Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Abstract

Students of criminal justice, crime, and punishment have long insisted that to understand the role and operation of law in any society, it is necessary to go beyond the examination of statutes. 1 The texts of statutory laws reflect pressures on lawmakers and may reveal an elite's sense of the ideological, social and political needs of the moment. They do not, however, reveal the working of the law in daily life. Laws may be ignored: they may be applied in ways that differ markedly from their wording and from the intentions of those who drafted them. Especially in the case of criminal law, we need to look at the workings of courts and other judicial and penal institutions to understand how the law was actually applied, interpreted, and understood. In this article, I use a newly discovered record of slave trials in eighteenth-century Jamaica to investigate the quotidian practices of the slave courts. Jamaican slave courts and the punishments they inflicted, I suggest, enacted rituals that both dramatized and sustained the power relations of this colonial slave society. Rather than representing the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of law, as did the contemporary English spectacle of trial and punishment, Jamaican judicial practice emphasized the difference between enslaved and free, and valorized the slaveholder's private penal power.The injunction to examine the working of courts in context is relatively easily obeyed in societies where judicial decisions were diligently recorded. English historians, for instance, have used the reams of paper generated by the courts that dealt with serious crimes. As a result we have detailed accounts both of the relative frequencies of different kinds of criminal prosecutions and the outcomes of those prosecuted, and of the nature of interactions in and outside the courrroom.i Even in England, where many court decisions were recorded, the great majority of legal interactions are beyond the reach of the quantitative historian, since they were made by magistrates who did not note down their decisions.' In addition, legal records produced within the common law tradition rarely give more than summary information about the content of cases; they lack the detailed records of evidence produced by continental European legal systems.

Conclusion

“…They also resorted to spiking (decapitation followed by the display of the offenders head on a pole), a punishment that was still being used quite extensively in Ireland during the crisis years of the 1790s. 29 As Clare Anderson has pointed out, 'in the colonies, gruesome forms of mutilation constituted an element of capital sentences for much longer than in Great Britain', 30 and further research is clearly needed to analyse when and why this pattern changed.…”

Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective

“…Together with the new approaches of Mintz and others, research into slaves and slavery has seen a blossoming of comparative research and new approaches from the side of culturalistoriented world and global historiography, as well as a series of new research orientations, such as ''racism and slavery'', 47 ''transculturation, diaspora/migration history'', 48 including trans-Atlantic construction of identities, ethnicities, and Atlantic creoles, 49 ''comparative history of slavery'', 50 ''history from below'', not only of slavery as an institution but first of all based on slave voices, life histories, and experiences, including ''abolition and post-emancipation'', 51 ''social history of law and slavery'', 52 ''social history of medicine'' (and sciences in general), 53 as well as international history, microhistory, in particular Atlantic history, history of the seas and migrations, 54 history of slaveries and creolizations in different spaces of the Indian Ocean, 55 or ''translocal/transnational'' cultural history, 56 with the variants of ''new'' imperial history, 57 histories of diasporas, and translocal south-south history. 58 More recently, the themes ''religion and slavery'' (if the slavers were only interested in the bodies of the enslaved, slaves in their agency transcended the individualities of the dead and the ubiquity of death), 59 ''women, children, and slavery'', 60 and ''gender and slavery'' 61 have also begun to play major roles, the high point of research so far (resulting in new criteria of analysis for a genuinely global history of slavery from today's perspective) being the two volumes of Women and Slavery and Children in Slavery. The appearance of Joseph Miller's article of synthesis on this subject is also not accidental.…”

Diasporic Africans and Postcolonial Brazil: Notes on the intersection of diaspora, transnationalism, and nation

“…Much has been written about the public torture and execution of slaves throughout the African diaspora, performed by masters and the state in order to orchestrate a reign of terror over the bodies and souls of the enslaved (Brown, 2008;Paton, 2001). Th e evidence indicates that Venerote's slaves were fully versed in this language of terror and deliberately inverted it in staging his execution.…”