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
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