No Bond but the Law

Investigating the cultural, social, and political history of punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard historiographies of slavery and punishment. She argues that while state and private forms of punishment in Jamaica necessarily changed around the time of abolition, the change-from private to state-administered punishment and from the infliction of physical pain to imprisonment-was neither straightforward nor complete. She complicates conceptions of the institutions and practices of slavery as pre-modern and those that followed as modern. In so doing, she offers critical readings of influential theories of power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha. Paton contends that there was a more longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment than is generally recognized. As she points out, the construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the high point of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s. Her analysis moves between imperial decisions on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in other countries and territories. Paton emphasizes that Jamaica was uniquely influential within and beyond the British Empire. As Britain's most populous and productive sugar colony, it provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining, and later evaluating, the emancipation process. Paton is attentive to the role of ordinary Jamaicans in shaping state decisions and she provides a nuanced explanation of how Jamaica's penal systems reformulated gender difference by punishing men and women in different ways and imprisoning them separately. Diana Paton is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England. She is the editor of A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, published by Duke University Press.