Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9080693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Paton (0000-0003-2500-3964) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 923-954 |
| Publication date | 2001-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Social History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4529 • E-ISSN: 1527-1897 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jsh.2001.0066 |
| PMID | 18754158 |
| OpenAlex | W2040653108 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 43 |
| References cited | 33 |
Previous analyses of the punishment of slaves in the British colonies have concentrated on the period after 1780. This article uses the mid-eighteenth-century records of the slave court of the parish of St. Andrew, Jamaica, to analyze the crimes for which slaves were prosecuted and the judicial punishments they received. Prosecutions concentrated heavily on a few offences, especially theft and running away. Punishments were severe and were largely concerned with the slave's body; they included death, flogging, transportation, and bodily mutilation. Some punishments made use of the cotton tree, which figured significantly in Afro-Jamaican cosmology, suggesting that the authorities were trying to harness or combat the power of obeah. The article compares the Jamaican slave court's practice to that of British courts in the same period, as well as to the experience of slaves under other jurisdictions. The slave court enacted rituals that both dramatized and sustained power relations, but rather than representing the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of law, as did the contemporary British spectacle of trial and punishment, the Jamaican court's practice emphasized the difference between enslaved and free, valorizing the private penal power of the master under slavery
Criminology · Media studies · Political science · Punishment (psychology) · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Obeah Acts
Bibliography of Articles and Books Published on Colonialism and Imperialism in 2001
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White Cannibalism in the Illegal Slave Trade
Contradictions of Culture and Oppression
Introducing Religious Reparations
Punishing the Criminal Corpse, 1700-1840
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Registration and Deportation
The South Sea Bubble and the Erasure of Slavery and Impressment
Moral Management in Mental Health Institutions in the British Colonial West Indies
Ignorance as a Productive Force in Complex Storyworlds
Dynamics of Racial Mixing in New Orleans and St. Augustine (Florida) in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
An economic rationale for the different methods of feeding enslaved people in the antebellum South and British West Indies
A Case for Naming Racial Violence
Dutch spirits, East Indians, and Hindu deities in Guyana
The Power of Procedure
[S]old to Any One Who Would Buy Them”
A descent into Hellshire
Fighting With the Enemy's Weapons
Enclosures abound
To Soften the Extreme Rigor of Their Bondage”
The Convict Peace
"Luxurious Resting Places for the Idle and Vicious"? The Rise and Fall of Penal Reform in Jamaica in the 1840s
Revisiting No Bond but the Law
Aliens in a Revolutionary World
Judges, Masters, Diviners
Sovereignty, Mastery, and Law in the Danish West Indies, 1672–1733
Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780–1838
The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing
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Analysis of an African Burial Ground in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica
Exploring the infeasibility of enforcing mandatory in-prison rehabilitation in Jamaica
The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape
From Slavery to Social Class to Disadvantage
Unsettling the Slave Master
The power of speech
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The London Hanged
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Contested States
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Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare
The 11 o'clock flog
Alternative husbandry
Sentence of death by burning for women
Doctors and Slaves
The Planters Suffer Little or Nothing”
Military and Civilian Justice in Eighteenth-Century England
Black Justice Under White Law
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| Unique citing works | 43 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,79 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2026 (25) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 37 |