[M]anaged at First as if They Were Beasts”

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves

Ethnology · Opposition (politics · Political science · Seasoning · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law · Ecology

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• Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

  Philip D Morgan•The William and Mary Quarterly•1995

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