Investigating the cultural, social, and political histories of
punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of
slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard
historiographies of slavery and discipline. The abolition of
slavery in Jamaica, as elsewhere, entailed the termination of
slaveholders' legal right to use violence--which they defined as
"punishment"--against those they had held as slaves. Paton argues
that, while slave emancipation involved major changes in the
organization and representation of punishment, there was no
straightforward transition from corporal punishment to the prison
or from privately inflicted to state-controlled punishment.
Contesting the dichotomous understanding of pre-modern and modern
modes of power that currently dominates the historiography of
punishment, she offers critical readings of influential theories of
power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha.
"No Bond but the Law" reveals the longstanding and intimate
relationship between state formation and private punishment. The
construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began
not with emancipation but at the peak of slave-based wealth in
Jamaica, in the 1780s. Jamaica provided the paradigmatic case for
British observers imagining and evaluating the emancipation
process. Paton's analysis moves between imperial processes on the
one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a
framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica
with those in the U.S. South and elsewhere. Emphasizing the
gendered nature of penal policy and practice throughout the
emancipation period, Paton is attentive to the ways in which the
actions of ordinary Jamaicans and, in particular, of women
prisoners, shaped state decisions.
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