Orlando Patterson - The Sociology of Slavery

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For C. L. R. JAMES

ORLANDO PATTERSON

polity

Copyright © Orlando Patterson 1967, 2022

The right of Orlando Patterson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1967 by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd

This edition published in 2022 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5099-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951461

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Formerly Enslaved Jamaicans (c 1870s)

The Sociology of Slavery was not simply my first scholarly book, but the academic and deeper intellectual as well as sources of all my later works on slavery, race and freedom. The slave plantations and their post-emancipation incarnations have profoundly influenced Jamaican society. For me, their presence could not have been more personal and pervasive. When I was four years old, my mother and I moved to Lionel Town in the centre of one of the island’s main sugar-producing areas. The only adequate preprimary school in the area was located in the church hall of a once elegant Anglican church in a bleak village called the Alley, once known, incredibly, as the Paris of Jamaica in the 18th century, and I was sent to live in the home of a family friend who was a foreman on the Monymusk estate, one of the island’s oldest, owned in the mid-18th century by Sir Archibald Grant who also owned a slaving station in West Africa that directly provided the estate with its enslaved. The house was located literally in the midst of the cane fields. A narrow dirt track ran from alongside it through a dark, dirt-poor village of wattle and daub huts, the former habitation of enslaved workers, in which the Indians, who had been brought over from India to replace them, still lived. The emaciated stiff bodies of the men clad in dhoti loincloth, the dull glow of the women’s hollowed eyes as they stared back at me and the other Black children, squatting before their rice pots above the wood fire on the ground, left an indelible impression on me. In hushed tones, the older children would often tell me: ‘Dat’s where di slave dem used to live.’ We moved to May Pen for my primary school, the then small capital town of Clarendon, once surrounded by sugar plantations and cattle pens: Sevens, Halse Hall, Suttons, Moreland, Amity Hall, New Yarmouth, Parnassus, only a few, like Monymusk, still going strong, most marked by the ruins of great houses shrouded in thorny bush – Bog, Parrins, Carlisle, Paradise, Exeter and Banks. From my childhood I began to wonder what life was like for the enslaved whose violently enforced labour made it all possible, imaginings made vivid by the scary duppy stories, told at dusk, by the older children and grandparents of the ghosts of the enslaved still haunting the eerily hot spaces around the silk cotton trees of the lonely country roads leading from the town.