Vincent Brown

Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society

In his 1801 history of the British West Indies, the Jamaican planter and slave owner Bryan Edwards admitted that, ‘In countries where slavery is established, the leading principle on which the government is supported is fear: or a sense of that absolute coercive necessity which, leaving no choice of action, supersedes all questions of right.’ Yet slave masters did not achieve the fear requisite to maintaining control over the enslaved by physical force alone. They did, in fact, assert their right to rule, and they did so by trying to terrorize the spiritual imaginations of the enslaved. To do so, slave masters projected their authority symbolically through spectacular punishments committed upon the bodies of the dead. As anthropologist Katherine Verdery has noted, dead bodies carry great symbolic weight: ‘they evoke awe, uncertainty, and fear associated with “cosmic” concerns, such as the meaning of life and death’. Moreover, when managed with political intent, ‘their corporeality makes them important means of localizing a claim’. Employing dead bodies for symbols, masters marked territory with awesome icons of their power. The use of spectacular terror to capture the imaginations of the enslaved remained a staple feature of social control in slave society. Yet even more menacingly, managers and overseers extended the spectacular to the magical, as they tried to harness the affective power of the dead and awe of the afterlife to their material authority. Though the intent was to dominate the imagination, the routinization of terrifying spectacles only aided the creation of new knowledges – novel understandings of the relationship between dead bodies, haunting spirits and political authority – that could also enhance the sacred authority of those opposed to serving the plantocracy as slaves, and who were willing to rise up and strike their masters. For their part, the enslaved established competing discourses of authority by invoking the spirits of the dead, and by selectively appropriating the material and spiritual power of the masters for their own

Eating the Dead: Consumption and Regeneration in the History of Sugar

In various scattered passages of Sidney W. Mintz’s great work, Sweetness and Power , there are tantalizing allusions to the “association between sugar and death.” These involved mostly the products of culinary artistry, such as candied funeral treats or the confections made for dia de los muertos. But by connecting the dots one finds in various of Professor Mintz’s writings, one can see that the anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes was right to suggest that Sweetness and Power could just as easily have been titled “Sweetness and Death.” For while sugar cultivation and the activities that surrounded it were enormously profitable for American empires, sugar was a catastrophe for the workers who grew it. Sugar was a cornerstone of Caribbean slavery and the slave trade, helping Great Britain to emerge during the eighteenth century as an economic colossus. The cost of this development was paid largely by men, women, and children on colonial plantations. Drawing examples from Jamaica, the eighteenth-century British Empire’s greatest engine of creative destruction, it is also possible to consider in a bit more depth the social relation between sugar, death, and the social regeneration of the enslaved.1 Sugar was a murderous commodity. In the formative period of sugar cane’s emergence in the world economy, from the midseventeenth to the early nineteenth century, American sugar plantations were among the most dangerous places a worker could be. Added to the hazards of rampant disease and the everyday violence of enslavement were the punishing demands of planting, tending, and processing the canes. Modern researchers have confirmed what contemporaries knew too well: Enslaved

History Attends to the Dead

This response to commentaries by Trevor Burnard, Colin Dayan, and Verene Shepherd on The Reapers Garden recalls some of the inspirations that motivated research for the book, the assumptions that framed its analysis, and the aims of its storytelling. The book begins where most demographic histories of slavery have left off, exploring how social, cultural, and political life articulated with the brutal facts of morbidity and mortality. It seeks to offer a dynamic understanding of how the idioms that related the living to the dead mediated the way people in Jamaican slave society strove to achieve particular ends. For those contending with the conditions of Atlantic slavery, enacting assumptions about the role of the dead in the fortunes of the living required daily struggle over the means of existence and the exercise of will, and these beliefs and behaviors associated with death became a driving force in slaverys political history.