‘Had his nose cropt for being formerly runaway’: disability and the bodies of fugitive slaves in the British Caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Barbadian and Jamaican runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815 to demonstrate that disability was key to slavery’s violence. Runaway advertisements indicate that enslaved people were debilitated in a variety of ways: discursively through law and legally sanctioned punishment, work regimes, and the material conditions of slavery. But they did more than merely reflect the presence of disability among the enslaved: they comprised a system of oppression that actually produced disability.