The Governor and the Enslaved: An Archaeology of Colonial Modernity at Marshall's Pen, Jamaica

The rise of modernity in Europe resulted in the redefinition of social relations between those in control of the apparatus of the state and economy on the one hand, and those who worked and lived within that apparatus on the other. This shift in the definition of the basic social unit from subject t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of historical archaeology Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 488 - 512
Main Author Delle, James A.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Boston Springer 01.12.2009
Springer US
Subjects
Age
Archaeology
Children
Colonial history
Colonialism
Consumerism
Historical archaeology
Jamaica
Material culture
Modernity
Parents
Plantations
Race
Slavery
Social archaeology
Social relations
Social Sciences
Towns
Villages
Workforce
Consumerism
Racialization
Jamaica
Modernity
Colonialism
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Summary:The rise of modernity in Europe resulted in the redefinition of social relations between those in control of the apparatus of the state and economy on the one hand, and those who worked and lived within that apparatus on the other. This shift in the definition of the basic social unit from subject to individual citizen was fraught with tension, and resulted in vast changes in the lives of colonized people throughout the European sphere of control. The social and material manifestations of these historical processes were many; this article considers how phenomena associated with colonial modernity impacted the lives of people enslaved at Marshall's Pen, a Jamaican coffee plantation, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. To this end, this article examines the negotiation of the social and material realities of nineteenth-century colonialism through the spread of mass-produced goods mediated through the rise of consumerism visible through archaeologically recovered material culture, the imposition of age-grade, gendered, ethnic and racial categorizations as manifestations of a rationalized social order, the increased focus on the individual as a self-regulating member of a moralized social order, and shifting definitions of the relationships between space and social organization reflecting in changing settlement patterns of village life.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
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ISSN:1092-7697
1573-7748
DOI:10.1007/s10761-009-0086-x