Overview

Investigating the cultural, social, and political history of punishment during ninety years surrounding the 1838 abolition of slavery in Jamaica, Diana Paton challenges standard historiographies of slavery and punishment. She argues that while state and private forms of punishment in Jamaica necessarily changed around the time of abolition, the change-from private to state-administered punishment and from the infliction of physical pain to imprisonment-was neither straightforward nor complete. She complicates conceptions of the institutions and practices of slavery as pre-modern and those that followed as modern. In so doing, she offers critical readings of influential theories of power and resistance, including those of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Ranajit Guha. Paton contends that there was a more longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment than is generally recognized. As she points out, the construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the high point of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s.Her analysis moves between imperial decisions on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in other countries and territories. Paton emphasizes that Jamaica was uniquely influential within and beyond the British Empire. As Britain's most populous and productive sugar colony, it provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining, and later evaluating, the emancipation process. Paton is attentive to the role of ordinary Jamaicans in shaping state decisions and she provides a nuanced explanation of how Jamaica's penal systems reformulated gender difference by punishing men and women in different ways and imprisoning them separately. Diana Paton is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England. She is the editor of A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, published by Duke University Press.

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Reviews

No Bond but the Law is one of the most interesting and intellectually ambitious works of scholarship to be published in the field of slave and emancipation studies in recent years. Diana Paton has written a book that takes several important conceptual matters and historiographies--emancipation, punishment, gender, and state formation--and puts them together in a remarkably compelling and original way. --Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration No Bond but the Law is a model of research procedure and historical writing. --Sidney Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History ... sheds valuable new light on the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the transition from a slave to a free-labour economy ... [Patton's] work makes claims which have implications that resonate far beyond this particular case study. --History October 2006

No Bond but the Law is a model of research procedure and historical writing. -Sidney Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History No Bond but the Law is one of the most interesting and intellectually ambitious works of scholarship to be published in the field of slave and emancipation studies in recent years. Diana Paton has written a book that takes several important conceptual matters and historiographies-emancipation, punishment, gender, and state formation-and puts them together in a remarkably compelling and original way. -Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration

"""No Bond but the Law is one of the most interesting and intellectually ambitious works of scholarship to be published in the field of slave and emancipation studies in recent years. Diana Paton has written a book that takes several important conceptual matters and historiographies--emancipation, punishment, gender, and state formation--and puts them together in a remarkably compelling and original way.""--Steven Hahn, author of A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration ""No Bond but the Law is a model of research procedure and historical writing.""--Sidney Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History "" ... sheds valuable new light on the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the transition from a slave to a free-labour economy ... [Patton's] work makes claims which have implications that resonate far beyond this particular case study.""--History October 2006"

Author Information

Diana Paton is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England. She is the editor of A Narrative of Events, Since the First of August 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, published by Duke University Press.

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