LITMIR.BIZ

INTRODUCTION¹ Life and Scholarship in the Shadow of Slavery

The Sociology of Slavery was not simply my first scholarly book, but the academic and deeper intellectual as well as sources of all my later works on slavery, race and freedom. The slave plantations and their post-emancipation incarnations have profoundly influenced Jamaican society. For me, their presence could not have been more personal and pervasive. When I was four years old, my mother and I moved to Lionel Town in the centre of one of the island’s main sugar-producing areas. The only adequate preprimary school in the area was located in the church hall of a once elegant Anglican church in a bleak village called the Alley, once known, incredibly, as the Paris of Jamaica in the 18th century, and I was sent to live in the home of a family friend who was a foreman on the Monymusk estate, one of the island’s oldest, owned in the mid-18th century by Sir Archibald Grant who also owned a slaving station in West Africa that directly provided the estate with its enslaved. The house was located literally in the midst of the cane fields. A narrow dirt track ran from alongside it through a dark, dirt-poor village of wattle and daub huts, the former habitation of enslaved workers, in which the Indians, who had been brought over from India to replace them, still lived. The emaciated stiff bodies of the men clad in dhoti loincloth, the dull glow of the women’s hollowed eyes as they stared back at me and the other Black children, squatting before their rice pots above the wood fire on the ground, left an indelible impression on me. In hushed tones, the older children would often tell me: ‘Dat’s where di slave dem used to live.’ We moved to May Pen for my primary school, the then small capital town of Clarendon, once surrounded by sugar plantations and cattle pens: Sevens, Halse Hall, Suttons, Moreland, Amity Hall, New Yarmouth, Parnassus, only a few, like Monymusk, still going strong, most marked by the ruins of great houses shrouded in thorny bush – Bog, Parrins, Carlisle, Paradise, Exeter and Banks. From my childhood I began to wonder what life was like for the enslaved whose violently enforced labour made it all possible, imaginings made vivid by the scary duppy stories, told at dusk, by the older children and grandparents of the ghosts of the enslaved still haunting the eerily hot spaces around the silk cotton trees of the lonely country roads leading from the town.

West Indian history had just begun to find a place amid the imperial history that still dominated the colonial curriculum of my primary school with its Royal Readers, as well as my secondary education, focused on British history and literature, and I seized every chance to study it. My very first research project was a study of the Morant Bay rebellion, the revolt of former Jamaica enslaved in 1865 that was ferociously put down by the colonial authorities, savagely aided by the Maroons. It won the national essay prize of the Jamaica History Teachers’ association in 1957 and confirmed my decision to study history should I win a scholarship to the recently formed University College of the West Indies. I did win a scholarship to the university, but to my great disbelief, in a typical act of learned imperial arrogance, the Black, Naipaulian mimic men who then ran the university ordered me to major in economics, which was being instituted for the first time in my freshman year and did not have enough applicants, my pleas and those of my distraught high-school history master simply brushed aside. Fortunately, the Economics Department was really an inter-disciplinary group dominated by two eminent social anthropologists, R. T. Smith and M. G. Smith, the sociologist Lloyd Brathwaite, and the demographer George Roberts. All recognized the centrality of history and enslavement for any understanding of the Caribbean. This included the economists of the department, George Cumper and, later, George Beckford. Indeed, Beckford saw the slave plantation and its later developments as so critical for any understanding of West Indian economy that he developed, along with the economist Lloyd Best, what became known as the ‘Plantation Model’ of the Caribbean economy and society. In addition to these interdisciplinary scholars, with whom I was later to work in the New World Group of Caribbean intellectuals, I developed strong friendships with fellow students who shared my historical view of Caribbean scholarship, particularly the political economist Norman Girvan and the historian Walter Rodney.

      There were, however, other forces that pulled me to an engagement with European thought and culture, both in my study of slavery and on the development of Europe’s culture of freedom. I arrived in London to begin my research on slavery in 1962, in what was to be the most exciting decade in the modern cultural history of Britain. I soon became deeply immersed in three networks of friends and fellow intellectuals: the West Indian student community, focused on the West Indian Student Centre in Collingham Gardens, Earls Court; the newly emerged New Left Review group that had broken off from the old Oxford New Left; and the literary group of West Indian writers and artists that came to be known as the Caribbean Artists’ Movement, founded mainly by the poet-historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, its first meeting being held at my flat in London.² My involvement with the West Indian Students’ Union mainly kept alive my engagement with the broader West Indian society, in much the same way that the University of the West Indies (UWI) had earlier done, and my commitment to return to Jamaica to give back and help in its post-colonial development, a necessary pull, in view of the nearly irresistible temptations of intellectual and cultural life in Britain of the sixties.

My involvement with the new New Left Review group (which had emerged in 1960 from the merger of E. P. Thompson’s New Reasoner and Stuart Hall’s Universities and New Left Review) came not long after the Perry Anderson take-over that basically sidelined Thompson and the older post-communist left that had started it. I became deeply involved with the group, eventually joining its editorial board, through my relationship with Robin Blackburn, whom I met during his freshman year at LSE after he had been sent down from Oxford. I was soon immersed in the many strands of Marxist thought of the period. Although Blackburn was later to write major studies on slavery and abolition, in his early years he showed little interest in the subject. To the degree that slavery was ever mentioned, it was focused exclusively on the Marxian theory of the slave mode of production, on which Perry Anderson was to later write at length.³ Nonetheless, my later deep involvement with the origins and development of European culture and the role of slavery

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