Higman has also written most extensively from the dominion perspective, as have an impressive number of other scholars. As I have already hinted, he somewhat normalizes the role of the white slaveholder class and the slave economic system, especially in his study of the managerial aspect of the plantation regime. His Plantation Jamaica:1750–185064 is an important and necessary work, but one reads it with some unease, a bit like reading a meticulous analysis of the Nazi Totenkopfverbände, the SS Death’s-Head Battalions that guarded and managed the concentration camps. Like all his other works, it is expertly crafted and thoroughly documented, and he is unsentimental in his approach to the subject, writing in the introduction:
Their business was exploitation and part of my task is to assess how efficiently they carried out that enterprise. It is only by taking this perspective that it is possible to understand the working of the larger system of plantation economy and the role of enslaved and free workers within the society. The people who did the hard work of the plantations remain essentially voiceless in the narrative, reduced to the tools of capital and themselves literally human capital. It is a harsh story.
Quite so. Nonetheless, other works such as Burnard’s are consistently more critical.65 From the older generation one may single out those of Brathwaite,66 Sheridan,67 the Bridenbaughs,68 Greene69 and Dunn.70 It may strike some as odd that I have classified Brathwaite’s work as a dominion study but, contrary to the popular view of the work as one focused on the life and culture of the slaves, it is largely devoted to the political, social and economic structure of the society and the role and attitude of the whites: only 59 of the text’s 312 pages directly examines the Black population. Brathwaite’s work is strongly influenced by Elsa Goveia’s study of the Leeward Islands, both in its attempt to interpret Jamaica during the same period of time as a systemic whole, and in his use of the creolization concept, neither of which is sufficiently acknowledged. In any case, his use of the concept of creolization is problematic in light of the still pluralistic and ‘disunited’ state of Jamaica and other West Indian societies emphasized by Goveia,71 the failure to distinguish localization from creolization, and the assumption that creolization entails assimilation and harmony, especially in sexual relations and racial mixing. His extraordinary view that it was ‘in the intimate area of sexual relations’ that ‘inter-cultural creolization took place’ by engendering a mixed group that helped ‘to integrate the society’,72 would certainly have been rejected by Goveia and, after the sickening revelations on Thomas Thistlewood73 whose cruelty and insatiable sexual sadism Douglas Hall agrees was the norm in Jamaica,74 must now be viewed with disbelief. The commonly held view that Brathwaite ‘coined and deployed the term creolization as a theory of Caribbean culture’, recently asserted by Kamugisha, is incorrect and puzzling.75 The concept was long in use among linguists, and its extension to Caribbean cultural processes received its definitive theoretical formulation in a 1968 conference at the University of the West Indies (coming after Goveia’s empirical use of the term), described by the Finnish creole scholar Angela Bartens as ‘one of the major events which initiated the era of modern creolistics’,76 a quarter of whose attendees were social scientists and historians, myself included, that Brathwaite would certainly have known about.77
Prominent among earlier scholars who, in critical reaction against the acculturation studies of Herskovits, had clearly articulated a conception of the Caribbean as a space in which creolization was the norm, was Sidney Mintz, who spent a lifetime researching the problem and developing a theoretical framework for understanding it.78 One prominent creole linguist who has extended her work from language to the socio-cultural domain of what she calls the ‘creole space’ is Bartens, whose book is an important contribution to the historical sociology of creolization that deserves greater attention among Caribbeanists.79 Given its roots in the study of language, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the most theoretically sophisticated and empirically informed works on the Jamaican creolization process is by the critically acclaimed British historian of French and Francophone Caribbean literature, Richard D. E. Burton.80
Mary Turner’s81 thoroughly documented, well-written work on the island during the same period covered by Brathwaite, paints a more complex, conflict-ridden system from which the religious sphere was not spared. The works of Sheridan, the Bridenbaughs and Dunn are especially valuable in placing Jamaica within its broader West Indian context, the latter two emphasizing the failure of early British Jamaica as a social system.82 Greene’s recent study offers a wealth of information on a wide range of social and economic activities, land use and demographic patterns at an unusual level of detail, and for the period of the mid-18th century too often neglected in recent studies.83
One quaint work on Jamaican slavery by the American historian Vincent Brown,84 has left me and many historians from the region perplexed. According to Brown, the catastrophic mortality rate in Jamaica for both blacks and whites, far from hardening attitudes towards death, was the source of cultural creation, ‘the principal arena of social life and gave rise to its customs’. This is a polished production, well received, but it describes a world unfamiliar to nearly all of us who have closely studied Jamaican slave society. True, there were elaborate funeral rites among the enslaved, mainly adaptations of African mortuary rituals to the exigencies of the plantation dead yards in which death was celebrated, when given the chance, as a return passage to Africa, which I discussed at some length in The Sociology of Slavery (pp. 195–207). Brown argues, however, that death and its rituals were central to life and culture at all levels and among all ethno-racial groups in Jamaican slave society. I found no evidence of any such cultural preoccupation in my years of study of Jamaica, nor has any of the many outstanding historians mentioned above who have studied the period over the past century. To the contrary, insofar as the most reliable contemporary observers mention the subject, it was to comment on the callous indifference of the whites of all classes to death and dying. Lady Nugent, one of the most astute observers of the late period, repeatedly expressed distress and astonishment that ‘here no one appears to think or feel for those who are suffering from these frightful attacks’ (17th August 1801) and, two weeks later, ‘that the usual occurrence of a death had taken place. Poor Mr Sandiford had died at 4 o’clock this morning … but all around us appeared quite callous’, then on the 10th December that same year: ‘He disgusted me very much the other day, by making a joke of poor Lord Hugh’s death; but it is a common custom here.’ [emphasis added]85 Thomas Thistlewood in his thirty-six years of living and keeping a diary on life in Jamaica offers not a single instance of any such preoccupation, the death of fellow whites such as the glutton who ‘eats as much as four moderate people would do’, treated as a matter-of-fact event that he had coming. The novelist Matthew Lewis, who had an extremely keen eye for anything unusual about Jamaican conventions and, as a celebrated gothic novelist, would certainly have been alert to unusual death customs among his fellow whites, comments informatively about the ‘African’ burial customs, obeah beliefs and ancestor worship of the blacks, but tells us nothing unusual about the whites’ responses to death.86 The response to Lewis’ own death is revealing. As the most celebrated slaveholder of his time, one would have expected what Brown describes as ‘intense and significant political activity’ and familial mourning rituals around his death. Instead, few mourned the rich man’s death, the editor of the journal, Judith Terry, commenting: ‘Celebrity that he was, his death caused hardly a ripple.’87 On this we can all agree: Professor Brown has forcefully restated the well-known fact that death was pervasive in Jamaican slave society.
One category of dominion studies concerns the development and role of the coloured or mixed racial group and of manumission in Jamaica, a subject first extensively explored by Goveia in her study of the Leeward Islands. The group was relatively small, but of increasing importance and influence from the late 18th century, attracting the racist venom of the island’s most educated and important 18th-century resident, Edward Long.88