The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

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The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


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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.

      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


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