Bibliographic Essay

Among the few books that focus specifically on violence in early American societies, one collective volume includes several chapters dealing with violence in slave societies: John Smolenski and Thomas J.

The topic of corporal punishment on plantations appears in many books on slavery in early English and French America, but none concentrates specifically on the subject. Particularly insightful are Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles Franyaises (XVIIe-XVIIIe siecles) (Basse Terre and Fort-de-France: Societe d'histoire de la Guadeloupe and Societe d'histoire de la Martinique, 1974); and Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth­Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). The role of violence in the production and reproduction of slave societies is a central theme of another book by Trevor Burnard, which is based on the diary of a Jamaican

CECILE VIDAL overseer: Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo- Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For the use of Thistlewood’s diary to study violence among other phenomena, see also Philip D. Morgan, ‘Slaves and Livestock in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica, Vineyard Pen, 1750-1751’, William and Mary Quarterly 52.1 (1995), 47-76. In a brilliant article, Vincent Brown argues that masters and drivers not only relied on brutal force, but also needed to resort to spiritual violence to impose their authority: ‘Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority in Jamaican Slave Society’, Slavery & Abolition 24.1 (2010), 24-53.

Historians of slave societies are increasingly taking into account the gendered dimension of racial slavery. Trevor Burnard has demonstrated that sexual violence constituted an arm of social control on Caribbean plantations: ‘The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer’, in Merril Smith (ed.), Sex in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 163-89. On the specific experience of violence by enslaved and freed women in a Caribbean urban slave society, see Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

The interplay between law, justice and violence is another major topic. Works dealing with judicial violence against slaves are Mindie Lazarus-Black, ‘Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates: Law and the Politics of Resistance in the British Caribbean, 1736-1834’, in Mindie Lazarus- Black and Susan F. Hirsch (eds.), Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 252-81; Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History 34.4 (2001), 923-54; and Betty Wood, ‘“Until He Should Be Dead, Dead, Dead”: The Judicial Treatment of Slaves in Eighteenth­Century Georgia’, Georgia Historical Quarterly 71.3 (1987), 377-98. On the use of slaves and freedmen as public executioners, see Gene E. Ogle, ‘Slaves of Justice: Saint-Domingue’s Executioners and the Production of Shame’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 29.2 (2003), 275-93. On slave patrols, see Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

The historiography on slave resistance is huge. Among many works, see Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Junius P. Rodriguez (ed.), Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, 2 vols.

For books analysing the representations of violence inflicted on slaves in artistic and literary works, slave narratives and abolitionist writings, see Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760-1807 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 ('Manchester: Maiichestyr University Press, 1988); and Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).