The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

Press, pp. 71–109.

      121 121. Richard Dunn, 1972, Sugar and Slaves, pp. xiii–xv.

      122 122. Fifty years after The Sociology of Slavery, Trevor Burnard in his Jamaica in the Age of Revolution pp. 28–30, has rediscovered the theoretical significance of Hobbes for an understanding of Jamaican slave society. What took so long?

      123 123. The Sociology of Slavery, p. 10.

      124 124. Goveia, 1965, op. cit., pp. 94–5.

      125 125. Burnard, 2020, op. cit., p. 19.

      126 126. Here is where Goveia and I differ. She concluded that the whites ‘had all the authority and prestige of an established elite, accustomed to manipulate and overawe the lower classes they governed’, op. cit., p. 94. However, our difference is due to the difference in the societies we studied. Jamaica was different from the Leeward Islands in this respect, as it was from Barbados which, I have recently argued, did develop rule based on both force and effective Hobbesian ‘sovereignty by institutions’ in contrast with Jamaica where the institutions existed but did not quite work, certainly not for the Black population. See Orlando Patterson, 2019. The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University Press, Chapter 1.

      127 127. I was to read this years later in Douglas Hall’s edition of the Thistlewood diary, first published in 1989: In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 204. However, my interpretation in the early 1960s of the archival and contemporary evidence on Jamaica slavery left me in no doubt that this was how many of the enslaved felt and that, apart from the Black and coloured kapos on the plantation, the typical Black field worker had little or no respect for the whites or freed Blacks. Sociology of Slavery, pp. 91–2.

      128 128. Orlando Patterson, 1970, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655–1740’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 289–325. The other being the literary sequel, my novel, Die the Long Day,William Morrow, 1972.

      129 129. Vincent Brown, 2020, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Harvard University Press.

      130 130. Michael Craton, 2009, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Cornell University Press. See Sidney Mintz’s searing critique: ‘More on the Peculiar Institution’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids,Vol. 58 (1984), no: 3/4, Leiden, 185–91.

      131 131. Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, p. 170.

      132 132. Hall, 1989, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 110.

      133 133. The situation was quite different during the 1790s when the Second Maroon War broke out. By then the slaves had come to see the Maroons as traitors not to be trusted and with whom they would have no dealings. See David Geggus, 1987, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s. New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 274–99.

      134 134. Patterson, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts,’ pp. 301, 304.

      135 135. Ibid., p. 305.

      136 136. Barbara Kopytoff, 1978, ‘The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 287–307; Richard Hart, 1950, ‘Cudjoe and the First Maroon War in Jamaica’, Caribbean Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 46–79; Philip Wright, 1970, ‘War and Peace with the Maroons, 1730–1739’, Caribbean Quarterly, 16: 5–27.

      137 137. Burford, 2020, op. cit., Chapter 4.

      138 138. Geggus, op. cit., p. 299.

      139 139. Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, Harvard University Press, 2020.

      140 140. Jamaican historians and nationalists, especially those searching for what Black American historians sometimes call ‘a usable past’, have had real problems dealing with the Maroons. We would dearly love to celebrate their triumph over the Jamaican slaveholders and British imperial soldiers in 1739, but their subsequent record of treachery and bounty-hunting perfidy make this impossible. I remember my reaction, as a 17-year-old doing my first archival research at the Institute of Jamaica, to the records of their out-of-control butchery of rebels and innocent peasants in the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. I cried.

      141 141. Kathleen Wilson, 2009, ‘The Performance of Freedom: Maroons and the Colonial Order in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the Atlantic Sound’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Jan. 2009), p. 55.

      142 142. Zoellner, op. cit., pp. 24–34.

      143 143. Goveia, op. cit., p. 95.

      144 144. Christer Petley, 2018,White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution, Oxford University Press, p. 60.

      145 145. The provision ground system has been called the foundation for a ‘proto-peasantry’ by Mintz, as noted earlier and it was, indeed, cherished by the slaves in allowing some respite from the surveillance of the slaveholders, but one should be careful not to miss the fact that it was another element of exploitation. The system, in fact, did not quite work in that the slaves were chronically undernourished, and many lived on the verge of starvation with the risk of outright famine and mass starvation when hurricanes, drought and wars struck. See The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 216–18. Kenneth Kiple, 1984, The Caribbean Slave: A biological History, Cambridge University Press, pp. 66–70. See also, Richard B. Sheridan, 1976. ‘The crisis of slave subsistence in the British West Indies during and after the American Revolution,’ William and Mary Quarterly,Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 615–41.

      146 146. Especially the work of my former undergraduate teacher, M. G. Smith, not only his writings on West Indian pluralism, cited earlier, but other works such as his 1960 publication: Government in Zazzau, 1800–1950, an early model of historical sociology for me; West Indian Family Structure, 1962, Research Institute for the Study of Man; The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, 1960 (with R. Augier and R. M. Nettleford), Institute of Social and Economic Research.Other influential early studies include: the classic symposium edited by Vera Rubin, 1960, Caribbean Studies: A Symposium, Institute of Social and Economic Research; Raymond Smith, 1956, The Negro Family in British Guiana. Family Structure and Social Status in the Villages, Routledge; Sidney Mintz, 1959a, ‘The Plantation as a Socio-Cultural Type’, in Plantation Systems of the New World,Vera Rubin, ed., pp. 42–53, Washington, DC: Pan-American Union, 1959b, ‘Labor and Sugar in Puerto Rico and in Jamaica, 1800–1850’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 273–81; 1966, ‘The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area’, in Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale, Vol. 9, pp. 912–37; Melville Herskovits, 1941, The Myth of the Negro Past, Harper & Brothers; 1937, Life in a Haitian Valley, Knopf.

      147 147. On my theory of segmentary and synthetic creolization see ‘Context and Choice in Ethnic Allegiance: A Theoretical Framework and Caribbean Case Study’, in Nathan Glazer and Patrick Moynihan, eds, 1975, Ethnicity:Theory and Experience, Harvard University Press, pp. 316–19. On the processes of cultural transmission and adaptation of African beliefs and values, see Orlando Patterson, 1976, ‘From Endo-deme to Matri-deme: An Interpretation of the Development of Kinship and Social Organization among the Slaves of Jamaica, 1655–1830’, in Samuel Proctor, Eighteenth Century Florida and the Caribbean, University Presses of Florida, pp. 50–9. See also ‘Persistence, Continuity and Change in the Jamaican Working Class Family’, Journal of Family History (1981), pp. 135–61.

      148 148. Orlando Patterson, 1972, Die the Long Day.William Morrow. See Janelle Rodriques’ probing recent analysis of my treatment of death and mourning in this novel, ‘Myal, Death and Mourning in Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day’, Cultural Dynamics, June, 2021, pp. 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1177/09213740211011193

      149 149. The striking differences in the demographic patterns of North America and the West Indies were remarked on from the late 18th century and used in abolitionist advocacy. See B. W. Higman, 1984, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834, pp. 305–6. It was noted by W. E. B. DuBois in his Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, Russell & Russell,