The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

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The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


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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.

      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.


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