The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

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The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


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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


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