No Bond but the Law forum in Small Axe

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small axe 34 March 2011 DOI 10.1215/07990537-1189611 Small Axe, Inc.

Revisiting No Bond but the LawDiana Paton

Melanie Newtons and Jonathan Dalbys thoughtful and insightful critiques of my work (for

which I thank them both) recognize that No Bond but the Law was situated within two com-

parative and transnational historiographical elds: the history of punishment and the history

of the transition away from slavery.1 Since its publication in 2004, a wave of new histories of

punishment has appeared. Historians of the United States in particular, driven in part by the

massive expansion of imprisonment in that country since the late 1960s, have published a

series of provocative studies that examine the causes and consequences of the growth ofincarceration. In the Caribbean too, and not just in Jamaica, high levels of violence and intense

fear of crime have created a sense of crisis in the recent past. Forces of coercion, including

judicial punishment, policing, and extra-judicial violence by state agents and private security

forces, have played an important role in producing and exacerbating, as well as responding

to, this sense of ongoing crisis. Yet while there is a developing sociology of state violence in

the region, little attempt has so far been made to understand the crisis of state legitimacy, the

fear of crime, and the high levels of everyday violence in historical terms. Contemporary com-mentary routinely and with justication gestures toward these phenomena as part of the legacy

of slavery, but the difcult task of working through how this legacy developed and changed

since slavery ended remains undone. In this response to Newtons and Dalbys critiques, I

respond to some of their critical points, but also attempt to think through how future historical

studies of the Caribbean and in particular of Jamaica might respond to the present crisis.

1 Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 17801870 (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2004). Hereafter cited in text.


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34 March 2011 Diana Paton | 177

The research that became No Bond but the Law was not initially driven by concerns about

the role of state violence and punishment in contemporary Jamaica. My primary interest then

was in how the end of slavery remade gender and gender relations.2 Going to the archives left

by the colonial state in search of evidence about the gendering of emancipation, I repeatedly

found material about prisons and punishments: stories about women who would not or could

not work the treadmill; debates about whether women should be ogged; reports on how

prisons were or were not effectively segregating men from women. The material I found in

archives in Kingston, London, and Spanish Town, among other places, foregrounded punish-

ment so frequently that I eventually had to consider it head-on. Gendered power remained

an important aspect of the questions addressed by No Bond but the Law, but one that was

subordinate to the overall theme of punishment. In unraveling the ways the establishment of

freedom came to depend so heavily on forms of coercion that had developed during slavery,

I ended up engaging with a scholarly literature on the history of punishment around the world,

to the point that the book has been taken up by scholars interested in punishment outside

the Caribbean at least as much as by those interested in emancipation within the region and

elsewhere in the Americas.

Looking at punishment from the vantage point of Jamaica allowed me both to show the

specic history of a penal regime that developed within this particular society dominated

by colonial slavery, and to try to displace the routine assumption that the British, and more

generally, the European experience is the norm against which colonial developments must

be measured. My study of Jamaican penality led me to prioritize analytic issues that, I would

argue, should be signicant for all studies of punishment, not just those in the Caribbean,

while also, I hope, pointing toward some directions for Caribbeanist historiography beyond

punishment. The rst is the need to investigate the relationship between states direct use of

violence and coercion and their authorization of the use of violence by private individuals and

nonstate corporate entities. This relationship is often ignored in histories of punishment that

center, as most do, entirely on the state. In the context of slavery and post-slavery society,

private violence could not be avoided, because the authorized private use of violence was a

dening aspect of slavery, encoded in laws in the seventeenth century that made slaveowners

responsible for the correction of small misdemeanours committed by enslaved people.3

Nevertheless, private, state-authorized violence takes place in all societies, most notably in

families, households, and places of work, and should be considered in relation to histories of

2 For my work on gender and emancipation produced alongside and in relation to my work on punishment, see Decency,

Dependence, and the Lash: Gender and the British Debate over Slave Emancipation, 18301834, Slavery and Abolition

17, no. 3 (1996): 16284; The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Womens Labor after Slavery in

Jamaica, in Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 2001), 175204; Gender, Language, Violence, and Slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 18001838, Gender

and History18, no. 2 (2006): 24665; and Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the

Atlantic World(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

3 For discussion of the conceptualization of private punishment as delegated state authority in Jamaicas 1664 and 1672

slave codes, see Diana Paton, Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,Journal of

Social History34, no. 4 (2001): 92354.


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Revisiting No Bond but the Law178 |

imprisonment. The recent work of Taylor Sherman on India, which develops the concept of the

coercive networkas a supplement to terms such aspenalityandpunishment, is important in

this respect.4 Her book examines prisons in conjunction with the punitive and violent actions

undertaken by state representatives that took place on the fringes of legality, including the

1919 massacre at Amritsar. Her concept of the coercive network might be extended in Carib-

bean (and non-Caribbean) historiography beyond her own use of it, into analysis of the use of

force in obvious zones of coercion like the plantation, but also those where force is less often

recognized, such as the family and household.

The second focus of No Bond but the Law that I hoped might serve as a model for other

scholarshipwas its emphasis on the impact of the everyday actions of people within penal

institutions on the larger politics of penal regimes. This was clearest in Jamaica during appren-

ticeship, when, as the book describes and Melanie Newton remarks on, a series of scandals

about prison abuses arose out of the sustained resistance of prisoners to elements of the

regime, contributing to the development of a major political conict between authorities in

London and Spanish Town. While attention to the experience of imprisonment has long been

a signicant part of studies of punishment, which have traditionally focused on how changes

in prison policy, design, and so on altered the experience of prisoners, only a few scholars

look in the other direction in order to think about how prisoner actions altered prison policy

or politics more generally. Studies that do investigate this question suggest that the impact

of prisoner action was often ambiguous, with long-term results that were often far from what

prisoners themselves would have hoped for. In Jamaica, as No Bond but the Law argues, the

West India Prisons Act crisis in the end led the British imperial government to retreat from its

partial but still signicant efforts to limit the worst abuses of freed people. A similar example

can be found in Robert Perkinsons recent discussion of the impact of legally oriented activ-

ism by prisoners in the United States in the 1970s. Perkinsons important and timely study of

the rise of what he calls contemporary Americas prison empire argues that it is rooted in

post-emancipation Texan policies that were themselves part of the backlash against Recon-

struction. Focusing on the interaction of national- and state-level politics with the politics of

prisoner action, he shows that while prisoner activism initially publicized and put restraints

on the brutal treatment of prisoners, in the long term it also helped to strengthen the hand

of conservative forces who argued for increased use of imprisonment. These kinds of unan-

ticipated consequences should not, Perkinson tells us, lead us to harvest regret alone, but

instead to take honest stock of the full history of the prison, an aspiration that is important

beyond the US prison empire.5

4 See Taylor Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India (London: Routledge, 2010); and Taylor Sherman, Tensions

of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa, and the

Caribbean, History Compass 7, no. 3 (2009): 65977.

5 Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of Americas Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan, 2010), 374. A similar argu-

ment about the impact of the Prisoner Rights Movement is made in Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The

Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).


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The third area of No Bond but the Laws analysis that I would like to stress was its com-

bination of attention to the power relations that informed penal policy with consideration of

popular understandings of justice outside the penal system. This argument is formulated

most explicitly in the nal chapter of the book but runs through the earlier chapters as well.

The books investigation of freed peoples encounters with and attempts to make use of the

ofcial judicial system alongside nonstate mechanisms for dealing with conict and dispens-

ing justice was designed to show the complexity of post-emancipation society, attempting to

understand popular struggle in all its complexity, rather than aiming to detect resistance to

state and ofcial control. This move away from the straightforward celebration of resistance

to a more complex analysis of politics at a local level has been at the heart of some of the

best recent work in Caribbean history, including Melanie Newtons own study of Barbados in

the emancipation era.6 Newtons examination of free people of color in Barbados shows the

diversity of members of this groups social position and the complexity of both their sense of

identity and their relationships with the majority of Afro-Barbadians who did not achieve legal

freedom until 1838.

Newtons and Dalbys commentaries on my work are generous and do not require a great

deal of direct response. Nevertheless, Jonathan Dalby raises a signicant criticism focused in

particular on No Bonds fourth chapter, which discusses the evolution of Jamaican penal policy

from 1838 to roughly 1870. The chapter charts Jamaicas post-emancipation experiment with

rehabilitative imprisonment, and its subsequent rejection of that experiment. As Dalby notes,

the period saw the building of the General Penitentiary in Kingston and the attempted reor-

ganization of Jamaicas penal system with the stated goal of reforming prisoners. Flogging

was briey banned from the penal repertoire, only to be reintroduced gradually from 1850,

as discourses relating to imprisonment increasingly emphasized, in racialized language, the

impossibility of reforming Jamaicans and the need for harsh repressive punitive measures.

Dalby criticizes No Bondfor providing insufcient explanation of the rapid abandonment of

the program of reform and rehabilitation and the startlingly sudden shift from reformation

to repression.

Dalby is right to point out that No Bonddoes not focus on explaining this shift in much

detail. The book briey explains it in the light of the nancial crisis of the Jamaican state in the

late 1840s and the sex-crime scandals of the 1850s, focusing in particular on the development

of a new language of race that condemned black Jamaicans as unreformable. It notes that

theseparate andsilentsystems of rehabilitative imprisonment came to seem too expensive

for a colony with limited resources, especially given the House of Assemblys reluctance to

tax the plantations. It also notes the prison sodomy scandal of 1849 and the fact that the

reintroduction of ogging in 1850 was part of a wider moral panic about sex crime in this

period (141). Dalbys work expands on and consolidates this argument. His exploration and

6 Melanie J. Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation

(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).


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documentation of the same issues in much greater detail, as well as his emphasis on the

impact of the ofcial interpretation of the cholera epidemic of 185052 as resulting from the

populations moral depravity, are welcome in eshing out my analysis. Particularly signicant

is Dalbys detailed reconstruction of the massive increase in prosecution of sex crime, in

particular sodomy and bestiality, and the connected moral panic surrounding illicit sexuality

led by the Falmouth Post, which linked penal policy to sexuality in its call for the reintroduction

of ogging and its denial of the possibility of rehabilitation. In researching No Bond but the

Law I did not undertake the systematic collection of court data that allows Dalby to show so

powerfully the extraordinary rate of prosecution for such crimes in Jamaica in the 1840s and

1850s (although the book relies on rather more quantication than Dalby suggests).7 Dalby is

also right to emphasize that the shift toward a deliberately harsh punitive system in Jamaica

came earlier than the equivalent shift in Britain.

Nevertheless, I stand by the chapters larger point that rejection is . . . the most frequent

fate of penal programs (150), and that therefore the Jamaican turn against rehabilitation was

to be expected. Since the development of mass imprisonment, penal policies have oscillated

between more rehabilitative and more punitive approaches to the treatment of prisoners, with

the latter tending to dominate overall. That Jamaican punishment followed the same pattern

is not surprising. Moreover, I would be cautious about understanding the move against reha-

bilitation as primarily based on cost, with the anxiety about sex crime understood as provid-

ing cover for a fundamentally cost-driven imperative. Although the rehabilitative system of

punishment was expensive, it was never actually implemented in full; moreover, the integration

of ogging into the prison system probably saved little if any money. People sentenced to be

ogged were also imprisoned, and the prison population remained roughly stable as the idea

of rehabilitation was abandoned. Perhaps what mattered in convincing previous supporters

of the rehabilitative program to turn against it was more the belief that rehabilitative imprison-

ment was costly and that a more repressive regime would be less so, rather than any actual

reduction in expense.

We should also be careful to avoid adopting the viewpoint of the rehabilitative penal

reformer, even while recognizing the signicance of the brevity of Jamaicas full-edged experi-

ment in rehabilitative imprisonment. The reintroduction of whipping and the end of the ideal

of rehabilitation was part of a wider shift toward a form of racism that saw black people as

permanently inferior, but the liberal view of race that accompanied rehabilitative imprisonment

was also deeply problematic in ways that remain crucially important for our own, supposedly

post-race, era. As No Bond but the Law suggested, building on work such as Catherine

Halls Civilising Subjects, the hopefulness of liberals at the emancipation moment was itself

7 See, for example, the gures on numbers of enslaved people advertised as runaways (32), on workhouse populations

and sentences during slavery (3637), and on the decisions of stipendiary magistrates during apprenticeship (7178).


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profoundly connected to coercion and to ideas of white superiority.8 In practice, rehabilitation

meant long sentences, unpaid labor, and (to the extent that it could be enforced) isolation.

Although not allied to a language of permanent and inevitable racial difference, the rehabilita-

tive project in Jamaica still rested on an interpretation of black people as less civilized than

white, as prison inspector John Daughtreys comments on the difference between criminals

in civilized countries and those in Jamaica (133) make clear.

In contrast to Jonathan Dalbys tightly focused attention to one aspect of my argument,

Melanie Newtons more expansive commentary pays attention to three areas. Two of these

relate directly to No Bond but the Law: Newtons attention to the scope of the study, in par-

ticular its efforts to work at multiple analytic scales, from the internal dynamics of the prisons

to imperial politics and transnational inuence in prison design; and her analysis of the books

engagement with Foucault. The third area is not directly anticipated by the book itself but

builds on it in order to understand the legacy of emancipation and incarceration against a

wider backdrop of an Atlantic World that includes other Caribbean sites and Africa. Here,

Newton brilliantly explores the conjunction of carceral technologies and ideologies of emanci-

pation in the experience of the so-called liberated Africans, making use of Rosanne Adderleys

important book New Negroes from Africato stress the use of what were effectively prisons

to hold freed people.9

Newtons effort to investigate emancipation and incarceration against a wider backdrop

are a response to her key criticism of No Bond but the Law: that the books comparative ori-

entation is toward scholarship on Europe and North America rather than toward the rest of the

Caribbean or more broadly toward South-South comparisons. She notes the absence from

No Bond but the Law of explicit connections between struggles over penal reform in Jamaica

and the rest of the British Caribbean and hopes that others will tak[e] a pan-Caribbean view

of state formation and imprisonment, or bring . . . social histories of incarceration and eman-

cipation in the British Caribbean into conversation with other processes of state formation

beyond Europe or North America.

It is tempting to respond defensively to such a critique by emphasizing that, beyond the

work of David Trotman and Kelvin Santiago-Valles, little had been written on punishment else-

where in the Caribbean at the point when I was writing.10 Moreover, No Bonddraws conceptual

8 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 18301867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

See the discussion of this book in Small Axe, no. 14 (September 2003).

9 Rosanne Marion Adderley, New Negroes from Africa: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the

Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

10 See David Vincent Trotman, Crime in Trinidad: Conict and Control in a Plantation Society, 18381900 (Knoxville: University

of Tennessee Press, 1986); Kelvin A. Santiago-Valles, Subject People and Colonial Discourses: Economic Transformation

and Social Disorder in Puerto Rico, 18981947(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and Kelvin A. Santiago-

Valles, Forcing Them to Work and Punishing Whoever Resisted: Servile Labor and Penal Servitude under Colonialism

in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico, in Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin

America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 18301940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996),

12368. Not a great deal has changed since No Bondappeared. One welcome exception is Cecilia Greens forthcom-

ing study of prisons in post-emancipation Barbados, Gender and Carceral Regimes in Barbados (unpublished paper

presented at the conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, Barbados, May 2010). Greens work demonstrates the

extraordinarily high proportion of female prisoners in that colony, far exceeding those for Jamaica, and raises important


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and empirical connections between developments in Jamaican punishment and similar devel-

opments in Puerto Rico, Martinique, Trinidad, Brazil, Peru, India, the Andaman Islands, as well

as with studies of Britain, France, Ireland, and the United States (including the US South).

Particularly inuential for me in understanding Jamaican penality were David Arnolds and

Anand Yangs work on India, Satadru Sens on the Andaman Islands, and Carlos Aguirres on

Peru.11 Nevertheless, Newton is right to point out that the book was strongly inuenced by

writing on European prisons, especially by the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and

Robin Evans.12 In addition, because Jamaican prison ofcials and lawmakers were obliged

to refer to imperial authorities regarding prisons, and chose to visit the United States to refer

to the model prisons there, Britain and the United States were essential reference points.

Newton is also right to point out that I could have engaged further with questions relat-

ing to punishment in the rest of the Caribbean and beyond Europe and North America. There

was some important work on punishment in these areas that I overlooked. I particularly regret

that I did not discover Peter Zinomans important 2001 study of prisons in Vietnam until after

No Bond but the Law had gone to press.13 Zinomans book, along with several important

works published since No Bond but the Law appeared, raises the question of whether there

is something specic about colonial penality (or, in Shermans terms, the coercive networks

of colonial states), distinct from the penal regimes of metropolitan states, and if so, what is

the nature of that colonial distinctiveness.14 My study of Jamaica, along with other studies of

colonial punishment, suggests that colonial state ofcials shared a perception that they were

dealing with racialized populations that were collectively inferior to white settlers. This tended

to produce a particular form of penal regime and punitive discourse that criminalized whole

questions about the relationship between gender, labor, and penal practice in post-emancipation societies. In addition, seeKelvin Santiago-Valles, Bloody Legislations, Entombment, and Race Making in the Spanish Atlantic: Differential Spaces

of General(ized) Connement in Spain and Puerto Rico, 17501840, Radical History Review 96 (2006): 3357. Santiago-

Valles has followed up his studies of law and penality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Puerto Rico with work on Spain

and Puerto Rico in an earlier period that, using world-systems analysis, conceives of penal institutions and slavery as allied

mechanisms . . . for conning labor (42), of which slavery was among the most brutal. Such mechanisms, he argues,

underwent massive expansion in the Spanish colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He ana-

lyzes the use of a range of panoptic techniques in the colonies (applicable to all subalterns, not just enslaved people) and

the use of convict labor in building military fortications in San Juan, as well as the Bourbon expansion of slavery. He notes

that while penal reformers succeeded in establishing isolated model penal institutions on the Spanish peninsula (50),

these models were not even generalized across peninsular Spain, let alone in the colonies, where incarceration became a

race-making model for the transformation of the entire island into a prison (ibid.).

11 David Arnold, The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge and Penology in Nineteenth-Century India, in David Arnold and

David Hardiman, eds., Subaltern Studies VIII: Essays in Honour of Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994),

14887; Anand A. Yang, Disciplining Natives: Prisons and Prisoners in Early Nineteenth-Century India, South Asia

10, no. 1 (1987): 2945; Satadru Sen, Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000); Carlos Aguirre, The Lima Penitentiary and the Modernization of Criminal Justice in

Nineteenth-Century Peru, in Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America:

Essays on Criminology, Penal Reform, and Social Control, 18301940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 4477; and

Carlos Aguirre, Disputed Views of Incarceration in Lima, 18901930: The Prisoners Agenda for Prison Reform, in Ricardo

D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since

Late Colonial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 34268.

12 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Vintage, 1977); Michael Igna-

tieff,A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 17501850 (London: Macmillan, 1978); Robin

Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 17501840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

13 Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 18621940 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2001).

14 Sherman, State Violence.


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populations rather than produced the deviance of a subsection. Colonial penal regimes

were also subject to less popular pressure for reform because political decisions were made

at the imperial rather than colonial level. However, in making this kind of generalization we

need to retain a sense of historical specicity. Most recent studies of colonial penality focus

on the twentieth century, paying particular attention to colonial states use of incarceration

and other forms of punishment in response to anticolonial movements. Nineteenth-century

colonialism in the Caribbean shared some features with these later colonial regimes, but the

difference of that historical moment to the twentieth century should not be overlooked. We

should also be aware that some similarities across colonial prison regimes were phenomena

common to penal regimes generally, rather than being specically colonial. For instance,

Zinomans suggestion that prisons across the colonial world were united by the fact that they

rarely embodied modern disciplinary technologies could be extended to all but a few prisons

within metropolitan centers as well. In arguing that colonial prisons did not match Foucaults

description of the carceral society in Discipline and Punish, we should be aware that similar

conclusions have been reached by many scholars of Europe and North America too.15

Where then might we go in writing histories of punishment and power in the Caribbean

and elsewhere? A different and perhaps more fruitful approach to the question of colonial-

ism and punishment has been taken by Daniel Botsman in his Punishment and Power in the

Making of Modern Japan.16 Botsman examines changes in punishment from Tokugawa to

Meiji Japan, showing that Meiji authorities reformed the Japanese penal system with a self-

conscious eye on Western models, even to the extent of sending ofcial visitors to Hong

Kong and Singapore to study punishment there. By the end of the nineteenth century, Japa-

nese leaders pointed to their modern prisons as part of their effort to prove the countrys

civilized status in order to renegotiate the unequal treaties imposed in the 1850s. 17 Thus,

rather than searching for something specically colonial (or semicolonial, in the case of

Japan between 1854 and 1895) about the penal regime of the society he studies, Botsman

convincingly shows that the penitentiary project as a whole was related to the global project

of empire in the nineteenth century. In the Caribbean, this status of the penitentiary as sign

of modernity worked out in a rather different way. With the regions long history of colonial

rule, Caribbean elites were positioned very differently to Japanese authorities. Nevertheless,

Botsmans analysis speaks to the way in which even in the Caribbean, colonial elites pointed

to the quality and humanity of their judicial system as a mechanism to convince the imperial

center of their ability to rule local populations without imperial intervention. As No Bond but

the Law argues, this was an important part of what was at stake during the amelioration

period of late slavery in Jamaica, as well as during apprenticeship.

15 See, for instance, Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 17001850: A Study in Local Administration (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1986).

16 Daniel V. Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).17 For a similar story in relation to China, see Frank Diktter, Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China (London:

Hurst, 2002).


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Id like to end by returning to two points made in No Bond but the Law, one in the

introduction and one in the conclusion. In the introduction, I described the book as in part

a response to David Scotts call for a critical interrogation of the practices, modalities, and

projects through which modernity inserted itself into and altered the lives of the colonized

(12). I suggested that future work could be done in related areas, specically in the areas of

religion, education, and health (ibid.). To what extent has such work developed in the time

since No Bondwas published? Brian Moore and Michele A. Johnsons comprehensive study

of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Jamaican cultural politics, Neither Led nor

Driven, appeared in the same year as No Bond but the Law.18 They argue that lower-class

Jamaicans were able to contest cultural imperialism, refusing to adopt the sociocultural

order prescribed for them on the basis of British Victorian morality. Neither Led nor Driven,

while an extremely rich work, somewhat overstates the ideological and cultural autonomy and

unity of the Afro-Jamaican population. Aside from this important work, religion and education

remain relatively unexplored, although the spread of formal schooling after slavery ended in

particular offers important possibilities for research. There is, however, a deepening histori-

ography in the broad area of the history of medicine, including new work by Steven Palmer

on the Rockefeller Foundations hookworm campaigns across the Caribbean, by Denise

Challenger on the Contagious Diseases Acts in Barbados, and by Darcy Hughes Heuring on

public health and nationalism in twentieth-century Jamaica.19 Much of this work is concerned

with questions about the way in which the Caribbean colonial state and private agencies such

as the Rockefeller Foundation attempted to remake Caribbean populations and Caribbean

people, showing public health in particular to be a messy and contradictory site of conict in

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Palmers work is particularly important for its

transnational scope that is nevertheless grounded in a deep knowledge of Caribbean history,

in contrast to some recent transnational historiography that uses Caribbean locations with little

concern for or understanding of the region or its history. (In the eld of the history of punish-

ment and law, Martin J. Wieners study of interracial murder in the British Empire is a good

example of the dangers here: although it includes a chapter on Trinidad and the Bahamas, the

content focuses almost exclusively on the experience of expatriate judges and adds little to

our understanding of either society.)20 My own current project deals with the construction of

obeah as a focus of state power and political attention in the Caribbean, attempting to draw

together questions related to law, penality, health, and religion. The study, which moves from

the eighteenth to the twentieth century, is designed to shed light on the interconnections and

18 Brian L. Moore and Michele A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica,

18651920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004).

19 Steven Palmer, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 2010); Denise Challenger, A Benign Place of Healing? The Contagious Diseases Hospital and Medical

Discipline in Post Slavery Barbados, in Juanita de Barros, Steven Palmer, and David Wright, eds., Health and Medicine

in the Circum-Caribbean, 18001968 (New York: Routledge, 2009); Darcy Hughes Heuring, Health and the Politics of

Improvement in British Colonial Jamaica, 19141945 (PhD diss., Northwestern University, forthcoming).20 Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 18701935 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2009).


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reverberations among legal categories, political discourse at both elite and popular levels,

and popular practice.

In the conclusion to No Bond but the Law I raised the question of what was in 2004

already a crisis of Jamaican justice, involving the regular use of state violence against people

suspected of crime or simply living in poor communities, and an absence of state legitimacy

among a substantial section of the population. I suggested that the situation had parallels

with, but not straightforward origins in, the development of penal systems in the aftermath

of slavery. Since then, the crisis has only become more acute. Killings of civilians by police

have increased, reaching more than two hundred a year between 2007 and 2009.21 The State

of Emergency declared on 23 May 2010 in response to US pressure for the extradition of

Christopher Dudus Coke on drugs-related chargespressure that the Jamaican govern-

ment had initially resisted in order, it is widely believed, to protect a political allyled to the

deaths at the hands of the police and military of at least seventy people in Tivoli Gardens in

West Kingston. These deaths have as yet met with no legal response beyond investigation by

the Ofce of the Public Defender. The lack of accountability of the state forces is of a piece

with a long history of extra-judicial killings of civilians by police, recently exposed through

video evidence.22 Nevertheless, the announcement of the State of Emergency reportedly led

to an outpouring of support for the security forces, as well as a limited amount of criticism.

Recent Jamaican police and military action takes place in an international context in which

state forces disregard for the lives of poor black inner-city residents is not only unremarkable

but is actively encouraged. A similar disregard for the lives of racially othered civilians has

operated in recent US foreign policy at the highest level, albeit hidden under polite language.

Colin Dayan has traced Donald Rumsfeld and others renaming torture at Abu Ghraib and

Guantnamo as abuse, and thus justifying it, to US Supreme Court rulings that limited the

meaning of the term cruel and unusual in relation to punishment. These rulings themselves

drew on the law of slavery in the United States that limited only unnecessary and excessive

force.23 We might trace an allied lineage back through the history of the Jamaican state. An

historical perspective on the question would need to revisit the history of the failed prosecu-

tion of Edward Eyre for his role in the suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion.24 It would be

necessary to investigate not only the preconditions for his impunity, some of which are raised

21 Amnesty International, Jamaica: Submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review: Ninth Session of the UPR Working

Group of the Human Rights Council, NovemberDecember 2010, AMR 38/001/2010, 19 April 2010, http://www.amnesty

.org/en/library/asset/AMR38/001/2010/en/6969d78c-036a-48d9-a4b1-3bd618f99352/amr380012010en.pdf, 4 (accessed

29 November 2010). See also Amnesty International, Public Security Reforms and Human Rights in Jamaica, AMR

38/001/2009, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR38/001/2009/en/353c5156-8749-41e1-8de9-fa9a611c9c2f/

amr380012009en.pdf (accessed 29 November 2010).

22 Three Cops Arrested over Video Killing,Jamaica Observer, 31 July 2010, http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Three-

cops-arrested-over-video-killing (accessed 6 August 2010).

23 Colin Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For another important discussion of the

historical situatedness of Rumsfelds argument, see Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce, Discipline and the Other Body:

Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, in Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao, eds., Discipline and the

Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 135.24 For a detailed reconstruction of the events that led to Eyres impunity from a legal-historical point of view, see R. W. Kostal,

A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).


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in No Bond but the Law, but also the development of Jamaican coercive networks since

Morant Bay, taking particular note of what they have learned from international state forces.25

Providing an account of how todays Jamaican state forces came not only to be able to kill

people with impunity, but also to receive very substantial public support while doing so, would

be among the most signicant contribution that future historians of Jamaica and Jamaican

state formation could make.

25 See Richard Drayton, From Kabul to Kingston, Guardian, 14 June 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/14/jamaica-tactics-army-afghanistan (accessed 6 August 2010). Drayton emphasizes the Jamaica Defense Forces

adoption of counterinsurgency tactics learned from US military forces who developed them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No Bond but the Law forum in Small Axe

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