The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

Sharpe was proclaimed a National Hero of Jamaica in 1975. A Teacher’s College in Montego Bay is named after him, and a memorial erected in that city, the main urban site of the revolution, in his honor. His image graces the Jamaican $50 bill.

      192 192. Emancipation Day 2021 Message by Prime Minister, the Most Honorable Andrew Holness, ON, PC, MP, 1st August 2021. Jamaica Information Service. https://jis.gov.jm/speeches/emancipation-day-2021-message-by-prime-minister-the-most-hon-andrew-holness-on-pc-mp/

      193 193. The U.N. Global Study of Homicide, 2019.

      194 194. Ian Thomson, 2011, The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica, Nation Books.

      195 195. For a more historically grounded reflection on the historical roots of contemporary violence in Jamaica, see Michele Lemonius, 2017, ‘Deviously Ingenious’: British Colonialism in Jamaica’, Peace Research, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 79–103.

      196 196. Dan Stone, op. cit., p. 115.

      197 197. I echo here Hannah Arendt, 1963, New Yorker essay, ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil’, by which she meant the normalization of wickedness, which is about as apt a description of Jamaican slave society as I can think of.

      198 198. Orlando Patterson, 1972, Die the Long Day, William Morrow.

PREFACE

      JAMAICA, and the other West Indian Islands, are unique in World history in that they present one of the rare cases of a human society being artificially created for the satisfaction of one clearly defined goal: that of making money through the production of sugar. In 1655 both the British masters and their slaves, who were later to come in such vast numbers, were total strangers to the land upon which they were destined to build a completely new society. The vast majority of the people who were to mould this society came against their will. This was true not only of the slaves, but of the large numbers of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English, who, coming originally as indentured servants and, later, under the pressure of economic deprivation, were as much the victims of the capitalist exploiters of England as were the bewildered tribesmen of Africa whose labour they were to supervise.

And of those whites who came to the colony with the high hopes of quickly making their fortunes and returning home many indeed were to spend the rest of their days bemoaning their foolhardiness. For Jamaican slave society was no place for the poor, ambitious pioneer. After the first fifty hectic years of indecision during which an unscrupulous few may have fulfilled their dreams, Jamaica developed into what it would remain for the rest of the period of slavery: a monstrous distortion of human society. It was not just the physical cruelty of the system that made it so perverse, for in this the society was hardly unique. What marks it out is the astonishing neglect and distortion of almost every one of the basic prerequisites of normal human living. This was a society in which clergymen were the ‘most finished debauchees’ in the land; in which the institution of marriage was officially condemned among both masters and slaves; in which the family was unthinkable to the vast majority of the population and promiscuity the norm; in which education was seen as an absolute waste of time and teachers shunned like the plague; in which the legal system was quite deliberately a travesty of anything that could be called justice; and in which all forms of refinements, of art, of folkways, were either absent or in a state of total disintegration. Only a small proportion of whites who monopolized almost all the fertile land in the island, benefited from the system. And these, no sooner had they secured their fortunes, abandoned the land which the production of their own wealth had made unbearable to live in, for the comforts of the mother country.

      The question which one inevitably asks on confronting this unnatural situation is how was it that it managed not to fall into total anarchy? How was such a system able to survive for nearly two centuries? This work is an attempt to answer this question. Posed in this way, it is clear that while the data employed is largely historical, the treatment of the subject is, of necessity, sociological. The society during the period of slavery presents a remarkable case study of the nature of social values and of social change. More important, it is of marked relevance to the fundamental sociological problem of social order and control. Few systems indeed have ever come closer to the brink of the Hobbesian state of nature and, as such, the sociologist researching this society is faced with the fascinating situation of examining on a concrete level the most basic question of his discipline; one which, nearly always, has been posed in the most abstract of terms.

      But this is not to say that the work is intended solely for sociologists. On the contrary, it is hoped that it will fill a vital gap in the history of Jamaica and the other English speaking West Indian Islands. So far, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the historiography of the West Indies has developed in two directions. On the one hand there are the large number of works by scholars of imperial history to whom the islands are of significance only in so far as they represented the platform upon which the European powers thrashed out their imperial differences. On the other hand, there are the scholarly, though often tedious works of those historians who have concentrated almost exclusively on the constitutional development of the islands.

It is easy to understand why the historians of the colonizing society and those of the local white plantocratic and settler élite should have so narrowed their perspectives. As Fannon so rightly observes: ‘The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother-country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves’. Thus, one looks in vain throughout the volumes of the Jamaican Historical Review for any paper of significance on the negro population of the island, (which, since 1700 always constituted more than 90 per cent of the total population) either during slavery or afterwards.

      Nor is it difficult to understand why this tradition should have been so faithfully preserved by the recently emerged bourgeois intelligentsia of the formerly enslaved negro population. This is merely an indication of the effectiveness of the process of mystification which has had three-hundred years of British colonial rule within which to consolidate and impose its crippling influence.

      This is the first attempt therefore, to analyse, in all its aspects, the nature of the society which existed during slavery in Jamaica, and in particular, to concentrate on the mass of the Negro people whose labour, whose skills, whose suffering and whose perseverance and, at times, defiance, managed to maintain the system, without breaking – like the Arawaks under their Spanish masters before them – under its yoke.

      This work is a revised version of a doctoral thesis which was written at the London School of Economics under the supervision of Professor David Glass. It is difficult to over-estimate the debt I owe to Professor Glass; the guidance, encouragement and criticisms which he made throughout the various stages of the writing of the original manuscript were invaluable. I am, of course, entirely responsible for whatever inelegance of style or misinterpretation of data that may exist in the final version.

I must also acknowledge my gratitude to the librarians and attendants of both the Manuscript Department and the Reading Room of the British Museum; to the officials and attendants of the Public Records Office, London; to the Librarian of the Royal Commonwealth Society; to the Secretary of the Library of the West India Committee, London; and to the Librarian and attendants of the London School of Economics. Thanks are also due to the Librarian and attendants of the Institute of Jamaica; to the Archivist of the Jamaica Archives; to the Librarian and attendants of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica; and to Mr Pat Rousseau, The Accountant and Manager of Worthy Park Estate, Jamaica, who not only arranged for me to read the private historical documents of the Estate, but very kindly provided me with a guide to the slave ruins of the plantation. To Mrs Leonie Amiel and Miss Kathrin Phillips who typed, respectively, the original and revised versions of this work, my warmest thanks.

      During the three years in which I carried out the research for this work I was supported by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. It is