Colonial trial records shaped how historians understand the 1831 Jamaican rebellion

Evidence

Finally, among those rebellions that had their immediate inspirations in the abolitionist controversies and the slave registry, there is Jamaica. Three large and immediately imposing volumes, originally amassed by the Colonial Office concerning this event, rest in Britain’s Public Records Office at Kew Gardens. They contain the official records from Jamaica of the trials of 626 men and women who took part in the “Slave Rebellion of 1831.” In the varied pens of the colonial recorders of the several counties and court martials of the island, they announce charge, testimony, disposition, and the occupational and bonded particularities of those Blacks who survived a more immediate expression of justice (officially there had been 207 slaves killed during the suppression of the rebellion). Since the overriding concern was with identifiable culpability they tell us more about the networks constructed among the slaves than the reasons they had for engineering these lattices of exchanges. They also tell us more about the configuration of the slaves in the eyes of that “mediocrity” of the colonial middle class than the vision of the slaves themselves, and of themselves. Lastly, since these documents are the primary sources for such historians of the rebellion as Craton, Reckord, and Patterson, and even played a part in contemporary reports such as those of Henry Bleby, they have had another significance: the construction of the events is that bequeathed by the interrogators. “[O]verseers and attorneys-turned-militiamen,” Mary Reckord characterized them, intent on “not only restoring order, but vengeance for their losses and humiliation.” Not to be outdone, Craton has written of “the plantocratic psyche” as the source of their reactions to the rebellion, “their emphasis on rape,” as a motive among the slaves, “a deep sexual insecurity” Patterson has asserted that they were “selfish and incompetent,” their “attitude toward slave revolts oscillated between extreme hysteria and unbelievable smugness.” Why, then, would its historians leave the identity of the slaves’ activities in Jamaica in 1831 in such hands? — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 803

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is a methodological provocation worth sitting with: the archive of slave resistance is authored by the planters who suppressed and interrogated the rebels. Could be an essay angle on epistemic violence in archives.
• SEED: The interrogators’ records shaping all subsequent scholarship on the Baptist War is an essay angle on how empire controls its own historical memory.