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In Jamaica, the longstanding notion of indigenous extinction through colonial violence and subsequent intermixing with enslaved Africans has led to widespread debate on the island regarding the legitimacy of Taíno survival. Colonial narratives attesting to the absolute decimation of original inhabitants throughout the Caribbean region have arguably created stagnant understandings of indigeneity in Jamaica into the 21st century. This paper seeks to investigate complex conceptualizations of indigeneity on the island and explore the ways in which the myth of extinction has persisted into the post-colonial period, along with the challenges related to the reconstruction of Taíno histories in Jamaica.

In this prolegomenon to my book in progress, I posit insects as an especially apposite focal point through which to investigate the constellation of European, Indigenous, and Afro-diasporic knowledges about West Indian nature. I also delineate how this focus on insects allows us to think anew long-standing literary critical problems of setting, semiotics, and figuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the ways Rastafari in Jamaica practiced statehood and statecraft between the 1930s and early 1960s. At times, as is well known, Rastafari rejected the authority and institutions of the colonial state in Jamaica. But archival documents also reveal the ways they came to battle against colonialism and white supremacy on their own terms. Rastas built their own versions of state institutions to recreate an alternate world beyond "Babylon." They learned to manipulate and "work" the institutions of Babylon from law courts to the political machine in order to survive. They followed national and international news—often from Africa—and absorbed knowledge about the United Nations they could use to fight legal cases and write petitions protesting the conditions of their existence. All this suggests a novel stream of Rastafari intellectual thought and action that we must add to our understandings of the movement. Studying Rastafari in this manner—possible because of extensive research in its rich history—provides an opportunity to understand the actions of marginalized groups acting beyond the traditional nation state in the moment of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public memory of slavery and resistance has been contentious terrain in Jamaica. During the island's more than three centuries of British rule, memorials reflected an imperial narrative in which emancipation was the outcome of a benevolent crown, reflected in statues and venerations of monarchical figures. Independence in 1962 changed this practice. New memorials honoured prominent black Jamaicans. Independence also created charged debates over state and public representations of Jamaican history. This essay reflects on these matters, and the lessons they hold for global discussions on how the history of slavery should be publicly remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the "seasoning" of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica's Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally "tame" Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers the history of slavery in the British Caribbean from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, particularly Jamaica, focusing on aspects on motherhood and reproduction. Topics include competing interests of plantation owners regarding mothers' work and child-rearing duties, child labor, the work involved in sugar production, and the impact of rising abolitionist sentiments on plantation life.

During the celebration of emancipation in the British West Indies, Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, a 90-year-old former apprentice from West Africa living in Jamaica wrote and likely delivered a speech in Arabic script and had it delivered to Jamaican Governor, Sir Lionel Smith. This recently discovered manuscript exhibits elements of the 'freedom narrative' as defined by Paul E. Lovejoy and of 'creole testimony' as identified by Nicole N. Aljoe. The language and discourse of the address reveal that linguistic and cultural creolization can be deliberate rather than organic. Kabā Saghanughu ingeniously used the official colonial discourse of this public occasion to project into the historical record his autobiography and critique of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Jamaican airs" is a paper introducing an unpublished primary source from the C. E. Long Papers at the British Library in London. Although much of the source's content was originally printed in 1797, in a periodical called The Columbian Magazine, about half has never been published. This half features the most extensive pieces of musical notation from the early-modern era of songs that were composed and performed by enslaved people. The present article is an early step in an ongoing and collaborative effort to share this music with people interested in studying Caribbean history and culture. It introduces the pieces of notation by contextualizing the larger primary source in which they are embedded. This is done in three parts: overall description, provenance and archival context, and preliminary analysis. The complete primary source has been made available to the public in an online exhibit with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White Jamaicans paid relatively high rates of taxation to support a powerful and assertive imperial state in schemes of settlement and security. They paid such taxes willingly because they were satisfied with what they got from the state. Furthermore, they believed they had a significant stake in the processes by which taxes were collected and spent. The power of the colonial state depended on the empire being a loose fraternal alliance. Nevertheless, what worked for imperial and colonial Jamaica did not necessarily work elsewhere. Jamaica provides a case study of how the imperial state worked satisfactorily for imperial rulers and those colonists whom they ruled when both the state and colonial settlers shared common beliefs and when negotiations made it clear that the interests of all parties coincided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of memorial murals in inner-city Kingston points to their importance in practices related to grief and mourning, but also in commemoration and celebration. It is the second aspect that I will focus on in this essay: what can we learn from an exploration of what and who memorial murals commemorate? What paradoxes and ambiguities does an ethnographically rooted analysis of this visual culture reveal, and might this allow for a more complex understanding of Jamaica's politics of difference? Might such an analysis problematize the moral judgements about the deviance of popular art as opposed to respectable cultural practices of the middle and upper classes? As a start in addressing these questions, I present several examples of memorial murals from inner-city communities in Jamaica. I suggest that one of the primary characteristics of memorial murals is their multivalency, and I further argue this multivalency disrupts certain moral values that are typically presented as incompatible or antagonistic. With this exploration I seek to show how aesthetic practice can reveal the ways in which the criminal and illegal are rarely completely separate from the legal and traditional constructions of "the good". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1960s, historians of the early-modern era have been working with colonial sources to uncover the ways that Africans with connections to the Gold Coast – often known as 'Coromantees' in the Anglo-American colonies – shaped the history of the Atlantic World. One of the most influential primary sources used in this literature is a 32-page section of the second volume of The History of Jamaica, written by the planter-historian Edward Long in 1774. 'The origins of a source' uses Long's life and works, both published and unpublished, to tell the story of this source's creation. In doing so, it provides a detailed case study for how a prominent and controversial intellectual acquired knowledge of African culture, and then repurposed and deployed that knowledge as a tool in the abolitionist debates. It argues that the political context of abolition is essential to understanding Long's writings on the Coromantee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses essays related to Jamaican 1970s, a revolutionary decade in Jamaican historiography. It states that essays exemplify ethos of Jamaican Cultural Political Modern Project (JCPMP), which aims to rethink Jamaican cultural-political historiography. It discusses Don Robotham's 1981 political booklet titled "1974–81" and Neville Dawes's 1978 book "Interim."

The article focuses on Jamaica in 1970s and its influence in definitive creation of black Britain, marking coming of age of children of the Windrush Generation of Caribbean migrants in Great Britain. Topics include racial identity of young black Britons, African diaspora of 1970s Jamaica and influence of Rastafari on black Britain Jamaica.

The article discusses left political wing of Jamaica between 1947-1980 including Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ) amid dominant political groups including People's National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Topics include politicians Norman Manley, Michael Manley and D. K. Duncan, Grenada Revolution and New Jewel Movement (NJM).

The author presents a narrative of his personal experiences and his family history in Jamaican 1970s, co-relating with social conditions, politics and culture in the era. He discusses his father's involvement in People's National Party (PNP) and later resignation from PNP and working with Workers Party of Jamaica (WPJ). Works discussed include Anthony C. Winkler's "Going Home to Teach", Brian Meeks' "Paint the Town Red", and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's "The True History of Paradise".

The article contrasts the trajectory of Irishman Henry Blake, Jamaican governor from 1889-1897 with that of John Eyre, the Protector of indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand who, in his later role as governor of Jamaica, would put down the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865. Topics discussed include information on the New Jamaica campaign launched by Blake, career background of Blake, and programs of Blake which resemble key aspects of Ireland's cultural and political revival in the 1890s.

The article explores the cultural, historical and imaginative connections between Ireland and the Caribbean. Topics discussed include significance of Montserrat's Saint Patrick's Day festival and the anniversary of the slave revolt, led by Maroon leader in Jamaica, Cudjoe, which took place on the island on Saint Patrick's Day in 1768, and works by Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison which recorded the 'green history' of Jamaica and the living legacy of the Black Irish of that island.

Manumission touched comparatively few slaves, but it proved to be an essential institution for the growth of Jamaica's free population-of-color. Heretofore, there have been no systematic studies of manumission records for the eighteenth century. This paper analyzes manumission deeds filed as official records in the island's Secretary's office during the 1770s. These documents are scrutinized in light of Edward Long's 1774 discussion on the free population and the manumission process. Despite white anxiety over the growth of the free-population-of-color, the data show that a wide cross-section of Jamaica's free-population liberated enslaved people for a variety of reasons, including cash payments that reflected market imperatives. While most enslaved people could never hope to find freedom in this fashion, the constancy of manumission had an enormous bearing on the makeup of the free population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between its first meeting in January 1664 and the final session held under unfree labour in December 1838, the volume of legislation passed by the house of assembly in Jamaica increased exponentially. As in Britain and Ireland, this reflected the growing administrative capacity and political power of the legislature and also the enormous demand for laws and law-making among local interest groups. The rise and fall of slavery and the slave society in the island was therefore underpinned in a large part by the power of its colonial legislature, which also operated within the broader transatlantic constitution structured by imperial politics and law. There was very little though to distinguish the house of assembly from others in British North America, at least in legislative terms, and even after the traumatic imperial disjuncture of 1783 the reformed transatlantic constitution continued to provide a supportive environment for the expansion of legislation within the island of Jamaica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those challenges did not determine the fate of the Jamaican planters. Rather, it was the radicalisation of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the extended period of war that began in 1793, that led to their eventual defeat over the question of the slave trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Surveyor, penkeeper, overseer, slaveowner, and landholder Thomas Thistlewood (1721–86) was a white English immigrant to British colonial Jamaica who lived there from 1750 until his death. Canonical readings of Thistlewood's archive quarantine his intellectual pursuits from his brutal plantation oversight, which included serial rapes of enslaved women. Taking a necessarily integrative approach, this essay analyzes Thistlewood's diaries in conjunction with his reading notes, identifying the literary-scientific valences of his perpetration and documentation of rape. It argues that violence against enslaved women was central to Thistlewood's Enlightenment thought and plantation management, in addition to considering the political stakes of choosing a language to describe his interactions with enslaved women. It proposes that antiracist feminist theory and art have the potential to critically disrupt analyses of slavery's archives that threaten to reproduce or even exacerbate their violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the historical recurrences of Maroon indigenous women from Jamaica, an island situated in the Caribbean Sea and part of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Topics discussed include brief history of Jamaica, two stories of historical recurrences, and a background on indigenous women of Jamaica.

In the early modern era, the hinterland of a Caribbean island encompassed more than the land sequestered by its sandy shorelines. This article uses the loggers of Barbados and the turtlers of Jamaica to explore how Caribbean colonists forged and maintained maritime hinterlands in order to supply island residents and feed urban populations. In timbering nearby islands and harvesting adjacent waterscapes, loggers and turtlers forged an interisland web of ecological and economic relationships that inextricably linked proximate islands to one another. Barbadians, for example, depended on timber from St. Lucia, and Jamaicans provisioned Port Royal with turtles from the Cayman Islands. In both instances, colonists and local officials claimed these nearby islands as "dependencies" of the larger colony and sought to defend them. By reorienting our understanding of hinterlands from interior lands to neighboring islands and seascapes, this article offers a new way of thinking about port cities, sufficiency, and industry, especially in plantation America. Rather than peripheral trades with little economic value, ventures such as timbering and turtling promoted vernacular industries, which in turn reduced reliance on imported goods, thereby enabling the islands of Barbados and Jamaica to become efficient, populous colonies within a profitable Atlantic empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a microhistory of Richard Tookerman, an alleged pirate who appeared in South Carolina, Jamaica, England, and other locations in the greater Atlantic world. Accused of trading with pirates and of assisting the pirate Stede Bonnet's escape from a South Carolina jail, Tookerman eventually resurfaced in Jamaica, where in 1721 he was apprehended by Admiral Edward Vernon. Sent to London to stand trial for crimes that included piracy and Jacobite activity, Tookerman went free by virtue of a writ of habeas corpus, which emboldened him to countersue Vernon for false imprisonment and negotiate a favorable cash settlement. The investigation of Tookerman's life reveals new dimensions of piracy by tracking individuals in local administrative records from several colonies in an attempt to connect piracy at sea with the land-based communities that supported it. Tookerman was a minister's son and self-styled "gentleman of South Carolina," and his rather ordinary life challenges the idea that pirates were a uniquely deviant kind of human being, thereby complicating the very idea of what it meant to be a "pirate." Tookerman's ability to evade the law in several maritime communities indicates a lingering sympathy for pirates, even as the British colonial governments tried to eradicate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the relationship of enslaved and apprenticed women in the Anglophone Caribbean to the embodied experience of childbearing, motherhood, and childlessness. It places this analysis in the context of a discussion of the development and implementation of pronatalist policies in the Anglophone Caribbean during the late period of slavery. It examines the experience of pronatalist policies by enslaved women, using as a case study a microhistory from Jamaica during the apprenticeship period (1834–1848). Although the existence of pronatalist policies gave some women (mothers with large numbers of children) a position from which to claim reduced workloads and other ‘rights’, they made the situation of childless women more difficult. In historians' attention to the struggles of mothers, we have sometimes paid insufficient attention to the perspective of childless and bereaved women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including British touring companies in post-emancipatory Jamaica, Spanish Zarzuela troupes in Argentina, and travelling theatres in Southeast Asia.

The article discusses author's place within the black/white color spectrum in Jamaica and the U.S. and focuses on how she addresses both whiteness and blackness within her work. Also, focuses on the race and gender which are more open in the lives of children and the questioning of the idea of purity and its relationship to whiteness, and visual culture and its effects on identity.

The colonial state of Jamaica and its attending institutions has given free passes for how it has ridiculed, suppressed and violently attacked Revivalism, Pocomania, Obeah and Rastafari. This paper provides a stream of correctives for the practice of shielding the colonial state and its institutions from criticism. Exposing colonialism's contempt for Black Spiritualism and Ethiopianism is demonstrated through interrogating Leonard P. Howell, Alexander Bedward and Paul Bogle. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, corridor, Bogle, Bedward and Howell suffered severe persecution and owning to ways they articulated liberation through Black spiritualism and Ethiopianism as the elites branded Obeah, Revivalism, Pocomania and Rastafari as seditious and pathways to lunacy. Labeling Jamaica's Black spiritual traditions as criminal and madness served as justifications to terrorize, imprison and murder Obeah workers, Revivalists and Rastas. Addressing this theater of ridicule and violence shifts attention towards Jamaica's harsh racial milieu were the consequences Afro-Jamaicans suffered for clinging to African spiritual ways and seeking redemption through Ethiopian paradigms that included, but were not limited to beatings, imprisonment and mockery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1870s and 80s, the Jamaican colonial government encouraged the institutionalization of juvenile delinquents in industrial schools as an alternative to their incarceration in prisons. Much of this effort was driven by concerns about the inability to control the potential labor of children, maintaining the social order, and the "perceived" instability of the black family. Through the Reformatories and Industrial Schools Law (1881), the Poor Relief Law (1886), and later the Young Criminals Punishment Law (1904), the colonial state funded the development of industrial schools and channeled boys and girls into these institutions through the courts and poor relief infrastructure. These laws linked industrial schools to the existing coercive social, legislative, and economic infrastructure that sought to control the labor of black Jamaicans. Gender as well as the type of crime committed determined where children were institutionalized in industrial schools. This paper contributes to the existing historiography on children in the Caribbean as well as reformatories and industrial schools in the colonial world by examining the legislation that shaped the development of industrial schools and the ways in which these institutions were integrated into existing coercive structures in Jamaica between 1881 and 1904. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the long eighteenth century, elite free people of color in Jamaica petitioned the government for exemptions to some of the island's laws against those with African ancestry. In making these appeals, they highlighted advanced social and financial positions that put them above the average Jamaican of color. But perhaps most important, these petitions noted familial relations to white men on the island. These kinship connections were central in determining if a free person of color was deserving enough to receive "privileged" rights. In bestowing these privileges, Jamaican officials demonstrated that one's racial status on the island was determined, in part, by familial linkages to white colonists. Although only a fraction of mixed-race Jamaicans gained these legal exemptions, the practice nevertheless reveals how important family relation was in constructing racial identities, even in a place built on racialized oppression and slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on payments for slave sales in the later phase of the British slave trade. It analyses the procedures used in the ‘guarantee’ system in transatlantic slaving whereby merchants in British ports forged close connections with African factors in British America and with British businessmen who guaranteed to pay the factors’ bills presented as payments for slave sales. This was an important institutional procedure in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Though the ‘guarantee’ system has been explained in outline in previous studies, the case study presented here offers the most detailed appraisal of this system. Examining the British slave trade to Jamaica in 1790s, then the most significant disembarkation centre for enslaved people taken on British vessels, the paper explains the coordination necessary between groups of British merchants, their African factors in Jamaica and their British guarantee in order to secure payments for slave sales at a time of considerable volatility in the demand for slaves in Jamaica. The paper suggests that cooperation between merchants in different British ports in connection with the slave trade is as worthy of investigation as the rivalry between the British ports involved in the ‘Guinea’ traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies of post-war chronic disease epidemiology have generally focused on the histories of research in the USA and UK. Using the archival records of a major British funding body, the Colonial Medical Research Committee and its successor the Tropical Medical Research Board, this article demonstrates the advantages of bringing a post-colonial analytic to this historiography. It highlights how the administrative and medical interests in population difference at the centre of the new epidemiology came to map onto political apparatus initially created to know, reform and govern colonial subjects. Although detachedfrom imperial aims, British medical scientists nonetheless attached value to colonial populations on the basis of British benefit and turned various sites into laboratories to extract it. This relationship did not die with the end of imperial rule. British scientists continued to pursue chronic disease epidemiology in former colonies well into the post-war period, informing debates about Britain’s own public health concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Surf Scoter (Melanitta perspicillata), a young male bird shot by president of hunting club, Felix MedinaIsa on January 25, 2015, Cuba, deposited in National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon, Portugal, similar record was noted in Jamaica in eighteenth century.

The article reviews history websites including "Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative," created by Vincent Brown, available at http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html, "Two Plantations: Enslaved Families in Virginia and Jamaica." available at: http://www.twoplantations.com/, and "Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930" available at digitalharlem.org.

A review of the scholarly history website entitled "Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative," available at http://revolt.axismaps.com, is presented.

The article discusses World War I and mentioned anti-Chinese riots in Jamaica in 1918. Topics discussed include mob violence, Chinese shopkeepers in Jamaica and Jamaican population. Other topics which includes economic factors in the riots, shopkeeper trade and relationship between Chinese and Jamaicans are also discussed.

A chamber of commerce in Kingston was a response to defects in local projections of the British imperial state. It met immediate needs to organise naval convoys and liaise with the local naval commander in the face of breakdown of effective government resulting from conflicts between Governor John Dalling and Jamaica's Assembly. The efforts of collective action were mitigated by being shared across a range of activities that the chamber either developed or collaborated in providing: convoys, negotiations over naval impressment, a coffee room, help with credit and specie, marine insurance and response to the disastrous hurricane of October 1780. The chamber is a significant illustration of the growing development of voluntary formal rules-based business interest representation in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Although short-lived, it is important as an early example of chamber bodies that later helped the management of empire and covered all its major cities. It shows these locally based bodies seeking new opportunities to represent commercial interests directly, rather than through traditional intermediaries, and beginning to fill gaps to support the development of trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Sistren Theatre Collective's play Domestick, performed at the Barn Theatre, Kingston, Jamaica in 1981 for local audiences and then in Canada for groups of domestic workers from the Caribbean, the Philippines, Europe and the UK. The play was also performed in Grenada and St Vincent when Sistren toured those islands in 1982. It is argued that Sistren's play is still relevant to contemporary debates on domestic work and the contemporary struggles of Jamaican domestic workers as it demonstrates that paid ‘housekeeping’ is a form of structural violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the second edition of Benjamin Moseley'sTreatise on Sugar(1799), Moseley, a doctor practicing in Kingston, nests a section on obeah into a discussion of the disfiguring illness yaws, which causes sufferers’ bodies to become “shocking grotesque figures, resembling woody excrescences, or stumps of trees; or old AEgyptian figures, that seem as if they had been made at the ends of the human, and beginnings of the brutal form.” This in turn is part of a larger section on “Miscellaneous Medical Observations” that also includes descriptions of cowpox, leprosy, and plague, illnesses defined by their rapid spread and their highly visible compromise of bodily systems and functions. Because of its inclusion here, obeah is classed as an infectious cultural disease that, like the illnesses Moseley discusses, can spread quickly through colonial populations, threatening the bodily and mental integrity of slaves and white planters alike. Taking a cue from Moseley, I analyze obeah as a cultural contaminant that embeds itself within the colonial and British imagination. Reading theTreatise on Sugaralongside the wildly popular British stage play,Obi, or Three-Fingered Jack(1800 and 1830), which tells the story of outlaw and murderer Jack Mansong, and Matthew Lewis’ autobiographicalJournal of a West India Proprietor(1834), in which Lewis constantly struggles to stifle the practice of obeah on his Jamaican plantations, I argue that colonists and residents of the metropole responded to obeah much as they did to infectious agents like yaws and yellow fever – through a mixture of quarantine, suppression, ignorance, and failed treatments that ultimately allowed for its continued spread. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses slave sales and transatlantic slave trade profits in the late eighteenth-century Jamaica in relation to the life of British American slave traders (Guinea factors) such as John Tailyour. According to the article, Scotland native Tailyour started selling captive Africans in 1785 and later became Jamaica's second-largest slave trader. Tailyour's life is examined in relation to his experiences in places such as London, England and New York.

Why were so many sex offences prosecuted in the Jamaican courts in the 1840s and early 1850s when so few had been heard before 1834? Local elites and colonial officials were almost unanimous in their belief that this episode represented an outbreak of sexual deviance and a disturbing manifestation of regression towards ‘African barbarism’. Using the concept of the moral panic as an explanatory tool, I argue here that this ‘epidemic’ was largely manufactured, the product of displaced elite anxieties about the dangers of freedom, and that it played a pivotal role in the abandonment of reform and the return to repression a decade after full emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]