Colleen A. Vasconcellos. Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788–1838

Twenty years ago, Wilma King published Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America. Largely based on the slave narratives of the Federal Writers’ Project, this was the first book to offer a detailed examination of the lives of American slave children. Now Colleen Vasconcellos has attempted to provide a similar study for Jamaican slavery. However, because there are hardly any slave narratives for Jamaica, Slavery, Childhood and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788–1838 assesses not only the lived experiences of Jamaican slave children but also how the planters and the slave community defined childhood in the five decades preceding emancipation. In particular, the book’s concern is to unravel the impact of the abolitionist movement on the ways in which Jamaican planters viewed and treated the children on their plantations. King structures her book around particular experiences of slave children, ranging from work and leisure to education and trauma. Although her source material sheds far more light on planter attitudes toward Jamaican slave children, rather than the lived experiences of these children, Vasconcellos has opted for a similar structure as King. She divides this short book into four chapters. The first examines how abolitionism and, in particular, the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 affected the lives of slave children as workers. It also explores how slave children responded to the changes in their working conditions up to the passing of the abolition act in 1833. Two thematic chapters follow this broad overview, one that deals with mixed-race slave children and the other with education, respectively. The last chapter covers the so-called apprenticeship period of 1834 until 1838, when children born after August 1, 1834 were free and the rest were apprenticed part-time to their former owners.

Abolitionism · Art · Emancipation · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law