35 35. Katie Donington, 2020, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World, Manchester University Press.

36 36. Diana Paton, 2001, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 34, pp. 923–54; as well as her 2012, Obeah and Other Powers:The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

37 37. Rhoda Reddock, 1994, Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago. A History, Ian Randle.

38 38. Rhoda Reddock, 1985, ‘Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective’, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 12, No. 1, Latin American Colonial History, pp. 77, 78.

39 39. Randy M. Browne, 2017, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press.

40 40. Patricia Mohammed, 2000, ‘“But Most of All Mi Love Me Browning”: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto Woman as the Desired’, Feminist Review,Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 22–48.

41 41. Kamala Kempadoo, 2004, Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor, Routledge.

42 42. Ibid.

43 43. Michael Craton and James Walvin, 1970, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670–1970, University of Toronto Press.

44 44. A few years later I conducted a questionnaire-based survey of Worthy Park with a research assistant, along with in-depth interviews of plantation workers, but never analysed the result. Soon after the survey I received a letter from Michael Craton asking me to leave his site alone and find another plantation to study. I gave up the project. The questionnaire materials, which include several network questions, will be deposited with my papers at a yet to be determined library.

45 45. Michael Craton, 1978, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica, Harvard University Press.

46 46. Orlando Patterson, 1982, ‘Recent Studies on Caribbean Slavery and The Atlantic Slave Trade’, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 251–75.

47 47. Sidney Mintz, 1984, ‘More on the Peculiar Institution’, New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids,Vol. 58, No. 3/4, pp. 185–99.

48 48. Michael Craton, 1979, ‘Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies, 1816–1832’, Past and Present, No. 85, pp. 99–125.

49 49. See James C. Scott, 1990, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts,Yale University Press, p. 24.

50 50. Michael Craton, 1974, ‘Searching for the Invisible Man: Some of the Problems of Writing on Slave Society in the British West Indies’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques,Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 50.

51 51. On Elkins, as indicated earlier, I am sympathetic to his comparison of slavery with the Nazi concentration camp. Unlike many critics of Elkins, I also found similarities to the Sambo stereotype in Jamaica, as I did later in other slave societies such as ancient Rome in the slaveholder class’s mocking stereotype of Greek slaves as worthless, unmanly and garrulous, or ‘Graeculus’, well documented in Roman comedy. Where we differ sharply is my interpretation that ‘Quashee’ and ‘Sambo’ were deliberately using the stereotype as a subaltern weapon against the slaveholder, as were the Graeculus of ancient Rome. See Orlando Patterson, 1982, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Harvard University Press, pp. 91, 96–7, 338.

52 52. Higman, 1976, op. cit.; see also his 1986 ‘Jamaican Coffee Plantations 1780–1860: A Cartographic Analysis’, Caribbean Geography,Vol. 2, pp. 73–91; and his 1989 ‘The Internal Economy of Jamaican Pens, 1760–1890’, Social and Economic Studies,Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 61–86.

53 53. Verene A. Shepherd, 2009, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica, Ian Randle.

54 54. Kathleen E. A. Monteith, 2002, ‘The Labour Regimen on JamaicanCoffee Plantations During Slavery’, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards, eds, Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture, University of the West Indies Press, pp. 259–73.

55 55. Higman, 1976, op. cit., pp. 16–17.

56 56. Trevor Burnard, 2020, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 13.

57 57. Burnard, 2020, op. cit., p. 14.

58 58. On which see Richard Sheridan, 1965, ‘The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review,Vol. 18, pp. 292–311; Richard Sheridan, 1985, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834, Cambridge University Press, Chapters 5–8.

59 59. Elsa Goveia, 1965, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,Yale University Press.

60 60. Ibid., pp. vii, viii.

61 61. Elsa Goveia, ‘Slave Society’ Review of The Sociology of Slavery’, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3411, 13th July 1967, p. 622. (The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 1002–2019). Signed reviews were introduced by the TLS only in 1974 and the authors of earlier reviews made available much later, when I became aware of the fact the review was by Goveia. It is unlikely that Goveia would have referred to her own work in a signed review.

62 62. Goveia, op. cit., p. 237.

63 63. Goveia, op. cit., p. 238.

64 64. B. W. Higman, 2005, Plantation Jamaica: 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy, University of the West Indies Press. See also his 1988 work, Jamaica Surveyed. Jamaica Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, University of the West Indies Press.

65 65. See in particular his comparative study, with John Garrigus, of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, which draws out distinctive patterns in both systems, while demonstrating their enormous significance for the economies of France and Britain and, in more general terms, the rise of European capitalism in the 18th century: The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, University of Pennsylvania Press (2016).

66 66. Edward Brathwaite, 1971, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, Clarendon Press.

67 67. Richard Sheridan, 1974, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, Johns Hopkins University Press.

68 68. Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, 1972, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 1624–1690, Oxford University Press.

69 69. Jack P. Greene, 2016, Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait, University of Virginia Press.

70 70. Richard Dunn, 1972, Sugar and Slaves:The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, University of North Carolina Press.

71 71. Goveia, op. cit., p. 338.

72 72. Brathwaite, op. cit., pp. 303–5.

73 73. Trevor Burnard, 2004, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-American World, University of North Carolina Press.

74 74. Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, 1989, Macmillan Press, p. xix.

75 75. Aaron Kamugisha, 2019, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition, Indiana University Press.

76 76. Angela Bartens, 2001, ‘The Rocky Road to Education in Creole’, Estudios de Sociolinguistica,Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 28.

77 77. The definitive account of that transformative conference is given by Dell Hymes, one of the founders of sociolinguistics and creole studies, Items, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1968. Find it here: https://items.ssrc.org/from-our-archives/pidginization-and-creolization-of-languages-their-social-contexts/On creolization in 17th-century Jamaica, see David Buisseret, ‘The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica’, in David Buisseret and Steven Reinhardt, eds, 2000. Texas A&M University Press, pp. 19–34. Buisseret’s ‘Introduction’ to the volume offers one of the clearest and most comprehensive models of the creolization process I know of.More recently, the theoretical complexities and contradictions of the concept, and the tensions between its usage by linguists, historians and anthropologists, as well as its global applications, have been examined in Charles Stewart, ed., 2016, Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, Routledge.

78 78. On which, see Michael Zeuske, 2011, ‘Sidney Mintz: Work, Creolization, Atlanticization’, Review,Vol.34, No. 4, pp. 423–8.

79 79. Angela Bartens, 1996, Der kreolische Raum: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Finnicae. See the useful review and summary by Stephanie Hackert, 1999, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 171–6.

80 80. Richard D. E. Burton, 1977, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean, Cornell University Press.

81 81. Mary Turner, 1998, Slaves and Missionaries:The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834, University Press of the West Indies.

82 82. Dunn, 1972, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, p. 276.

83 83. Greene, 2014, op. cit.

84 84. Vincent Brown, 2008, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, Harvard University Press.

85 85. Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, Philip Wright, ed., 1966, Institute of Jamaica: pp. 16, 18, 45. Brown cites the second of these entries without comment.

86 86. Matthew Lewis, 1999, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, edited by Judith Terry. Lewis lightheartedly refers once to his Jamaican ancestors who have ‘always had a taste for being well lodged after their decease’ (p. 100).

87 87. Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, p. xiii.

88 88. On Edward Long and the free coloureds, see Burnard, 2020, op. cit., Chapters 2 and 5.

89 89. The Jamaican sociologist, Fernando Henriques, coined this term, and it still resonates even to this day, reflected in the bizarre recent increase in the use of skin whitening cream even among reggae and dancehall stars. See his Family and Color in Jamaica, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953. On the sad matter of present-day skin whitening in the island see Rebekah Kebede, with Marlon James, 2017, ‘Why Black Women in a Predominately Black Culture are still Bleaching their Skin. Investigating deep-rooted ideals in Jamaica’, Marie Daire, https://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/a27678/skin-bleaching-epidemic-in-jamaica/

90 90. Matthew Lewis, 1999, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, Oxford World Classic, Oxford University Press.

91 91. Ronald Finlay, 1975, ‘Slavery, Incentives, and Manumission: A Theoretical Model’, Journal of Political Economy Vol. 83, no. 5, pp. 923–34; Orlando Patterson, 1982/2018. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Chapters 8–10.

92 92. Brooke N. Newman, 2018, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica,Yale University Press.

93 93. Mavis Campbell, 1976, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Arnold A. Sio, 1976, ‘Race, Colour, and Miscegenation: The Free Coloured of Jamaica and Barbados’, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 5–21; Gad J. Heuman, 1981, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865, Praeger; Daniel Livesay, 2018. Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833, University of North Carolina Press; David B. Ryden, 2018, ‘Manumission in Late Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, Vol. 92, Nos. 3–4, pp. 211–44; Erin Trahey, 2019, ‘Among Her Kinswomen: Legacies of Free Women of Color in Jamaica’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2, pp. 257–88; Wilmot Swithin, 2020, ‘Free Blacks, Free Coloureds and Freedmen in Jamaican Politics, 1830–1842’, Journal of Caribbean History, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 228–55.

94 94. Livesay, op. cit., 2018; Burnard, op. cit., 2020, ‘The Ambiguous Place of Free People in Jamaica’, Chapter 5.

95 95. Christer Petley, 2009, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition, Routledge; also, 2018, White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution, Oxford University Press.

96 96. David Beck Ryden, 2009,West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807, Cambridge University Press.

97 97. S. D. Smit, 2006, Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834, Cambridge University Press.

98 98. Aaron Graham, 2018, ‘A Descent into Hellshire: Safety, Security and the End of Slavery in Jamaica, 1819–1820’, Atlantic Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2. See also his 2019 study: ‘Towns, Government, Legislation and the “Police” in Jamaica and the British Atlantic, 1770–1805’, Urban History,Vol. 47, No.1. Graham’s excellent series of papers on the island are building up to what promises to be an exciting dominion volume on the slave system during its last seven decades.

99 99. Eric Williams, 1944/2021, Capitalism and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press.

100 100. See Kenneth Morgan, 2000, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800. Also, H. Cateau and S. Carrington, eds, 2000, Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later. Eric Eustace Williams – A Reassessment of the Man and His Work, Peter Lang Inc.

101 101. Franklin Knight, 2011, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, Oxford University Press, Introduction.

102 102. Catherine Hall, 2002, Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, University of Chicago Press; and, with Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, 2014, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, Cambridge University Press.

103 103. Kathleen Wilson, 2003, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, Routledge.

104 104. Susan D. Amussen, 2007, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700, University of North Carolina Press.

105 105. Katie Donington, 2020, The Bonds of Family: Slavery, Commerce and Culture in the British Atlantic World, Manchester University Press.

106 106. Hilary McD. Beckles, 2013, Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide, University of the West Indies Press; Verene Shepherd, 2014, ‘Jamaica and the Debate over Reparation for Slavery: An Overview’, in Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper and Keith McClelland, eds, Emancipation and the Remaking of the British Imperial World, Manchester University Press, Chapter 13, pp. 223–50.

107 107. Especially Elizabeth Donnan’s monumental four-volume editions of documents on the trade: Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935. The valuable, although now neglected works of Melville Herskovits, especially Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, 2 Vols., 1938 and The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) deserve continued recognition. For an excellent, balanced assessment of Herskovits and his works, see Jerry Gershenhorn, 2004, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge, University of Nebraska Press.

108 108. See the notes to Chapter 5.

109 109. Philip Curtin, 1972, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press.

110 110. For a recent review of scholarship on the trade see Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade’, The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, edited by Mark M. Smith and Robert L. Paquette.The German historian, Michael Zeuske, in a comprehensive historiographical essay, has criticized what he considers an overemphasis on the hegemonic slaveries of antiquity, Islam and the Americas and appeals for scholarly engagement with the ‘smaller slaveries’ of the world, which is precisely what I attempted in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. See his ‘Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 57, No. 1 (April 2012), pp. 87–111.

111 111. Curtin drew on Chapter 5 of The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 113–44, and on R. B. LePage and David De Camp, 1960, Jamaican Creole: An Historical Introduction to Jamaican Creole, St Martin’s Press.

112 112. Curtin, 1972, The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 130, 158–61. See in particular Table 46, p. 160. summarizing the chapter’s findings.

113 113. J. I. Inikori, 1976, ‘Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey’, Journal of African History, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 1976, pp. 197–223.

114 114. I was a founding board member of the DuBois Institute but have long ceased being a formal member. See the history of the project here: https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about#history/1/en/

115 115. See https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/about#methodology/coverage-of-the-slave-trade/1/en/

116 116. See Introductory Maps: https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/maps#introductory/

117 117. T. Parsons’ first explicit exploration of the problem in Hobbesian terms was in his foundational work, 1937, The Structure of Social Action, The Free Press, pp. 89–102. He elaborated on it in his 1951 work, The Social System, Harper and Row, pp. 36–45.

118 118. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth (1651) Oxford University Press (2012).

119 119. For one of many discussions on this issue see, D. Lockwood, 1956. ‘The Social System,’ British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 7, pp. 134–6. This was one of the works that influenced my own appraisal of the ‘problem’. See also, Desmond Ellis, 1971, ‘The Hobbesian Problem of Order: A Critical Appraisal of the Normative Solution’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 692–703.

120 120. See for example, Orlando Patterson, ‘Culture and Continuity: Causal Structures in Socio-Cultural Persistence’, in Roger Friedland and John Mohr, eds, 2004. Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, Cambridge University Press, pp. 71–109.

121 121. Richard Dunn, 1972, Sugar and Slaves, pp. xiii–xv.

122 122. Fifty years after The Sociology of Slavery, Trevor Burnard in his Jamaica in the Age of Revolution pp. 28–30, has rediscovered the theoretical significance of Hobbes for an understanding of Jamaican slave society. What took so long?

123 123. The Sociology of Slavery, p. 10.

124 124. Goveia, 1965, op. cit., pp. 94–5.

125 125. Burnard, 2020, op. cit., p. 19.

126 126. Here is where Goveia and I differ. She concluded that the whites ‘had all the authority and prestige of an established elite, accustomed to manipulate and overawe the lower classes they governed’, op. cit., p. 94. However, our difference is due to the difference in the societies we studied. Jamaica was different from the Leeward Islands in this respect, as it was from Barbados which, I have recently argued, did develop rule based on both force and effective Hobbesian ‘sovereignty by institutions’ in contrast with Jamaica where the institutions existed but did not quite work, certainly not for the Black population. See Orlando Patterson, 2019. The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University Press, Chapter 1.

127 127. I was to read this years later in Douglas Hall’s edition of the Thistlewood diary, first published in 1989: In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 204. However, my interpretation in the early 1960s of the archival and contemporary evidence on Jamaica slavery left me in no doubt that this was how many of the enslaved felt and that, apart from the Black and coloured kapos on the plantation, the typical Black field worker had little or no respect for the whites or freed Blacks. Sociology of Slavery, pp. 91–2.

128 128. Orlando Patterson, 1970, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655–1740’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 289–325. The other being the literary sequel, my novel, Die the Long Day,William Morrow, 1972.

129 129. Vincent Brown, 2020, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Harvard University Press.

130 130. Michael Craton, 2009, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Cornell University Press. See Sidney Mintz’s searing critique: ‘More on the Peculiar Institution’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids,Vol. 58 (1984), no: 3/4, Leiden, 185–91.

131 131. Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, p. 170.

132 132. Hall, 1989, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 110.

133 133. The situation was quite different during the 1790s when the Second Maroon War broke out. By then the slaves had come to see the Maroons as traitors not to be trusted and with whom they would have no dealings. See David Geggus, 1987, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s. New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 274–99.

134 134. Patterson, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts,’ pp. 301, 304.

135 135. Ibid., p. 305.

136 136. Barbara Kopytoff, 1978, ‘The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 287–307; Richard Hart, 1950, ‘Cudjoe and the First Maroon War in Jamaica’, Caribbean Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 46–79; Philip Wright, 1970, ‘War and Peace with the Maroons, 1730–1739’, Caribbean Quarterly, 16: 5–27.

137 137. Burford, 2020, op. cit., Chapter 4.

138 138. Geggus, op. cit., p. 299.

139 139. Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, Harvard University Press, 2020.

140 140. Jamaican historians and nationalists, especially those searching for what Black American historians sometimes call ‘a usable past’, have had real problems dealing with the Maroons. We would dearly love to celebrate their triumph over the Jamaican slaveholders and British imperial soldiers in 1739, but their subsequent record of treachery and bounty-hunting perfidy make this impossible. I remember my reaction, as a 17-year-old doing my first archival research at the Institute of Jamaica, to the records of their out-of-control butchery of rebels and innocent peasants in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. I cried.

141 141. Kathleen Wilson, 2009, ‘The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jan. 2009), p. 55.

142 142. Zoellner, op. cit., pp. 24–34.

143 143. Goveia, op. cit., p. 95.

144 144. Christer Petley, 2018,White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution, Oxford University Press, p. 60.

145 145. The provision ground system has been called the foundation for a ‘proto-peasantry’ by Mintz, as noted earlier and it was, indeed, cherished by the slaves in allowing some respite from the surveillance of the slaveholders, but one should be careful not to miss the fact that it was another element of exploitation. The system, in fact, did not quite work in that the slaves were chronically undernourished, and many lived on the verge of starvation with the risk of outright famine and mass starvation when hurricanes, drought and wars struck. See The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 216–18. Kenneth Kiple, 1984, The Caribbean Slave: A biological History, Cambridge University Press, pp. 66–70. See also, Richard B. Sheridan, 1976. ‘The crisis of slave subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution,’ William and Mary Quarterly,Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 615–41.

146 146. Especially the work of my former undergraduate teacher, M. G. Smith, not only his writings on West Indian pluralism, cited earlier, but other works such as his 1960 publication: Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950, an early model of historical sociology for me; West Indian Family Structure, 1962, Research Institute for the Study of Man; The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, 1960 (with R. Augier and R. M. Nettleford), Institute of Social and Economic Research.Other influential early studies include: the classic symposium edited by Vera Rubin, 1960, Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, Institute of Social and Economic Research; Raymond Smith, 1956, The Negro Family in British Guiana. Family Structure and Social Status in the Villages, Routledge; Sidney Mintz, 1959a, ‘The Plantation as a Socio-Cultural Type’, in Plantation Systems of the New World,Vera Rubin, ed., pp. 42–53, Washington, DC: Pan-American Union, 1959b, ‘Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica, 1800–1850’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 273–81; 1966, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, in Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, Vol. 9, pp. 912–37; Melville Herskovits, 1941, The Myth of the Negro Past, Harper & Brothers; 1937, Life in a Haitian Valley, Knopf.

147 147. On my theory of segmentary and synthetic creolization see ‘Context and Choice in Ethnic Allegiance: A Theoretical Framework and Caribbean Case Study’, in Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan, eds, 1975, Ethnicity:Theory and Experience, Harvard University Press, pp. 316–19. On the processes of cultural transmission and adaptation of African beliefs and values, see Orlando Patterson, 1976, ‘From Endo-deme to Matri-deme: An Interpretation of the Development of Kinship and Social Organization among the Slaves of Jamaica, 1655–1830’, in Samuel Proctor, Eighteenth Century Florida and the Caribbean, University Presses of Florida, pp. 50–9. See also ‘Persistence, Continuity and Change in the Jamaican Working Class Family’, Journal of Family History (1981), pp. 135–61.

148 148. Orlando Patterson, 1972, Die the Long Day.William Morrow. See Janelle Rodriques’ probing recent analysis of my treatment of death and mourning in this novel, ‘Myal, Death and Mourning in Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day’, Cultural Dynamics, June, 2021, pp. 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211011193

149 149. The striking differences in the demographic patterns of North America and the West Indies were remarked on from the late 18th century and used in abolitionist advocacy. See B. W. Higman, 1984, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834, pp. 305–6. It was noted by W. E. B. DuBois in his Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, Russell & Russell, 1935, p. 4. Philip Curtin drew closer attention to it in his 1969 work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 88–91; as did Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, in their 1974 study, Time on the Cross, W. W. Norton, p. 25.

150 150. Michael Tadman, 2000, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review,Vol. 105, No. 5, pp. 1534–75.

151 151. Richard S. Dunn, 2014, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, Harvard University Press, p. 73.

152 152. B.W. Higman, 1984, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean,1807–1834, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 304–7; 375–7. See also Kenneth K. Kiple, 1984, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History, Cambridge University Press, pp. 105–6.

153 153. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, 1979, ‘Recent Findings in the Study of Slave Demography and Family Structure’, Sociology and Social Research, Vol. 63, pp. 567–8. Michael Tadman, however, has challenged the view that mortality rates in the two regions were not far apart, as has Higman. See Tadman, 2000, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review,Vol. 105, No. 5, p. 1558.

154 154. T. G. Burnard, 2001, ‘Prodigious Riches’: The Wealth of Jamaica before the American Revolution’, Economic History Review, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 519–20.

155 155. R. B. Sheridan, 1965, ‘The Wealth of Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 292, 311. Burnard, 2001, op. cit., found that Sheridan greatly underestimated the island’s wealth.

156 156. Douglas Hall, 1962, ‘Slaves and Slavery in the British West Indies’, Social and Economic Studies,Vol. 11, No. 4, p. 307.

157 157. Tadman, op. cit., it should be noted, argues that the diet of U.S. slaves may not even have been the cause of their exceptional rates of natural increase, p. 1559. This, however, is controversial.

158 158. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus, 2016, The Plantation Machine, p. 38.

159 159. For a detailed examination of the contrasting demographic strategies of U.S. and Jamaican slaveholders, see Kenneth Kiple, op. cit., pp. 104–19.

160 160. The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 94–112. Building on the pioneer work of George Roberts, 1957, The Population of Jamaica, Cambridge University Press, especially Chapters 6–8.

161 161. Kiple, ibid., p. 103.

162 162. H. Klein and S. Engerman, 1978, ‘Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the British West Indies’, William & Mary Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 357–74.

163 163. For one explanation for the ‘anomaly’ of Barbados, see Michael Tadman, op. cit., p. 1565.

164 164. See Higman, 1984, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, p. 314.

165 165. Kiple, op. cit., p. 34.

166 166. Verene A. Shepherd, 2002, ‘Petticoat Rebellion?’: The Black Woman’s Body and Voice in the Struggles for Freedom in Colonial Jamaica’, In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean History, and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson, p. 24.

167 167. On which, see Hall, 1989, In Miserable Slavery, p. 135.

168 168. Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 161–3.

169 169. Kenneth Morgan, 2006. ‘Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c1776–1834’, History 91(302): 231–53.

170 170. Trevor Burnard, 2004, Mastery,Tyranny, and Desire, pp. 156–62.

171 171. Michael Tadman, 2000, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review,Vol. 105, No. 5, pp. 1534–75, 1555, 1561.

172 172. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations, pp. 163–4.

173 173. Tadman, op. cit., pp. 1538, 1543.

174 174. See George Roberts, 1957, The Population of Jamaica, Cambridge University Press, pp. 42–5.

175 175. Thomas J. Marchione, 1980, ‘A History of Breast-Feeding Practices in the English-Speaking Caribbean in the Twentieth Century’, Food and Nutrition Bulletin, Vol. 2, No. 2, The United Nations University, pp. 1–11.

176 176. The striking differences in the demographic patterns of North America and the West Indies were remarked on from the late 18th century and used in abolitionist advocacy. See B. W. Higman, 1984, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834, pp. 305–6. It was noted by W. E. B. DuBois in his Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, Russell & Russell (1935), p. 4. Philip Curtin drew closer attention to it in his 1969 work, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 88–91; as did Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman in their 1974 study, Time on the Cross,W.W. Norton, p. 25.

177 177. The question of the demographic impact of the Atlantic slave trade on West Africa is a thorny one, which this argument carefully avoids. See Patrick Manning, ‘The Slave Trade: The Formal Demography of a Global System’, in J. I. Inikori and S. Engerman, eds, 1992, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas and Europe, Duke University Press, pp. 117–41.

178 178. On which, see Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., 1996, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Westview Press. And more recently Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses, eds, 2010, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, Oxford University Press, especially parts 3 and 4.

179 179. A. Dirk Moses, 2008, ‘The Fate of Blacks and Jews: A Response to Jeffrey Herf’, Journal of Genocide Research,Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 275.

180 180. Jeffrey Herf, ‘Comparative Perspectives on Anti-Semitism, Radical Anti-Semitism in the Holocaust and American White Racism’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2007, pp. 575–600; Seymour Drescher, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis’, in Rosenbaum, op. cit., pp. 65–85.

181 181. Marion A. Kaplan, 1998, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, p. 288. See also pp. 5, 9, 34–6, 150–60, 166, 173–9, 184–200, 299.

182 182. Daniel J. Goldhagen, 1997, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, pp. 168–9.

183 183. Claudia Card, 2003, ‘Genocide and Social Death’, Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 1, Feminist Philosophy and the Problem of Evil, pp. 63–79.

184 184. Card, ibid., p. 63.

185 185. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, pp. 21, 25.

186 186. Ibid., p. 21.

187 187. James M. Phillippo, 1843, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, James M. Campbell & Co. p. 95. He also notes that ‘suicide was awfully prevalent’, p. 97.

188 188. The term was coined by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 study, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection, Roman & Allanfield. It was estimated at 100 million by the Economist in 2010 and by Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen at 117 million in 2015. https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/4182-amartya-sen-suggests-solutions-to-gendercide; Economist, 6th March 2010: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2010/03/04/gendercide.Note that the term refers to ‘the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender)’ and includes males, as in the Serbian sex-selective massacre of ethnic-Albanian men in 1999, or the Stalinist purges. However, my focus is on female gendercide, which more approximates the genocidal missing bodies of Jamaican slave society, since the vast majority of the 117 female victims of gendercide are ‘missing’ persons not allowed an existence because of their gender.

189 189. Mary Ann Warren, Gendercide, cited in Adam Jones, 2000, ‘Gendercide and Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research,Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 185–211.

190 190. Dan Stone, ‘Genocide and Memory’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, pp. 102, 114.

191 191. Sharpe was proclaimed a National Hero of Jamaica in 1975. A Teacher’s College in Montego Bay is named after him, and a memorial erected in that city, the main urban site of the revolution, in his honor. His image graces the Jamaican $50 bill.

192 192. Emancipation Day 2021 Message by Prime Minister, the Most Honorable Andrew Holness, ON, PC, MP, 1st August 2021. Jamaica Information Service. https://jis.gov.jm/speeches/emancipation-day-2021-message-by-prime-minister-the-most-hon-andrew-holness-on-pc-mp/

193 193. The U.N. Global Study of Homicide, 2019.

194 194. Ian Thomson, 2011, The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica, Nation Books.

195 195. For a more historically grounded reflection on the historical roots of contemporary violence in Jamaica, see Michele Lemonius, 2017, ‘Deviously Ingenious’: British Colonialism in Jamaica’, Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 79–103.

196 196. Dan Stone, op. cit., p. 115.

197 197. I echo here Hannah Arendt, 1963, New Yorker essay, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, by which she meant the normalization of wickedness, which is about as apt a description of Jamaican slave society as I can think of.

198 198. Orlando Patterson, 1972, Die the Long Day, William Morrow.