No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780?1870 By Diana Paton

Violence and intimacy in colonial and postcolonial Africa

“…His contribution advances recent scholarship on incarceration and convict labour in post-emancipation contexts. While existing scholarship has begun to highlight the ways in which local penal systems were embedded in trans-imperial circulations of ideas and practices of punishment and forced labour contexts (Lichtenstein 1996;Paton 2004;Penn 2008;Anderson 2011;Jean 2016;Lopes 2022), Holdridge's focus on violent intimacies sheds light on the '"messiness" of human actions' that exposed the imperfections of colonial rule.…”

Oceanic Mobility and the Empire of the Pass System

“…In many ways, this version of the pass fructified in the context of debates about slavery's abolition, which Diana Paton notes took place in the same discursive field as debates about punishment facilitated the expansion of magistracy or police power. 55 The pass built on those debates, by deepening the distinction between forms of labor while simultaneously placing them on a continuum in relation to idleness and enshrining them in law. 56 In the Indian Ocean too, this work of the pass system is best illustrated in British-controlled Mauritius.…”

The Death Penalty in Barbados: Reforming a Colonial Legacy

“…In these years, 'racial thinking … propelled these law and order reforms to top priority' (Patterson Smith 1994: 141). As Paton (2004) cautioned, we should not imagine a stark binary between the slavery and post-emancipation periods, as modes of punishment and control traversed this dateline. Nevertheless, significant change occurred across these eras, and new laws dealing specifically with crime and punishment were enacted for the purpose of imposing repressive state control on the formerly enslaved.…”