Abstract
Abstract Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved people, representing them as a type of “property,” and so these documents form a major part of the archive of Jamaican slavery. This article explores the practices, aims, and assumptions of the people who produced the inventories, developing our understanding of slaveholder culture in the British Caribbean and of the bureaucratic and accounting techniques that facilitated slave management.
Highlights
Probate inventories represent a fairly typical example of an important genre of written documentation
Throughout the first four decades of the nineteenth century, we find people represented as property in the Jamaican colonial archive
Even during the 1830s, as the British government deconstructed the system of slavery in its Caribbean colonies, enslaved people continued to appear as property in probate inventories
Summary
In early nineteenth-century Jamaica, when executors presented a will to be proved, the law required that they arrange for the return of a “just inventory of the testator’s estate,” and it made the same arrangements for the estates of those who died intestate. Planters in Jamaica considered their land valueless without enslaved workers, who were “the sinews of a plantation,” “the principal, and the principle, of a planter’s wealth.” But in probate, enslaved people were more vulnerable to sale or seizure than the land on which they were forced to labor In this process, executors faced the challenges of extending loans or repaying lenders, and things could be taken out of their hands by insistent creditors willing to use the courts, as indicated by the blunt comment in one inventory: “negroes & stock taken & sold by the marshall.” At the home of one deceased planter the appraisers found only eleven enslaved people, described as “invalids,” along with old and broken furniture. The death of a slaveholder always led to the imposition of some new “owner;” but it often presaged the unimaginable horror of seizure, sale, and separation
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