Accepted author manuscript, 216 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Review article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 31/01/2021 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | Journal of Global Slavery |
Issue number | 1 |
Volume | 6 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Pages (from-to) | 11-30 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 29/01/21 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica's Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.