of the Slave Trade to America, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930–1935. The valuable, although now neglected works of Melville Herskovits, especially Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, 2 Vols., 1938 and The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) deserve continued recognition. For an excellent, balanced assessment of Herskovits and his works, see Jerry Gershenhorn, 2004, Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge, University of Nebraska Press.108 108. See the notes to Chapter 5.
109 109. Philip Curtin, 1972, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press.
110 110. For a recent review of scholarship on the trade see Stephen D. Behrendt, ‘The Transatlantic Slave Trade’, The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, edited by Mark M. Smith and Robert L. Paquette.The German historian, Michael Zeuske, in a comprehensive historiographical essay, has criticized what he considers an overemphasis on the hegemonic slaveries of antiquity, Islam and the Americas and appeals for scholarly engagement with the ‘smaller slaveries’ of the world, which is precisely what I attempted in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. See his ‘Historiography and Research Problems of Slavery and the Slave Trade in a Global-Historical Perspective’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 57, No. 1 (April 2012), pp. 87–111.
111 111. Curtin drew on Chapter 5 of The Sociology of Slavery, pp. 113–44, and on R. B. LePage and David De Camp, 1960, Jamaican Creole: An Historical Introduction to Jamaican Creole, St Martin’s Press.
112 112. Curtin, 1972, The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 130, 158–61. See in particular Table 46, p. 160. summarizing the chapter’s findings.
113 113. J. I. Inikori, 1976, ‘Measuring the Atlantic Slave Trade: An Assessment of Curtin and Anstey’, Journal of African History, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 1976, pp. 197–223.
114 114. I was a founding board member of the DuBois Institute but have long ceased being a formal member. See the history of the project here: https://www.slavevoyages.org/about/about#history/1/en/
115 115. See https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/about#methodology/coverage-of-the-slave-trade/1/en/
116 116. See Introductory Maps: https://slavevoyages.org/voyage/maps#introductory/
117 117. T. Parsons’ first explicit exploration of the problem in Hobbesian terms was in his foundational work, 1937, The Structure of Social Action, The Free Press, pp. 89–102. He elaborated on it in his 1951 work, The Social System, Harper and Row, pp. 36–45.
118 118. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth (1651) Oxford University Press (2012).
119 119. For one of many discussions on this issue see, D. Lockwood, 1956. ‘The Social System,’ British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 7, pp. 134–6. This was one of the works that influenced my own appraisal of the ‘problem’. See also, Desmond Ellis, 1971, ‘The Hobbesian Problem of Order: A Critical Appraisal of the Normative Solution’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 692–703.
120 120. See for example, Orlando Patterson, ‘Culture and Continuity: Causal Structures in Socio-Cultural Persistence’, in Roger Friedland and John Mohr, eds, 2004. Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, Cambridge University Press, pp. 71–109.
121 121. Richard Dunn, 1972, Sugar and Slaves, pp. xiii–xv.
122 122. Fifty years after The Sociology of Slavery, Trevor Burnard in his Jamaica in the Age of Revolution pp. 28–30, has rediscovered the theoretical significance of Hobbes for an understanding of Jamaican slave society. What took so long?
123 123. The Sociology of Slavery, p. 10.
124 124. Goveia, 1965, op. cit., pp. 94–5.
125 125. Burnard, 2020, op. cit., p. 19.
126 126. Here is where Goveia and I differ. She concluded that the whites ‘had all the authority and prestige of an established elite, accustomed to manipulate and overawe the lower classes they governed’, op. cit., p. 94. However, our difference is due to the difference in the societies we studied. Jamaica was different from the Leeward Islands in this respect, as it was from Barbados which, I have recently argued, did develop rule based on both force and effective Hobbesian ‘sovereignty by institutions’ in contrast with Jamaica where the institutions existed but did not quite work, certainly not for the Black population. See Orlando Patterson, 2019. The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament, Harvard University Press, Chapter 1.
127 127. I was to read this years later in Douglas Hall’s edition of the Thistlewood diary, first published in 1989: In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 204. However, my interpretation in the early 1960s of the archival and contemporary evidence on Jamaica slavery left me in no doubt that this was how many of the enslaved felt and that, apart from the Black and coloured kapos on the plantation, the typical Black field worker had little or no respect for the whites or freed Blacks. Sociology of Slavery, pp. 91–2.
128 128. Orlando Patterson, 1970, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655–1740’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 289–325. The other being the literary sequel, my novel, Die the Long Day,William Morrow, 1972.
129 129. Vincent Brown, 2020, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, Harvard University Press.
130 130. Michael Craton, 2009, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies, Cornell University Press. See Sidney Mintz’s searing critique: ‘More on the Peculiar Institution’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids,Vol. 58 (1984), no: 3/4, Leiden, 185–91.
131 131. Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, p. 170.
132 132. Hall, 1989, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, p. 110.
133 133. The situation was quite different during the 1790s when the Second Maroon War broke out. By then the slaves had come to see the Maroons as traitors not to be trusted and with whom they would have no dealings. See David Geggus, 1987, ‘The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s. New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 274–99.
134 134. Patterson, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts,’ pp. 301, 304.
135 135. Ibid., p. 305.
136 136. Barbara Kopytoff, 1978, ‘The Early Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Societies’, William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 287–307; Richard Hart, 1950, ‘Cudjoe and the First Maroon War in Jamaica’, Caribbean Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 46–79; Philip Wright, 1970, ‘War and Peace with the Maroons, 1730–1739’, Caribbean Quarterly, 16: 5–27.
137 137. Burford, 2020, op. cit., Chapter 4.
138 138. Geggus, op. cit., p. 299.
139 139. Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire, Harvard University Press, 2020.
140 140. Jamaican historians and nationalists, especially those searching for what Black American historians sometimes call ‘a usable past’, have had real problems dealing with the Maroons. We would dearly love to celebrate their triumph over the Jamaican slaveholders and British imperial soldiers in 1739, but their subsequent record of treachery and bounty-hunting perfidy make this impossible. I remember my reaction, as a 17-year-old doing my first archival research at the Institute of Jamaica, to the records of their out-of-control butchery of rebels and innocent peasants in
