West Indian enslavement, and for Jamaica in particular, the database indicates that, in both proportionate and absolute terms, the numbers going to Jamaica were staggering. The new map, from the project’s valuable set of Introductory Maps,116 visually indicates the extraordinary numbers that went to the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, when compared with North America. Having carefully followed the development of the database over the years, I have repeatedly drawn on it to update the estimated numbers going to Jamaica and the regions from which the Africans arriving in the island came.
How do these recent figures compare with my estimates of over 55 years ago? In the first place, far more slaves went to Jamaica than any of us, including Curtin, suspected at the time. I was, however, more concerned with the proportion of slaves contributed by different regions of Africa, given my primary interest in tracing the tribal and cultural origins of the Jamaican enslaved, reflected in the title of Chapter 5. In this regard, apart from the very earliest period,1655–1700, my proportional estimates have held up reasonably well. In broad terms, I had estimated that during the first half of the period of slavery the single largest group of slaves would have come from what was called the Gold Coast (now Ghana), the second largest from the Slave Coast and the Bight of Benin (now Nigeria), and that during most of the second half of the eighteenth century the largest contingent came from Nigeria, but that ‘during the last seventeen years of the trade there was a striking reappearance of slaves from Southwestern Africa, particularly from the region of the Congo’ (p. 144). This is broadly what the Atlantic database shows, although the decennial estimates differed, especially during the 17th century.
Table 0. Number of Slaves Disembarked in Jamaica from Embarkation Regions of Africa, 1601–1840
Table composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Data Base, https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates
One pleasant surprise is the degree to which slaves from Ghana dominated the period between 1700 and 1740. I had argued, along with the creole linguists, that this was the period in which the creole language and Afro-Jamaican culture was at its most formative stage and the major presence of slaves from Ghana during this time would have meant that their impact would remain lasting, even if their numbers were later surpassed by enslaved persons from Nigeria. This argument is now strengthened.
However, not everything went my way with these latest data. The biggest surprise is the fact that during the 17th century 6,853 of the Jamaican enslaved came from South East Africa! No one saw anything like this during the 20th century. Indeed, it was considered a near certainty that hardly anyone came from South East Africa to the islands, or to North America (what the Portuguese slavers were up to in South America and Southern Africa was anybody’s guess at that time). That clearly was not the case. However, they were soon overwhelmed by slaves from West Africa and there is no trace of their cultures or languages in the creole culture of Jamaica, then or now.
In the next section I will return to these latest findings on the demographic history of Jamaica and their startling implication that the history of enslavement in the island was one of protracted or slow-moving genocide on a scale that approaches the Jewish holocaust in Nazi Germany.
The Sociology of Slavery was the work that launched my career as a historical sociologist. As such, beyond the personal desire, rooted in my upbringing and history, to understand what had produced me and my society, it was motivated by an important theoretical problem in sociology that had been posed by the leading sociologist of my youth, Talcott Parsons, which was: how is society possible, or more basically, how does social order come about?117 For Parsons, that problem was first explored explicitly by Hobbes, who in Leviathan118 famously posed the problem with his depiction of the state of nature as one of war of all against all, in which there was ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’ and life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, the solution to which was submission to the absolute authority of the state or Leviathan. Parsons rejected Hobbes’ solution in favour of his normative theory of action in which individuals come to accept the demands of social life through their internalization of cultural norms.119 Even as an undergraduate forced to imbibe this functionalist dogma, I had developed deep scepticism about the Parsonian solution. It was evident to me then that this simply begged the question: yes, order is possible because of internalized culture, and I have subsequently spent a good deal of intellectual effort trying to figure out how culture persists,120 but where did this culture come from?
Parsons did have the salutary effect of leading me to Hobbes, whose Leviathan I read as avidly as Camus and Marx during my final undergraduate year. At the LSE Sociology department where I arrived in the fall of 1962, I had to justify why my thesis was not going to be merely another history of ‘facts and more damn facts’ to my doctoral supervisor, David Glass, Britain’s most eminent demographer. Hobbes, as is well known, had stated that slavery was a clear case of a state of nature, his views on the subject informed by ancient classical slavery. My answer was that Jamaican slavery came closest to an existentially real case study of a society in which life was indeed nasty, brutish and short and, with its endless series of revolts by the enslaved, racial and ethnic divisions, rapes, suicides, homicides, gibbeting, bilboeing, flight, and merciless use of the whip, a state of war of all against all. The interesting thing about Hobbes, I pointed out, was that he imagined this state of nature to have existed not simply in the condition of preliterate societies (those imagined ‘savage people in many places of America’) but in the descent of civilized people back into this savage state. He had in mind the English Civil War. North America, like Barbados was still mainly British white colonies of settlement when the Leviathan was published (1651) and Jamaica was not captured by the British until four years after this. Nonetheless, I argued that a far better case study was 18th-century Jamaica, in which civilized Britons, after a few weeks’ sojourn, erupted into near complete savagery in their ruthless relations of domination with the enslaved, in the course of which, as Dunn would later write, they ‘lived fast, spent recklessly, played desperately and died young’,121 which Hobbes would, in all likelihood, have agreed came close to his imagined state of declension to warring savagery.122 My thesis topic was accepted, although it helped that no one at LSE thought much of Talcott Parsons, in spite of his preeminence in America and Germany. What I wrote in the preface to the first edition was the gist of my thesis statement: ‘Few systems indeed have ever come closer to the brink of the Hobbesian state of nature and, as such, the sociologist researching this society is faced with the fascinating situation of examining on a concrete level the most basic question of his discipline.’123 Nonetheless, the system did persist, for all the savagery, for 183 years, so the research problem that naturally followed from this was: how was such a system able to survive for all that time? In answering this theoretical question, I would also be addressing the even more important substantive problem that had troubled me from my childhood, and so intrigued R. D. Laing and his patients: what was it really like for my ancestors? How did they survive the long ordeal of British slavery?
I did address this issue in the penultimate chapter on resistance (see especially pp. 280–3) and considered the detailed account in the book as a whole to be all the answer that was needed, but, with hindsight, perhaps it should have been spelled out more explicitly. The simple answer to the theoretical question is that Hobbes was right. Might, a monopoly of the superior instruments of violence, always prevails, and this might the Hobbesian retro-savages who ruled the island had to their great advantage. As Elsa Goveia had earlier observed of the Leeward Islands,124 and Burnard much later of Jamaica: ‘White Jamaicans survived because they mastered the real and symbolic instruments of violence. And power in the Caribbean is closely connected with trauma.’125 However, Hobbes’ conception of the Leviathan was not one solely of raw power. People, by virtue of being rational beings, he argued, recognized
