Session 9: Slaveholders and enslaved people

William Berryman – Figures in Plantain Walk, Jamaica (c. 1810)

We will look at a written document: Matthew Lewis’s journal of his time as a slaveholder in Jamaica, produced around the same time as the image above. Lewis wrote about various aspects of slave life and resistance, but he did so very much from his own perspective – as a plantation owner and slaveholder.

We will ask how we can understand the lives and ideas of enslaved people, given the nature of the available sources. We will also consider what such sources reveal about the minds and priorities of the master class in the British Caribbean.

Is the outlook of the slaves visible to us in primary sources? Who was Lewis and what can he tell us about enslaved people, their lives and how they chose to resist slavery? What are the strengths and shortcomings of the source ?

Primary source:

Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor: Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834), pp. 187 – 94, 201–8.

Some more reading:

Zacek, N. Reading the Rebels: Currents of Slave Resistance in the Eighteenth-Century British West Indies (2007).