No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (review)

Found guilty and facing sentencing in 1845, Edward Thompson made a speech to the court where he claimed that at Emancipation two ships had sailed from England for Jamaica. One carrying liberty had arrived but the other, carrying justice, sunk on the way over. What prompted him to make such a claim and why would it resonate deeply, not just with the other African Jamaican prisoners awaiting sentencing that day, but within the wider history of colonial Jamaica? How far would the disappointment encapsulated in this metaphor help to shape a distinct society?

In a consistently thought-provoking book Diana Paton examines the linked roles of law and punishment in slavery and post-slavery Jamaica. Her wide-ranging study of shifting attitudes towards punishment over ninety years offers a fresh approach to the transformation of the island's society before, during and after Emancipation, bridging a divide where many academic studies chose to stop or start. She engages with wider ideas about the transformitive potential of punishment that circulated in Britain and North America, several of which were applied in Jamaica, where the largest and richest of Britain's West Indian sugar islands not only saw very high hopes for general social reformation at Emancipation but then continued to offer a test bed for ambitious schemes to achieve social transformations. In tracing shifts in official policies over two generations Paton not only unpacks the changing theories about punishment current among metropolitan intellectuals but then considers what their application meant for African Jamaicans. There are fresh insights on every page.

Emancipation removed slaveholders' right to punish "their" freed slaves, transferring correction to the colonial state. In practice the preceding generation's policy of Amelioration, where the island's Assembly compiled successive Slave Codes that sought to rein in owners' brutality towards the enslaved had already produced some changes, restricting law-abiding planters' most arbitrary powers. But, whatever ameliorative tweaking had occurred before 1832, freedom still transformed social relations in Jamaica. Not as much as the ex-slaves hoped, but far more than the former slaveholders had expected. Because Paton extends her research back to the 1780s, when an extensive prison-building campaign was undertaken on the island, she can explore the uneven transformation of the slavery-era system over its final two generations. At the local level slaveholders and their whip-bearing overseers and drivers retained a great deal of power, although slave courts heard some appeals and enslaved litigants did not always lose. Meanwhile English activists engaged with the issue of flogging, and particularly the flogging of enslaved women, which came to provide a key image within the anti-slavery campaign in Britain. One of the longer-lasting reforms from the pre-emancipation period was a ban on judicial floggings for women, which remained in force for the next two generations. Justice might be more equal; punishments became increasingly gendered.

After Emancipation the implementation of penal theorists' latest nostrums offered a new agenda for public spending, with the island's Assembly choosing to lay out its limited funds not on the schools that the ex-slaves wanted but instead on replacing the former parish workhouses with new houses of correction. These new prisons sought to define gender roles, so that men and women were placed in separate spaces. Other recommendations beloved by penal theorists in the 1830s, like the degree that work in gaol would instill discipline and virtue in even hardened criminals, made rather less sense in a post-slavery society—where many convicts had already experienced the far harsher work discipline of the cane fields. Paton's sensitive reading of the debates over prison building, the discussions on what values imprisonment was supposed to instill and, indeed, on the leasing out of prisoners' labour and the gradual re-introduction of flogging into the armoury of official punishments, offers a fascinating index for the gradual retreat of the initial high...