The Sociology of Slavery (eBook)

Orlando Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and Chair of the Jamaica Education Transformation Commission at the Office of the Prime Minister of Jamaica.

Introduction to the 2022 Edition: Life and Scholarship in the Shadow of Slavery

Preface

I The Masters: An Overall View of Slavery

II The Slave Plantation: Its Socio-Economic Structure

III The Treatment of the Slaves in Law and Custom

IV An Analysis of the Slave Population of Jamaica

V The Tribal Origins of the Jamaican Slaves

VI The Socialization and Personality Structure of the Slave

VII Social Institutions of the Slaves: Witchcraft, Sorcery and Religion

VIII Social Institutions of the Slaves: Economy, Recreation and Control

XIV The Mechanisms of Resistance to Slavery

XX The Cultural and Social Development of Jamaica: 1655-1865

Appendix 1: Stephen Fullers Account of the Number of Negroes imported and exported at Jamaica each year, 1702-75

Appendix 2: Exports from Jamaica, 1768

Appendix 3: General Return from the Island of Jamaica, for Fifty-Three Years, ending 31st December 1836, abstracted from the Journals of the House Assembly

Appendix 4: Output, Income and Expenditure in 1832

Appendix 5: Manuscripts and Official Publications Consulted

Appendix 6: Europeans in West Africa; Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Appendix 7: Africa as known to Europeans in the Mid-eighteenth Century

Index

'a lucid, densely packed, and extremely intelligent analysis of slavery... indispensable'
Eric Hobsbawm, The Guardian

'an inventive and perceptive book'
Jack P. Greene, The American Historical Review

'a valuable contribution to the study of West Indian history... Patterson has asked new questions and elicited some new answers in his discussion of the Jamaican slave society.'
Elsa Goveia, The Times Literary Supplement

'This book is a badly needed and well done study of the slave society of Jamaica... Refreshingly free of romanticism, it deals frankly with the impact of slavery upon all the members of Jamaican society.'
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, The Historian

"[Orlando Patterson] is one of our great comparative and historical sociologists"
Society