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The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson
Читать онлайн.Название The Sociology of Slavery
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509550999
Автор произведения Orlando Patterson
Жанр Социология
Издательство John Wiley & Sons Limited
Another kind of evidence demolishes this attempt to blame African lactation practices for Jamaica’s demographic disaster. Tadman171 has shown that in the Louisiana sugar belt of the slave South, where the lactation practices of the enslaved were similar to those of other North American enslaved as well as their white enslavers, a similar pattern of massive demographic decline is found, resulting from the same combination of inhumane treatment and imbalanced sex-ratios. The horrendous overworking of women on the Louisiana cane fields reduced their fertility, reinforcing Dunn’s argument that ‘the sugar labor performed by the Mesopotamia women [of Jamaica] in their prime childbearing years was the main cause of their low birthrate’.172 This heavy toll on fertility, argues Tadman, combined with the ability to replace the dead by buying a male-dominated workforce from the older slave states, was the lethal combination accounting for the catastrophic demographic decline of the Jamaican population, not African lactation practices, not even yellow fever.173
Perhaps the strongest evidence that it was the peculiar savagery of the condition of enslavement in Jamaica that most accounts for the demographic decline is how swiftly the Jamaican population began to reproduce almost immediately after abolition, in spite of persisting African-type lactation practices among the formerly enslaved African and creole blacks (who had similar practices) and has never stopped growing.174 Ironically, recent studies have shown that the decline of traditional breast-feeding practices among Jamaican and other West Indian peasant and urban working-class women since the 1950s, and their replacement with commercially promoted infant formulas, has led to a disastrous increase in infant malnutrition, illnesses and mortality.175
This being so, consider Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 shows the relative percentage of slaves taken to Jamaica and the North American mainland by decade between 1651 and 1830. Between 1651 and 1660, North America received far more slaves than Jamaica. In 1655 Jamaica was taken by the British from the Spanish and, instantly, everything changed. Between five and ten times more slaves were delivered to Jamaica than to North America during the six decades after 1660, and the last three decades of the 18th century and more than twice as many in the middle decades in between. Figure 2 shows the cumulative effect in absolute numbers: between 1650 and 1830, a total of 1,017,109 Africans were disembarked in Jamaica, while only 388,233 were taken to North America.176 However, in 1830 there were 2,009,048 enslaved in America and, including free blacks, some 2,328,642 Black souls. At that time, there were only 319,074 enslaved in Jamaica and, all told, 359,147 people of some Black ancestry.
What this astonishing difference amounts to is this: had Africans and their descendants experienced the same rate of increase in Jamaica as had occurred in North America, the theoretically possible 1830 enslaved population in the island would have been 5,262,522 and its total Black population (including free coloured or people of mixed ancestry) would have been 6,100,620. Taking account of the 359,147 survivors in 1830, and using North American slavery as a counterfactual yardstick, we must conclude that there were 5,741,473 missing Black Jamaicans in 1830, which is a measure of British protracted genocide of Black people in the island between 1655 and 1830. To express this in the stronger causal terms of a counterfactual conditional: had it not been for the distinctive features of Jamaican slavery, 5,741,473 Jamaican lives would not have been lost. (My estimate, I hasten to add, is confined to the Jamaican enslaved population, both the Africans brought there and their descendants, with no implications for African lives lost in Africa.)177 This figure, we might note, is not much smaller than the six million Jews eliminated in the Nazi holocaust. Jamaican slavery, we conclude, was a clear case of genocide.
Figure 1. Relative Percentages of Slaves Disembarked in Jamaica and North America
Figure 2. A Counterfactual Picture of Jamaican Genocide: Jamaican & North American Slavery Compared, 1650–1830
Graphs composed by author from Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates
To be sure, there are varieties of genocide.178 The British genocide of Blacks in Jamaica took place over 183 years rather than the twelve years of the Nazi holocaust and 2–4 years of the Ottoman genocide of at least 1.1 million Armenians between 1915 and 1919. This suggests a distinction between protracted or slow-moving and concentrated genocide. Several scholars have drawn attention to the differences and similarities between slavery and the Jewish genocide ‘without lapsing into facile equation or producing crude hierarchies of suffering’, as A. Dirk Moses aptly puts it.179 Some, such as Drescher and Hirsch have emphasized the differences.180 Others, without underplaying the differences, have pointed to similarities, several drawing on my concept of social death in addressing the parallels. In her definitive study of life in Nazi Germany, Kaplan repeatedly describes the pre-destruction period leading up to the death camps as a condition of social death for the Jews living in Germany: ‘In the 1930s Nazi Germany succeeded in enforcing social death on its Jews – excommunicating them, subjecting them to inferior status, and relegating them to a perpetual state of dishonour.’181 Daniel Goldhagen, writing about the same time, made a similar point, arguing that while German Jews were indeed totally dominated, natally alienated and dishonoured, the distinctive features of social death, the critical distinction lay in the fact that the slaveholder found value in the body of the enslaved, while the Nazi terrorist sought the elimination of Jewish bodies.182 More recently, Claudia Card has argued that my concept of social