Abstract
This special issue explores how enslaved workers of African descent were punished in the Americas. It studies punishment inside and beyond the criminal justice system, investigating its legitimation and implementation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collectively, the articles address three main themes: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies. This perspective illustrates the broader implications of punishment for issues of labor supply and labor control, and helps us understand how slavery was produced and reproduced in different, yet connected, regions of the Americas.
This special issue is an invitation to study slavery through the lens of punishment.1 By approaching enslaved people primarily as highly controlled workers, it seeks to connect the fields of labor history and the history of punishment beyond the traditional association of wage labor and incarceration.2 Concretely, it addresses the processes and modalities through which the enslaved population in the Americas was punished. The interest lies in mapping and interpreting different forms of punishment that were used against enslaved workers, investigating the ways they were legitimated and implemented, and analyzing their broader implications for questions of labor supply and labor control. Thus, among other things, we ask how the punishment of enslaved people in the Americas was constructed through legal theory and practice, and how it differed from that of other groups of the population. We seek to interpret how it changed across decades and, more specifically, explore the impact of the processes of abolition of the slave trade and slavery on the forms and legitimation of punitive practices. In addressing all these issues, we systematically attempt to include the perspective of the enslaved, and to consider their reactions to—and actions with respect to—their punishment.
With these questions, we are building on a rich set of entangled historiographic traditions that span several decades. Indeed, within the rather small and highly fragmented field of historical studies on punishment and labor management, scholarship on the punishment of the enslaved in the Americas stands out as a major exception.3 One only has to read the interview with Sidney Chalhoub included in this special issue to understand how significant Brazilian studies on the punishment of the enslaved have been, and how deeply they are embedded in broader traditions of social and labor histories of slavery.4 The same is true for other scholarly conversations on slavery and state-administered punishment, particularly with respect to the British and French Caribbean, and the United States.5
However, the scholarship on the punishment of the enslaved has traditionally focused only on separate imperial or national contexts. Conversely, this special issue provides a forum for an integrated and comparative debate on the findings of the scholarship in each area. Thus, it brings together for the first time contributions that span both imperial and national contexts—more specifically, they embrace the Dutch, British, French and Spanish empires, as well as the United States, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia. Its focus on the period between the 1760s and the 1880s (with some chapters taking even longer-term perspectives) allows for a detailed analysis of changes in punitive practices and labor regimes in those decades marked by processes of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery.
While each article still delves into the specificities of each context, the deliberate arrangement of the articles suggests one possible route of reading that amplifies some entanglements, similarities, and differences among the punitive practices to which the enslaved were subjected. This route starts with Canfijn and Fatah-Black’s long-term overview of modes of punishment of the enslaved in Suriname from the early-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, in which the authors focus on judicial punishments and changes in sentencing. It continues with De Vito’s exploration of the paternalist relationships between slaves, masters, and the colonial authorities through the analysis of domestic and state-administered punishment in the Audiencia de Quito and early Ecuador. Staying in South America, Echeverri’s connected study of exports of workers of African descent in New Granada (present-day Colombia and Panama) foregrounds the element of forced mobility in the context of political conflict between the newly emerged state of Colombia and powerful slaveholders. Forced mobility as punishment is then dealt with by Jones, who follows convicted slaves between imperial Jamaica and Cuba. The entanglements between penal transportation and slavery are subsequently highlighted in Paterson’s article on French Guiana, which introduces the perspective of the punishment of runaway slaves. Escaped slaves are also central in Müller’s article on the US South, which discusses their forced employment after recapture and the conflicts resulting thereof between slaveowners and authorities. The final article by Jean focusses on Brazil and addresses the legal and social aspects connected with the commutation of the death penalty. It highlights enslaved men and women’s knowledge and manipulation of the legal system and culture.
The broad spatial and temporal scope of the chapters published in this special issue provides a vantage point for wider interventions in the scholarship. Three such insights seem especially likely to open up new debates and stimulate new empirical, and possibly comparative and connected, research. They regard, respectively: the relationship between the enslaved, the slaveholders, and the state; the shifts in modalities of governance across space and time; and the entanglement of modes of punishment across geographies.
1 Slaves, Masters, and the State
With respect to the first point, this special issue suggests that the punishment of slaves can only be fully understood as the result of negotiations, collaborations and conflicts among the state, the masters, and the enslaved persons themselves. Accordingly, “punishment” is understood here in broader terms, that is, beyond the traditional focus on the criminal justice system. Several authors in this special issue unravel the complexity of state-administered punishment, which mobilized distinct punitive agencies and sites, and triggered major debates on the reform or abolition of specific punitive regimes, such as flogging or the death penalty (Jones, Müller, Canfijn and Fatah-Black, Jean). Additionally, this special issue insists that the punitive practices that concerned enslaved workers were not only shaped by the state, but also by the slaveholders and their overseers, and by the actions and perceptions of the slaves themselves (see especially De Vito, Echeverri, Paterson, Jean).6 Certain modes of punishment were answers to the resistance of enslaved people, rather than simply imposed on them. From a theoretical point of view, then, one may say that punitive practices and discourses were (and are) both relational and circular, emerging from the complex interactions of various social actors. Indeed, precisely for this reason, studying the punishment of the enslaved provides a unique entry point into the analysis of power relations.
This expansion of the notion of punishment leads us to reflect also about the boundaries between punishment and social control.7 On the one hand, the focus in this special issue is on explicit punitive practices such as flogging, incarceration, penal transportation, and capital punishment, rather than on practices such as censuses of the enslaved population, the slave pass system, or the religious indoctrination of the enslaved.8 On the other hand, we acknowledge that punishment is embedded in, and often ambiguously entangled with, broader strategies of social control. Placing this ambiguity at the center of the analysis is productive, as there exists a deceptive link between punishment and crime. As Diana Paton importantly discusses in her afterword, punishment is accompanied by a constructed legitimacy to maintain uneven social relations. Moreover, at the interface between both social control and punishment as castigation lies the performative function of punishment.9 When a slaveholder had a slave flogged in front of other workers, they chastised this particular person, but they also sent out a threatening and disciplining message to the others, with a view to strengthen their control of the workforce as a whole. The “spectacle of suffering” of state-administered punishment had a similar role.10 Taking on a partly symbolic function, actions like these were often deliberately cruel and, hence, deterrent (see Canfijn and Fatah-Black). At the same time, precisely the expectation of a harsh reaction from the powerful provided the background against which the paternalist benevolence of the master or the state could emerge, as when they “spared” or “pardoned” their potential victims, or when they applied less violent forms of reprimand and correction.
Whenever an enslaved person was punished, fundamental issues were at stake regarding the relationships between the state and the slaveholders. Who had the authority to define the legitimacy of the use of violence against the enslaved? Who was entitled to punish the enslaved? And who was to establish the appropriate forms and limits of punishment? This is where the law as the embodiment of the visions of the powerful comes into play. In the words of Rebecca Scott, studying law and slavery means “to study many variations on the dance of deference between masters and the state.”11 A dance of deference, conflicts and alliances, one could add. Indeed, a complex interplay of power took place around the discursive and material practices of punishment of the enslaved. Both the slaveowners and the state needed to enhance their authority by reaffirming their right to punish enslaved workers. At the same time, the state had to balance its authority with the property rights of slaveholders. And the latter had to weigh their right to punish against their economic interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, with the need to prevent larger disruptions of their autoridad dominica (master’s authority) that could derive from an untimely and openly abusive repression.
On the ground, things were even more articulated than that. Neither the (colonial) state nor the slaveholding elites were monoliths: different officials and masters had distinct strategies in managing the enslaved workforce, and the two groups were crossed by internal conflicts, not the least because many high-ranking officials and politicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americas were also slaveowners. Moreover, enslaved people were not passive targets of violence and silent witnesses of the relations of power that the state and the elites constructed through their punitive practices. They initiated lawsuits and resisted and escaped from punishment at the same time that they had their own ideas about the legitimacy of violence. Finally, the configurations of the punishment of the enslaved were not static, as the actors, the legal and institutional frames, and the modalities and semantics of punishment changed across time.
2 Punishment in Comparison
Comparative insights across space and time are the second area wherein this special issue intervenes. The interventions at this level are not only empirical but also methodological. They invite scholars to rethink the comparisons between regions and space not merely as the study of differences and similarities among predefined factors (for instance, the forms of punishment, the institutions that were imbricated in the process, or the legal frame), but also as an analysis of the making of different repertoires of legal, discursive, and material practices through the negotiation, collaboration, and conflict among the state, the masters, and the slaves.
Every period and every setting had its own dynamics that determined the possibilities actors had within the law, but also outside of it, in terms of social opportunities, cultural context, or political legacy. One big issue is the circumvention of the slave trade. Historian Miranda Spieler has noted that its abolition marked the increasing power over the enslaved by public authorities.12 In French Guiana—Paterson insists in this special issue—the state instrumented the enforcement of the law against the slave trade to appropriate the slaves and, subsequently, circulate them within their own political entity. In Colombia/New Granada, the external slave trade was equally prohibited but, as Echeverri highlights in her contribution, slaveowners pushed hard for their individual rights to punish rebel slaves by selling them outside their jurisdiction. What connects these two cases are actors seizing the remainders of legal structures of the slave trade after the legal trafficking of people had ceased.
The possibilities in terms of the law differed widely, as did the possibilities to make use of the law. While access to the legal system was much more problematic for enslaved workers in the countryside than for city slaves, and, in general, in Jamaica and the US South, mid-nineteenth-century Brazil disposed of an infrastructure that allowed convicted slaves to write petitions from inside jail, thereby empowering them to actively shape juridical cultures, as Jean puts it in her chapter.
In other words, every context disposed of a set of options available within the confines of the law. Actors often exhausted these options to the limit, like southern slaveholders who neglected to claim their runaway slaves to avoid paying fees (Müller), traffickers who were opaque about the destinations of the people they transported (Jones), or enslaved people pulling all possible and impossible strings to defend themselves from jail (Jean). Frequently, actors went beyond the limits, like those Colombian slaveholders who exported slaves illegally (Echeverri), and the masters across all polities who applied excessive physical punishment. Enslaved workers tried to access all their options, too, but they were by definition much more restricted. Importantly, the law was created and modelled in a way as to control and suppress them. Breaking the law was hence a liberation; and often literally so when enslaved men and women ran away from their owners or broke out of prison (Paterson, Müller).
Over time, as several contributions to this special issue indicate, there seemed to be an increasing attempt by the authorities to interfere with the “domestic” punishment of the enslaved, especially starting from the last third of the eighteenth century (De Vito, Jones, Müller). How far can this trend be related to the changing historical context? By the mid-eighteenth century, slavery had become a dominant organization of labor throughout the American continents and the Caribbean. Enslaved workers—by this time overwhelmingly of African descent—toiled in urban workshops, households, mines, and, more than anything else, on plantations that became increasingly large over time. Towards the end of the century and into the early nineteenth century, the geography of slavery was radically transformed, entailing the destruction of the institution in some regions and its entrenchment and expansion in others. The US North gradually abolished slavery between 1777 and 1804, and the Haitian Revolution put an end to it in 1803 on St. Domingue. The illegalization of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807/1808 was another large milestone. After the independence of many of the former Spanish territories in South and Central America in the 1820s, slavery continued to be legal until 1834 in the British, until 1848 in the French, and until 1863 in the Dutch Caribbean. Abolition in the US South was completed by 1865, and Cuba (still under Spanish rule) and Brazil clung to it until as late as 1886 and 1888, respectively. Surrounded by regions where slavery had been abolished, those places in which it endured were confronted with drastic changes revolving around the justification and organization of this institution of labor supply.
With this broader frame of change in mind, we may ask whether the imperial and nation states sought to limit masters’ arbitrariness to defend the institution of slavery against the growing pressure of abolitionists. At the ideological level, did they implement more regulated modes of punishment that harmonized more with nineteenth-century humanitarianism? And in more practical terms, did the trend of commuting death sentences in the nineteenth century reflect the rising prices of enslaved labor, which stemmed from the shrinking access to enslaved Africans? Moreover, did the ongoing resistance of enslaved men and women lead to stronger mechanisms of top-down control? In short, since this was a time when slavery in the Americas was losing considerable support on the international stage, the conclusion might be to detect a correlation between the weakening slave system and the increased state involvement in punishment.13
However, generalizations must be approached with care. For example, a comparison between the measures that the Spanish authorities put in place since the mid-sixteenth century to protect the enslaved from the abuses of the masters (De Vito) and the late-eighteenth-century intervention of the Dutch colonial state in defense of the enslaved of Suriname (Canfijn and Fatah-Black) reveals the different balance of forces between private and state actors in colonial enterprises sponsored directly by the state and by entities like the Dutch West India Company. Moreover, the attempts by authorities to interfere at times remained mere attempts, or were severely limited in their scope. And indeed, some chapters here warn against any easy conclusion about the linearity and “necessity” of such transformations (De Vito, Echeverri). They rather foreground the persistent social power of the slaveholders; they highlight the conflicts and negotiations between the state and the masters that stood behind any attempt at reform, and which often hampered its implementation; and they point to the fact that even the transition from colonial to republican regimes did not necessarily bring about radical changes in the logistics and forms of the punishment of the enslaved. This point also emerges in Jean’s chapter on the reintroduction of capital punishment for enslaved people who murdered their masters in post-independence Brazil.
The shifting relationship between the state and slaveowners around the punishment of the enslaved also needs to be approached within a framework that includes other groups of workers. For example, in the United States, by intruding into punishment that was previously considered private, the state interfered with modes of labor organization most aggressively. With runaway slaves (who had no detectable owners) or convicted slaves (for whom the owners were compensated), this was relatively easy and straightforward. Yet over time, it became also much more relevant to access Black labor outside the system of slavery. Thus, as the nineteenth century progressed, free people of African descent were increasingly criminalized and punished heavily for minor offenses, which underscored their susceptibility as easily exploitable workers.14 Conversely, in Cuba during the nineteenth century the criminalization of free Black people became connected with the efforts of “whitening” the population (blanqueamiento). Although plans for the deportation of all free Blacks from the island were ultimately never implemented, the tendency was that of expelling and marginalizing them, rather than exploiting their work. At the same time, the unwillingness of the metropolitan government to avoid major conflicts with slaveholders and the direct political role of slaveholders in local government prevented the colonial state from intervening strongly in the realm of the autoridad dominica and on “domestic” punishments more specifically. Indeed, those premises may explain why the state was so ineffective in protecting not only enslaved workers, but also other plantation workers such as Chinese indentured laborers and leased-out convicts, from the punishments and mistreatments they received from the plantation owners.15
3 Punitive Connections
The third element that cuts across the chapters regards the entanglements among the regions and periods addressed. Two dimensions seem especially relevant at this level: punitive practices that created connections among different imperial and national territories; and the circulation of knowledge on the punishment of the enslaved across those polities and across time.
The most obvious spatial dimension to punishment is the forced displacement of convicted slaves. Intended to expel people from a country for good, and sometimes to create a disposable workforce elsewhere, it was a significant legal sentencing in Jamaica, as Jones discusses in her chapter, and throughout the Spanish and the French Caribbean, as part of broader networks of imperial transportation.16 For the US, we dispose of rather concrete numbers. The governor of Virginia could commute the death sentences of enslaved men and women convicted of crimes to “sale and transportation,” which was carried out mostly to Spanish Florida and the Caribbean. Jeff Forret has recently shown that the number of these convicts amounted to 455 between 1815 and 1846. The State of Virginia usually forfeited money in these transactions because they reimbursed the slaveowners.17 While it is not hard to see why authorities would be interested in getting rid of a segment of their enslaved population deemed especially dangerous, the side of the buyers is much less transparent. A New Orleans newspaper wondered exactly this, asking who would want to buy convicted American slaves: “[W]hat country allows the importation of slaves from the United States, especially the importation of convict slaves?”18 The answer most probably is that the buyers did not know, as traders did their best to hide the criminal past of the slaves they were exporting.19
Selling convicted slaves was a particularity of the slave trade that highlighted the interconnectedness of different regions in the Americas. When considering that slaveholders found a way to supply themselves with enslaved workers even after the official abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, they emerge as a transnational class, as Marcela Echeverri has argued elsewhere.20 They kept informed about experiments with labor that were taking place in other places in the Atlantic world. Circulation of information and technology can be detected on various levels. Exchanges about the strategies of control and punishment of the enslaved workers formed a vast network of highly differentiated actors. Bivar Marquese’s Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente arguably provides the most complete synthesis and discussion to date of the reflections of political authorities, slaveholders, missionaries, medical experts across the Portuguese, Spanish, French and British empires, and the US from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century.21
A similar intensity of exchange in theories and practices can be observed regarding the penitentiaries, which were established in the nineteenth century in the western hemisphere. Some of the penitentiaries in the US North were notorious among the global models of the prison reformers, and a key source of inspiration for the creation of similar institutions in the new republics of Latin America.22 Meanwhile, debates were held in Havana in the final years of slavery (mid-1870s to 1880s), with a view to establish a penitentiary (penitenciaria) on the Isle of Pine, just south of Cuba. While the attempts proved ultimately unsuccessful, they invoked “the principles and precepts of the penitentiary science” and featured detailed references to the related International Prison Congresses of London, Stockholm, and Rome, and to concrete experiences in Spain, France, Britain, Belgium, and the United States.23 Within punitive institutions, the spreading of specific techniques of labor extraction and torment was the result of trans-local networks too. A prime example is the treadmill, which originated in England and was employed in workhouses in Jamaica and Charleston for punishing and disciplining workers.24
The circulation of knowledge about the punishment of the enslaved was not uniquely a trans-national or trans-imperial phenomenon, nor was it confined to the upper echelons of American societies. In this special issue, for example, Echeverri and De Vito show the ways in which state authorities, slaveholders, and the slaves in New Granada rejected or appropriated the protective measures contained in the Royal Cédula of 31 May 1789 during the last decades of Spanish rule and into the early republican period. Indeed, as many scholars have observed, the law was a field of conflict, and the enslaved, similar to other subaltern workers, appropriated selective aspects of the law to protect themselves from the abuses of their masters and, more generally, in order to improve their situation.25 In the most extreme cases, the enslaved workers even manipulated punishment itself in order to leave the violent world of the plantations: recent scholarship on Cuba and Brazil has insisted, for example, that in some cases they collectively murdered the masters or the overseers in order to be sentenced to punishments that would involve their removal from the plantations.26
The acquisition and circulation of knowledge by and among the enslaved were also key to other strategies that went against the law. Müller’s and Patterson’s chapters in this special issue show their relevance in individual and collective escapes, and other scholars have highlighted this issue with relation to slave revolts.27 At the same time, as De Vito observes here, a circularity existed between practices of resistance based on the law and those that went beyond or against it, as those enslaved who tried to manipulate the legal system benefited from the pressure that other slaves exerted on the elites by the (threat of) escapes, revolt and the murder of the masters, and overseers. Finally, the circulation of ideas and practices among the subaltern workers and members of the elites allowed the enslaved not only to manipulate the law more effectively, but also to participate in changing the legal framework as such. As Elciene Azevedo has shown for the province of São Paulo in the central decades of the nineteenth century, it was the existence of an organized network of enslaved workers and abolitionist lawyers, magistrates and intellectuals that facilitated the systematic access of the slaves to the legal system, and ultimately created the conditions for broader legal changes.28
The connections among the three main contributions of this special issue are apparent: viewing the construction of punitive practices and discourses as the outcomes of continuous relations of conflict, negotiation, and collaboration among different social actors allows us to study the emergence of different punitive regimes across time and space. This, in turn, underscores the importance of looking into the spatiality of the punishment of the enslaved, and into the impact of the circulation of ideas, techniques, and practices. Lastly, this spatial awareness forces us to ground our analysis of the punitive practices directed against the enslaved workers within specific contexts. As this special issue demonstrates, a processual and expanded understanding of punishment provides us with a vantage point from which to address multiple aspects of the production and reproduction of slavery in distinct but connected regions of the Americas during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
The special issue emerged out of the online workshop “Punishing the Enslaved,” held in March 2021. We are thankful to all participants for their engagement and constructive discussions. We would also like to thank Ismael Montana and Damian Pargas for their support and patience, as well as all anonymous peer reviewers for their work.
Classic works presenting this traditional view include: Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (1939; London: Routledge, 2003); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory: Origins of the Penitentiary System (1977; London: Palgrave, 2018). For a recent reproposition of this approach, see Dario Melossi, Máximo Sozzo and José A. Brandariz-García, eds., The Political Economy of Punishment Today: Visions, Debates and Challenges (London: Routledge, 2018).
Christian G. De Vito and Adam Fagbore, “Punitive Perspectives on Labour Management,” special issue “Punishing Workers, Managing Labour,” International Review of Social History (forthcoming).
For key works, see Silvia Hunold Lara, Campos da violência. Escravos e Senhores na Capitania do io de Janeiro 1750–1808 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988); Andrei Koerner, “Punição, disciplina e pensamento penal no Brasil do século XIX,” Lua Nova 68 (2006): 205–242; Olgário Paulo Vogt, Roberto Radünz, “Condenados à força: A escravidão e os processos judiciais no Brasil,” Métis: história & cultura, 11, no. 21 (2012): 209–228; Maria Helena P.T. Machado, Crime e escravidão. Trabalho, luta e resistência nas Labouras Paulistas (1830–1888) (São Paulo: EdUsp, 2014). For a brief overview, see Lidia Gonçalves Martins, “Escravidão, criminalidade e Justiça: um balanço da produção historiográfica recente,” in Sergio Ricardo da Mata, Helena Miranda Mollo, and Flávia Florentino Varella, eds., Anals do 3o Seminário Nacional da História da Historiografia “Aprender com a história” (Ouro Preto: Edufop, 2009), 978–985.
Philip J. Schwartz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana Stata University Press, 1988); Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Alejandro de la Fuente, “Su ‘único derecho’: los esclavos y la ley,” Debates y perspectivas 4 (2004): 7–21; Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 659–592; James M. Campbell, Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Glenn Mc Nair, Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Juan B. Amores Carredano, “Justicia y esclavitud: Cuba, 1800–1820,” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 66, no. 1 (2009): 79–101; Caroline Oudin-Bastide, “Sévice contre les esclaves et impunité des maîtres (Guadeloupe et Martinique, XVIIe–XIXe siècles),” Caleidoscopios colonials (2010): 155–174; Dawn Harris, Punishing the Black Body: Marking Social and Racial Structures in Barbados and Jamaica (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Frédéric Régent, Les Maîtres de la Guadeloupe: Propriétaires d’ esclaves 1635–1848 (Paris: Éditions Taillandier, 2019).
One relevant aspect that remains beyond the scope of this special issue regards the punishments that were based on the slaves’ own justice system. For a pioneering and fascinating study that integrates this aspect, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname,” Law and History 29, no. 4 (2011): 925–984.
For an important example of scholarship that has used the notion of “social control” to frame the question of the punishment of the enslaved and provide comparative insights, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971).
For a stronger focus on social control of the enslaved in the British Atlantic world, see Trevor Burnard and Natalie Zacek, eds., “The Management of Enslaved People on Anglo-American Plantations, 1700–1860,” [special issue] Journal of Global Slavery 6, no. 1 (2021).
For an extreme example of punishment as workers’ control on a plantation, see Nicholas Radburn, “ ‘[M]anaged at First as if They Were Beasts’. The Seasoning of Enslaved Africans in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Global Slavery 6, no. 1 (2021): 11–30.
Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Rebecca J. Scott, “Slavery and the Law in Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, and Justice,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 924.
Miranda Spieler, “Slave Flight, Slave Torture, and the State: Nineteenth-Century French Guiana,” French Politics, Culture and Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 58.
For an insightful reflection on some of these connections, see Marcelo R. Ferraro, “The Political Economy of Punishment: Slavery and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Brazil and the United States,” International Review of Social History (forthcoming).
Carey Latimore IV, “A Step Closer to Slavery? Free African Americans, Industrialization, Social Control and Residency in Richmond City, 1850–1860,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 1 (2011): 119–137; Viola Franziska Müller, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2022). Also compare to vagrancy laws that foremost targeted Black people after emancipation, for example, Marion Pluskota, “Freedom of Movement, Access to the Urban Centres, and Abolition of Slavery in the French Caribbean,” International Review of Social History 65, no. 28 (2020): 93–115.
On Cuba, see Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Jorge Camacho, Miedo negro, poder blanco en la Cuba colonial (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015); Christian G. De Vito, “Punishment and Labour Relations: Cuba between Abolition and Empire (1835–1886),” Crime, Histoire & Sociétès / Crime, History & Societies 22, no. 1 (2018): 53–79. For a further expansion of the comparison to Brazil, see Babatunde Sofela, Emancipados: Slave Societies in Brazil and Cuba (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011); Beatriz Mamigomian, Africanos livres: A abolição do tráfico de escravos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 2017).
Midlo Hall, Social Control Slave Plantation Societies; Danielle Donet-Vincent, De soleil et de silences: histoire des bagnes de Guyane (Paris: La Boutique de l’ Histoire, 2003); John Savage, “Black Magic and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and the Provostial Court in Restoration Era Martinique,” Journal of Social History 40, no. 3 (2007): 635–662; Miranda Frances Spieler, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guyana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Marco Fioravanti, “Domestic enemy: Poisoning and resistance to the slave order in the 19th century French Antilles,” Historia Constitucional 14 (2013): 503–514; Reynaldo Ortiz-Minaya, From Plantation to Prison: Visual Economies of Slaves Resistance, Criminal Justice, and Penal Exile in the Spanish Caribbean 1820–1886 (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 2014); Allyson Jaye Delnore, “Empire by Example? Deportees in France and Algeria and the Re-making of a Modern Empire, 1846–1854,” French Politics, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 33–54; Christian G. De Vito, “Punitive Entanglements: Connected Histories of Penal Transportation, Deportation, and Incarceration in the Spanish Empire (1830s–1898),” International Review of Social History 63, no. 26 (2018): 169–189.
Jeff Forret, William’s Gang: A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 56–58.
Quoted in Forret, William’s Gang, 84.
Forret, William’s Gang, 58.
Marcela Echeverri, “Esclavitud y tráfico de esclavos en el Pacífico suramericano durante la era de la abolición,” HMex 69, no. 2 (2019): 663.
Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente. Senhores, letrados e o controle dos esclavos nas Américas, 1660–1860 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004).
Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Adam J. Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven: Yale University Press: 1992); Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America: Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control, 1830–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid, Ultramar, 1833, caja 2, exp. 464, Proyecto de un establecimiento penal en la Isla de Pinos, 30 October 1886. On the transnational debates on crime and punishment in the second half of the nineteenth century: Peter Becker, and Richard F. Wetzell, eds., Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Nir Shafir, “The International Congress as Scientific and Diplomatic Technology: Global Intellectual Exchange in the International Prison Congress, 1860–90,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 72–93; Briony Neilson, “The Paradox of Penal Colonization: Debates on Convict Transportation at the International Prison Congresses 1872–1895,” French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 6 (2015): 198–211.
Paton, No Bond, 83, 88–89; Müller in this special issue.
For a collection of sources, see Carolina González Undurraga, Esclavos y esclavas demandando justicia: Chile, 1740–1823. Documentación judicial por carta de libertad y papel de venta (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 2014). For insights from different regions and on distinct groups of workers, see Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2005); Bonny Ibhawoh, Imperial Justice: Africans in Empire’s Court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bianca Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Griet Vermeesch, Manon van der Heijden and Jaco Zuiderduijn, eds., The Uses of Justice in Global Perspective, 1600–1900 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
Elciene Azevedo, O direito dos escravos: Lutas jurídicas e abolicionismo na província de São Paulo (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2010): 37–85; De Vito, “Punishment and Labour Relations,” 61–65.
See for example, Iacy Maya Mata, Conspirações da raça de cor (Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2015); Marjoleine Kars, Blood in the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (New York: New Press, 2020); Crystal Nicole Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021). For the reconstruction of a seventeenth-century mutiny that showcases this approach: Johan Heinsen, Mutiny in the Danish Atlantic World: Convicts, Sailors and a Dissonant Empire (London: Bloombsbury, 2017).
Azevedo, O direito dos esclavos.
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