There was one other important personal experience in England that greatly influenced the writing of The Sociology of Slavery. Not long after we arrived in England, Norman Girvan, Walter Rodney and I received a note from C. L. R James, summoning us to a weekly meeting with him at his London apartment (we never figured out how James came to know of our existence). We obeyed, of course, read every item on the reading list he sent us and, for the better part of a university term, we literally sat at the feet of the great man – there were not enough chairs in his modest flat, but the seating arrangement was symbolically appropriate – and listened to his interpretation of Marxism, with its strongly Trotskyite slant. James, of course, had been a friend of Trotsky, so the three of us were simply awed at the fact that we were getting the true vision of Marxist theory from someone who had got it from the horse’s mouth of one of Marxism’s founding fathers. Interestingly, James made no attempt to change my approach to the study of slavery in Jamaica, grounded theoretically more in Hobbes than Marx and, indeed, encouraged me to probe as deeply as I could into the lives and mode of survival of the enslaved. His deep interest in Caribbean society superseded any theoretical interest he may have had when discussing my work with me. Never once did he raise the subject of the slave mode of production. He had only recently returned from Trinidad, where he had been deeply involved with the decolonization movement before his final split with Eric Williams and was writing the appendix to the 1963 edition of the Black Jacobins,4 entitled, ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’, to which he occasionally referred during our meetings.
The contrast with my New Left associates could not have been greater. We both agreed that, as West Indians, all our problems and cultural distinctiveness originated in slavery and the succeeding colonial situation. At the time, James was also writing one of his great classic studies, Beyond a Boundary, on the role of cricket in West Indian culture; his very grounded treatment of the subject was similar to my own approach to Jamaican slavery and underdevelopment. James was also instrumental in the publication of my first novel, The Children of Sisyphus, which he recommended to his publisher, without even asking me, after reading the manuscript that I had nervously left with him after one of our meetings, later writing a long and very favourable review article on it.5 My admiration, and gratitude for all I had learned from him during those Friday evening listenings, was partly expressed in the dedication of The Sociology of Slavery to him.
The Sociology of Slavery was the first book-length study of Jamaican slavery and slave society. It is also among the first studies in English to focus in its entirety on the culture, social organization, cultural life and attitudes and modes of resistance of the enslaved, in the New World. There were, of course, many book-length and other studies on Jamaica before, but they were focused mainly on other aspects of the society – its politics, economy, demography, flora and fauna, climate, the white ruling class and so on, or general studies with a chapter on slavery in general. Oddly, even the more recent scholars of Jamaican history who immediately preceded me seemed to have deliberately avoided any direct treatment of the subject. Douglas Hall, for many years chair of history at UWI, wrote his dissertation and most important work, Free Jamaica,6 on the immediate post-emancipation period, the same relatively brief period covered by Philip Curtin7 in his published dissertation, Two Jamaicas. Indeed, with the notable exceptions of C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins (first published in 1938), Eric Williams’ The Negro in the Caribbean (1942)8 and Capitalism and Slavery (1944),9 and Elsa Goveia’s Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century,10 which appeared two years before The Sociology of Slavery, this avoidance of slaving and the enslaved as the focus of research, was true of all the English-speaking historians writing on the West Indies. Reference was, of course, made to the enslaved in many of these earlier studies, but rarely to their way of life, and no one had written a book-length study. I drew on the most important of these studies, especially Lowell Joseph Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833,11 Frank W. Pitman’s The Development of the British West Indies, 1700–1763,12 George Roberts’13 Population of Jamaica, and M. G. Smith’s paper on the early 19th-century British Caribbean.14 The authors of the latter two were my undergraduate teachers, and Smith’s paper was of special importance in pointing the way towards how a sociologist would approach the study of slavery. Although he wrote nothing on slavery in Jamaica, another of my teachers, the British anthropologist, Raymond Smith, was important in my study of the enslaved family, since I adapted his theory of the developmental cycle of the household, which he had derived for the anthropologist, Meyer Fortes, in writing about the subject.
It is hard to imagine it now, but before The Sociology of Slavery, with the partial exception of Kenneth Stampp, there was not a single book-length study in English focused on the social and cultural practices of the enslaved and their responses to their enslavement, by any professional historian writing on the West Indies and North America. U. B. Phillips, the dominant, white-supremacist historian on U.S. slavery up to the middle of the century, wrote on aspects of enslaved life, especially in his slightly less racist, Life and Labor in the Old South,15 but as part of his wider pro-Southern study of the slave South, as were similar chapters in the broader studies of plantation slavery in Mississippi by Charles Sydnor.16 A change occurred among white scholars following the civil rights revolution, especially in the revisionist work of Kenneth Stampp,17 which challenged the prevailing pro-Southern works of U. B. Phillips and others; and there was the important comparative works by Tannenbaum18 and Klein.19 While anti-slavery and sympathetic to the enslaved, none of these works by white historians was wholly focused on the life of the enslaved and culture although Stampp’s book was exceptional in devoting over a third of the volume to these subjects. Both Tannenbaum’s and Klein’s works were concerned primarily with the question of the differences between Latin American and U.S. slavery. Stanley Elkins’20 work, which compared slavery with the Nazi concentration camp in arguing that there was more than a core of truth in the infantilized image of blacks reflected in the slaveholder’s Sambo stereotype, was indeed focused on the life and thoughts of the enslaved and, while his comparison with the Nazi concentration camps was not as far off the mark as so many critics claimed, he erred, not so much in identifying similarities in the psychological responses of Jewish inmates and slaves but in his interpretation of the meanings and significance of these behavioural and psychological strategies of the enslaved. The work was published in 1959 and still in vogue when I was researching The Sociology of Slavery. Indeed, my critique of the work’s basic argument was among the first to be published and became the concluding chapter of Ann J. Lane’s collection of critical writings on the Elkins book.21
The situation was different among the pre-civil rights era of Black American