The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson
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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