Research for this article was supported by a grant from the joint committee on Latin America of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

1. Books on slavery and emancipation in Jamaica include Higman, Barry, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip, Two Jamaicas: the Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony (Cambridge, 1955)Google Scholar; andCraton, Michael, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).Google Scholar See also Hall, Douglas, Free Jamaica, 1838–1865, an Economic History (New Haven, 1959)Google Scholar. On women, see Mair, Lucille, “An Historical Study of Women in Jamaica from 1655 to 1843” (Ph.D. diss., University of the West Indies, 1974)Google Scholar.

2. Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 11–13Google Scholar.

3. “In Jefferson Lecture, Historian Assails New Approaches to the Past,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 1 May 1991Google Scholar.

4. Sources of information on the law of birth registration and bastardy are Rose, Lionel, Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Great Britain, 1800–1939 (London, 1986)Google Scholar; and Henriques, U. R. Q., “Bastardy and the New Poor Law,” Past and Present 37 (July 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Nissel, Muriel, People Count: A History of the General Register Office (London, 1987)Google Scholar.

5. Nissel, 25

6. The absence of compulsion until such a relatively late date can be explained partly by the opposition of the Church of England to civil registration and partly by British reluctance to increase the police power of the state. But doctors, statisticians, and public health officials wanted stricter control over registration, as in France, Prussia, and Belgium. See Regulations for the Duties of Registrars of Birth and Death in London (London, 1855), 61Google Scholar.

7. Rose, , Massacre of the Innocents, 22–34Google Scholar, discusses the relationship between bastardy law and the poor law.

8. See Carlyle, Thomas, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” in Thomas Carlyle, The Nigger Question, John Stuart Mill, The Negro Question, ed. August, Eugene R. (New York, 1971)Google Scholar. Carlyle's racism only deepened over time; when the article was reprinted in 1853, he retitled it “Nigger Question.”

9. “Protest of the Assembly of Jamaica” (June 1838), in Select Documents on British Colonial Policy, 1830–1860, ed. Bell, Kenneth N. and Morrell, W. P. (Oxford, 1928), 404Google Scholar.

10. There was strong pressure in Parliament to make any legal action on her part to charge the father impossible, but in the end this did not prevail. In principle after 1834, the mother could still charge the father in court, but only at quarter session, not at petty sessions. In 1844 the law was changed so that she could bring an action in petty session, a somewhat easier, but still daunting, procedure. See Henriques, , “Bastardy and the New Poor Law,” 10Google Scholar.

11. Circular Dispatch, Lord Glenelg to Governors of the West Indian Colonies, 1 February 1837, Parliamentary Papers [PP], 1839, 35.

12. Ibid.

13. Henriques cites parliamentary testimony to this effect. “Bastardy and the New Poor Law,” 106.

14. Smith, Lionel to Glenelg, , 24 September 1838, enclosure; Lyon, to Smith, Lionel, 15 September 1838, both in PP, 1839, 35Google Scholar.

15. Robotham, Don, The Notorious Riot: Social, Economic and Political Bases of Paul Bogle's Revolt (Mona, 1982)Google Scholar; Hall, Free Jamaica.

16. Mintz, Sidney, Caribbean Transformations (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar, has a useful discussion of the villages and the phenomenon of post-emancipation peasantry. See also Eltis, David, “Abolitionist Perception of Society after Slavery,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846, ed. Walvin, James (Baton Rouge, 1982)Google Scholar.

17. Report of the Commission upon the Condition of the Juvenile Population of Jamaica, Appendix B. Testimony of Plato Elphick (Kingston, 1897), 53Google Scholar; and Elphick, , letter to the editor, Gall's Newsletter (Kingston), 13 November 1880Google Scholar.

18. For work on the family in the Caribbean, see Clarke, Edith, My Mother Who Fathered Me (London, 1957)Google Scholar; Smith, Raymond T., Kinship and Class in the West Indies: a Genealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana (New York, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, M. G., The Plural Society in the West Indies (Berkeley, 1965)Google Scholar; Patterson, Orlando, “Persistence, Continuity and Change in the Jamaican Working-Class Family,” Journal of Family History 7 (Summer 1982): 135–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alexander, Jack, “Love, Race, Slavery and Sexuality in Jamaican Images of the Family,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice In Latin America, ed. Smith, Raymond T. (Chapel Hill, 1984), 146–79Google Scholar. For work in women's history, see Mair, Lucille, Women Field Workers in Jamaica during Slavery (Mona, 1987)Google Scholar; and Brodber, Erna, “Afro-Jamaican Women at the Turn of the Century,” Social and Economic Studies 35 (September 1986): 23–50Google Scholar.

19. Klein, Herbert, African Slavery in Latin American and the Caribbean (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

20. Quoted in Sherlock, Philip, Norman Manley, a Biography (London, 1980)Google Scholar.

21. Smith, , Plural Society, 94ff., 101ff., 133–36Google Scholar, discusses the rights and obligations of men and women in concubinage.

22. Katzin, Margaret, “The Jamaica Country Higgler,” in Work and Family Life in West Indian Perspective, ed. Comitas, Lambros and Lowenthal, David (Garden City, 1973)Google Scholar; and Mintz, Sidney, “Men, Women, and Trade,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1971): 247–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Contemporaries also noticed this; for example, Caldecott, Alfred, The Church in the West Indies (1898; reprint, London, 1970), 95Google Scholar.

23. Gillis, John, For Better, For Worse: British Marriage, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

24. This law created a secular marriage service to be performed by a civil registrar. Dissenters or Catholics could hold a service of their own, but had to undergo civil preliminaries. Nissel, , People Count, 7–10Google Scholar.

25. While Catherine Hall has rightly stressed the novel at a woman's escape from subjugation, I would emphasize less that aspect than Jane's desire for marriage and her rejection of concubinage. Hall, Catherine, “The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre,” Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 171Google Scholar.

26. Much of the information on this subject is in the report of a lawyer to Jamaican clergy who engaged him to study the state of Jamaican marriage law and inform them of the rights and duties under it. Baptist Missionary Society (London), Papers of Samuel Oughton, WI/5, Middleton, A. B. to BMS, , 9 May 1836Google Scholar.

27. Frequently, both before and after emancipation, black Jamaicans wanted marriages to be performed by dissenting clergy because “they preferred the presence of their own religious teacher with whom they were acquainted to that of the regular [Anglican] clergy of the parish from whom they probably had never received the slightest recognition …” Oughton Papers, I/5, Resolution of the Baptist Ministers of the South East Union Empowering Samuel Oughton to Present their Case … to the Society for the Protection of Civil and Religious Liberty, 14 June 1843.

28. After emancipation, the slave marriages performed by dissenting clergy were retroactively validated by law. Samuel, Peter, Wesleyan Methodist Missions in Jamaica and Honduras Delineated (London, 1850), 86Google Scholar.

29. Davenport, William, “The Jamaican Family System,” Social and Economic Studies 10 (December 1961): 432Google Scholar. See also Kitzinger, Sheila,“The Social Context of Birth: Some Comparisons of Childbirth in Jamaica and Britain,” in Ethnography of Fertility and Birth, ed. McCormack, Carol (New York, 1982), 181–203Google Scholar. She notes that Jamaican women would often give the child the father's name to persuade him to pay maintenance. Sometimes a mother would do so if a father's identity was widely known or assumed in the community, even if he refused acknowledgment.

30. Carlyle, “The Nigger Question,” 22, 23.

31. Carlyle, Thomas, “Latter-Day Pamphlets: The Present Time,” in Complete Works of Thomas Carlyle, Vol. 13 (New York, 1897), 286Google Scholar.

32. Ibid.,10.

33. Mill, John Stuart, and Taylor, Harriet, Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Rossi, Alice (Chicago, 1970)Google Scholar.

34. Mill, “The Negro Question,” 49.

35. Carlyle, Thomas, Past and Present, excerpted in Voices of the Industrial Revolution: Selected Readings from the Liberal Economist and the Critics, ed. Bowditch, John and Ramsland, Clement (Ann Arbor, 1978), 92Google Scholar.

36. See the discussion in Semmel, Bernard, Democracy versus Empire: the Jamaica Riots of 1865 and the Governor Eyre Controversy (Garden City, 1969)Google Scholar.

37. Carlyle, , “Shooting Niagara–and After?” in Complete Works, Vol. 16, 592Google Scholar.

38. Later, in 1884, some elected members were added, but their vote could be overridden by the governor. Ayearst, Morley, The British West Indies (London, 1960), 30–31Google Scholar.

39. Jacobs, H. P., Sixty Years of Change in Jamaica: Progress and Reaction in Kingston and the Countryside (Kingston, 1973), 105Google Scholar ff. See also the article in The Jamaican Creole (Kingston), 9 December 1882Google Scholar, protesting their exclusion from the government posts.

40. Judah, Abraham and Sinclair, A. C., comps., Debates of the Honorable House of Assembly of Jamaica, 13 vols. (Kingston and Spanish Town, 1856–1866), 6 February 1861, 374–77Google Scholar.

41. This was reported by Simms, Canon in The Gleaner, 6 April 1900Google Scholar.

42. Public Record Office [PRO], Colonial Office [CO] 137/471, Grant to Kimberley, 24 July 1873, confidential.

43. Ibid.

44. Gall's Packet (Kingston), February 25, 1874Google Scholar.

45. Papers Relative to the Affairs of Jamaica, 3, 1866–1867, Carnarvon to Grant, 1 August 1866, 89, pp.

46. Legislative Council, Proceedings, 5, 1896, 85Google Scholar.

47. All laws discussed here are in Curran, C. Ribton, ed., Statutes and Laws of the Isle of Jamaica, 1681–1881 (Kingston, 1889)Google Scholar.

48. CO 137/500, Musgrave to Kimberley, 22 May 1881, no. 143. Beside the figure of 75 percent the Governor has interpolated that 58 percent was more accurate. Whatever the case for that year, the illegitimacy rates were between 60 and 70 percent from the time that statistics began to be kept in the 1870s. Smith, , Kinship and Class, 104Google Scholar. See also Tekse, Kalman, Population and Vital Statistics, Jamaica, 1832–1964 (Kingston, 1974)Google Scholar.

49. Colonial authorities also feared that forced paternity registration would be bad for women and wanted to rule out any chance of either party being able to register the father without the consent of the other. See Institute of Jamaica (Kingston), Papers of Enos Nuttall, MST 209, Minutes of Sir Henry Montague Norman, 1 July 1886, in which the governor stated this when he replied to a petition from Anglican clergy asking that paternity registration be enforced by law.

50. CO 137/611, Olivier to Chamberlain, 17 July 1900, confidential.

51. The Gleaner, 10 April 1970. Also see Cumper, Gloria, “The Child Born Out of Wedlock,” Torch 26 (1970): 16–27Google Scholar.

52. Your Child and You: A Guide for the Jamaican Parent (Kingston, n.d. [1979])Google Scholar. This is a collection of transcripts of radio broadcasts of the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, jointly sponsored by the Jamaica Child Welfare Association and the Jamaica Children's Service Society.

53. Scott, Joy, “Chaos in the Archives,” The Sunday Gleaner, 6 December 1987Google Scholar.

54. See note 4.

55. Asad, Talal, “Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair,” Politics and Society 18 (December 1990): 455–480CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments (Chicago, 1989), 21–22Google Scholar.

57. CO 137/502 Herbert to Musgrave, 1 July 1881. And see PP, 1877, 61, Draft of a Criminal Code and Code of Criminal Procedures for the Island of Jamaica, Memorandum of R.S. Wright, 392. Here a jurist in the process of drafting a model code for Jamaica stated: “The age below which a female cannot give consent to connection has been reduced with reference to a non-European population.”