Agency of the Enslaved

In Agency of the Enslaved: Jamaica and the Culture of Freedom in the Atlantic World, D.A. Dunkley challenges the notion that enslavement fostered the culture of freedom in the former colonies of Western Europe in the Americas. Dunkley argues the point that the preconception that out of slavery came freedom has discouraged scholars from fully exploring the importance of the agency displayed by enslaved people. This study examines those struggles and argues that these formed the real basis of the culture of freedom in the Atlantic societies. These struggles were not for freedom, but for the acknowledgment of the freedom that enslaved people knew was already theirs. Agency of the Enslaved reveals several major incidents in which the enslaved in Jamaica—a country Dunkley uses as a case study with wider applicability to the Atlantic world—demonstrated that they viewed slavery as an immoral, illegal, unnecessary, temporary, and socially deprecating imposition. These views inspired their attempts to undermine the slave system that the British had established in Jamaica shortly after they captured the island in 1655. Acts of resistance took place throughout the island-colony and were recorded on the sugar plantations and in the courts, schools, and Christian churches. The slaveholders envisaged all of these sites as participants in their attempts to dominate the enslaved people. Regardless, the enslaved had re-envisioned and had used these places as sites of empowerment, and to show that they would never accept the designation of ‘slave.'

Historian Dunkley argues that the concept of freedom in the written history of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world has never been examined from the perceptions and experiences of the enslaved. Freedom is usually defined as an external condition; Dunkley argues that the feelings and consequent actions of individuals proclaim freedom despite enslavement. These feelings, convictions, and behaviors influenced the larger societies in which slaves lived. An important example is education. Clerics and mission societies provided religious and literacy instruction to make better slaves. Those educated, however, achieved deeper understanding of the wider society and the ways in which they could undermine its power. Similarly, the marriage of enslaved persons by Anglican clergy asserted freedom because slave marriage was illegal and presented a host of legal and financial problems to slaveholders. Slaves resist, as is well known, but Dunkley focuses on resistance as a consequence of internal conviction and defines this conviction as freedom. Readers may agree or not. This well-written book, based on both archival and published sources, has a place in all academic libraries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries., The most innovative element of the book is its extended analysis of the changing role of the Anglican Church in Jamaica. . . .As a philosophical rumination, Dunkley’s concept of slave freedom has a lot to offer toward a powerful corrective to narratives that presume to know how slaves viewed their enslavement or what they hoped to achieve by engaging in acts of resistance. . . .Agency of the Enslaved prompts readers to avoid pat assumptions about the mindsets of the enslaved and demonstrates the sophisticated legal and religious strategies enslaved Afro-Jamaicans used to challenge the island’s slave regime., Dunkley powerfully and cogently articulates the agency of captive Africans working on commercial Plantations in Jamaica under British colonialism from 1655-1834. Dunkley moves the argument beyond the passive and active resistance dichotomy to show that the notion of freedom was deeply embedded in the world view, ethos and psyche of the enslaved that saw themselves as free people. . . . Dunkley eloquently reveals that some of the most ardent supporters of freedom and the role and rights of the individual in the social contract were the captives Africans in the Americas who were not legally seen as members of the contract., A glance through the endnotes will attest to Dunkley’s commitment to a painstaking reading of archives including the National Archives, Fulham Papers, the House of Lords Record Office, and the University of Birmingham Archives (all in England). The book’s recovery of secular and religious source materials, and Dunkley’s revealing insights about the relationships documented therein, surely will stimulate further investigation of this fascinating aspect of a volatile period in Jamaican history. The main premise of the book – that slave freedom was self-determined – has been absolutely fundamental to the progression of scholarship on slavery and continues to gain currency among scholars working on the history of slavery and related fields. Dunkley’s emphatic assertions of slave freedom, accompanied by his familiarity with previous scholarship and the detailed archive he exposes, offers a reminder to specialists, and an invocation to non-specialists, that enslaved people and the freedoms they claimed belong at the fore of Atlantic studies and Caribbean history., This is a highly innovative, thoughtful, and interesting study of slavery in Jamaica. It is particularly good in dealing with the agency of the enslaved and their resistance to enslavement.

Daive A. Dunkley teaches in the Department of History and Archeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.