slavery in jamaica documentary

Her publications include Depression to Decolonization: Barlclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926–1962; West Indian Business History: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship (co-edited with B.W. ‘Such is the craving appetite for this abominable custom,’ a planter manual stated, ‘that few, either children or adults, can be broken of it, when once they begin to taste and swallow its insidious, slow poison’.2424 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (1967) [hereafter Patterson, Sociology of Slavery], pp. Thomson wrote that ‘many young females . Such women were noticeably less fertile than their North American sisters. . John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations relative to the West India Islands (2 vols., Edinburgh, 1817) [hereafter Williamson, Medical Observations], ii. Without direct testimony of any sort on the matter from the women themselves, both arguments remain difficult to evaluate conclusively. The health of babies depended crucially on the nutritional intake and bodily strength of their mothers. Tetanus probably accounted for around 20 per cent of total slave mortality in the British Caribbean.9999 Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, p. 29. (Redirected from Slavery in Jamaica) Human rights in Jamaica is an ongoing process of development that has to consider the realities of high poverty levels, high violence, fluctuating economic conditions, and poor representation for citizens. Long, History of Jamaica, ii. In spite of these slights to slave women's morality, observers in fact noted low incidences of venereal disease among British Caribbean slave populations, and the West Indian variant of syphilis – often non‐venereal – was less contagious than the strain found in Europe. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, p. 112. Consequently, the views of slave women in Jamaica cannot be presented. George W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (Cambridge, 1957), pp. Practical Rules for Management, p. 134. In the 1790s ordinances were enacted for the provision of suitable lying‐in wards, and some planters erected structures separate from the slave hospital for this purpose.111111 This would yield about 50 pregnancies, 25 births and 13 surviving children. 1534 The Spanish move to Villa de la Vega. A battle between masters and slaves over the respective benefits of home delivery and lying‐in rooms raged from the late eighteenth century through to slave emancipation. See also Dadzie, ‘Invisible Woman’, 27. Higman, Slave Populations, pp. Klein, Herbert S. and Dadzie, Stella, ‘Searching for the Invisible Woman: Slavery and Resistance in Jamaica’, Race and Class, xxxii (1990), [hereafter Dadzie, ‘Invisible Woman’], 21– 38; and studies by Orlando Patterson, Selwyn H. H. Carrington, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Verene A. Shepherd, cited in nn. . the result of a malformed foetus.8888 The risk of severe bleeding is greatly increased when the woman is suffering from anaemia and also when she has had multiple births; maternal death rates are five times higher in anaemic than in non‐anaemic women.106106 So many documented material and epidemiological factors contributed to the low reproductive capacity of slave women that self‐induced abortion or abstinence is unlikely to have contributed significantly. Most slave women on sugar plantations laboured in the two main field gangs that undertook the heavy agricultural work. Proceedings of the Twenty‐third annual Symposium of the Eugenics Society, London 1986, ed. The contemporary evidence is mainly taken from the writings of white planters, doctors and estate attorneys that dominate the documentary record on slavery in British America. 70, 77. It is likely that birth‐spacing differentials among African and creole slave women in Jamaica were as much the result of avoiding post‐partum intercourse as the consequence of prolonged lactation. 114, 200. 92–3. In 1792 the Jamaican Assembly also exempted any slave woman who had six children alive from field labour and relieved her owner of any taxes otherwise owing upon her.108108 Modern medical findings do not support the notion that pica (an appetite for eating dirt) directly halts menstruation, but it is a condition related to deficiencies in iron. Most infant deaths occurred soon after birth. “It was deep and dark,” Brown says of the research. The ‘others’ unidentified here may have been the ‘obeahmen’, or alleged practitioners of African remedies, sometimes accused of helping slave women in pursuing this choice.7878 Breaking the Ties: French Romantic Socialism and the Critique of Liberal Slave Emancipation. Statistics gathered from these sources show the extent of the demographic problem. The Bristol absentee slave‐owner Richard Bright considered that ‘loose conduct’ among the slave women on his Jamaican sugar estates had led to the frequency of miscarriages and stillbirths. The choices available to slave women are especially pertinent when one considers the implications of planters’ or overseers’ rapes of black women. Black drivers, who often administered floggings, were just as harsh to female as to male slaves. Thus, until knowledge improves about the ways in which Jamaican slave women controlled their own fertility, it remains tendentious to suggest that they opposed breeding as a form of political resistance to the injustices of their enslavement, as some historians have suggested.117117 Where there is now barbarism, there used to be civilization. Living Costs, Real Incomes and Inequality in Colonial Jamaica. J. R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery: The Process of Amelioration, 1750–1834 (Oxford, 1988) [hereafter Ward, British West Indian Slavery], p. 179. The attorneys for this estate claimed in 1812 that these slaves were not badly treated or worked hard and that there were ‘no Negroes in the parish of Westmoreland more indulged, better fed or better clothed’.3131 By roughly 800 CE, a second wave of inhabitance occurred by the Arawak tribes, including the Tainos, prior to the arrival of Columbus in 1494. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, Ind., 1996) [hereafter Bush, ‘Hard Labor’], p. 197. B orn a slave on Jamaican plantation in 1800, William Buchanan’s life was remarkable. Most of the papers concern the properties when they were administered by Conservative MP Henry Goulburn between 1805 and 1856. Both the scattered data available before 1807 and the much fuller statistics from the post‐1817 period show that the crisis of reproduction was all too apparent. . Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976), pp. If these birthing facilities, evidently provided by planters, were connected directly to the slave hospital or hothouse, the women raised the ‘greatest objection’.110110 Ward, British West Indian Slavery, p. 188; William A. However, all these ratios are much lower than peak fertility in modern Jamaica, which yields 299 infants per 1,000 woman‐years at ages 20 to 24.1010 National Archives, CO 139/147, act no. Reproduction among West Indian slave women was higher among those who undertook domestic work rather than field work. Contemporary writings offered contradictory accounts of the difficulties that slave women, seen as ‘blacks’, suffered during childbirth. Thomson, Treatise on Diseases, p. 111. If one assumes, taking the second calculation, that one third of the 150 breeding women were of reproductive age and had births every other year and pregnancies twice that again, on an annual basis 8 out of 50 at a given moment would produce 16 pregnancies in a year, which seems low compared with the figure just derived. Peter Diggory, Malcolm Potts and Sue Teper (1988), pp. Henry Goulbourn, an absentee Jamaican plantation owner, was informed by his manager that the poor levels of fertility on his sugar estate partly resulted from the ability of pregnant slaves to procure abortions.7979 Dietary deficiencies in protein and calcium, the high incidence of deaths among infants, the severity of the gang system on plantations, and the underlying discipline imposed by white estate personnel on slaves are essential parts of this explanation. The exception was Barbados, which experienced an absolute increase in its slave population between 1807 and 1834. Lewis's sugar estate had more women than the norm in Jamaica. [David Collins], Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (1803) [hereafter Practical Rules for Management], p. 146. Although they did not pinpoint malnutrition as a cause of amenorrhea (cessation of the menstrual period), they sometimes related it to slave women's practice of geophagy –‘dirt eating’. The slave trade is said to have drawn between ten and twenty million Africans from their homeland, with approximately six hundred thousand coming to Jamaica (one of the largest importer of slaves at the time) between 1533 and 1807. 163–89, and Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo‐Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2004); Verene A. Shepherd, ‘Gender and Representation in European Accounts of Pre‐Emancipation Jamaica’, in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, ed. 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