When William Knibb, a Baptist missionary in Jamaica, made his famous abolition ist speech in 1832, he did more than just condemn slavery. He particularly emphasized its degrading effect on women, evoking images of being flogged and preyed on sexually by masters and overseers. He often had seen slave women chained together, even during pregnancy, in Jamaica. He pointedly remarked that he had never seen such things in England, and asked his audience if Englishmen could endure the thought of these evils. At the time of his speech, the end of slavery was two years away, and it seemed reasonable to assume Jamaica and the other slave colonies would be cleansed of vice and raised to the moral level of England. I will focus here on efforts after 1834 to develop a new social/sexual order in Jamaica, most important of the British sugar islands. Emancipation and the reconfiguration of Jamaican politics and society which followed were strongly shaped by gender issues; I believe these issues are as fundamental to understanding post-emancipation Jamaica as the conflicts over land and labor which have traditionally preoccupied historians.1 Second, I want to show that events in Jamaica expose prominent fault lines of sexual and political ideology in Britain. Most important of these is the question of whether the established moral grounding Knibb evoked in his speech even existed in Britain. That this is contestable emerged at various times in the nineteenth century. But it was especially evident in a long-running argument between John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle, for whom the Jamaica question was a key occasion. My third objective is to suggest how social/sexual order is related to colonialism in general. Edward Said has pointed out how culture is a system of discriminations, legislated at the top but enacted throughout the entire entity, involving distinctions between high and low, superior and inferior, them and us.2 This is true, but Said overstates the monolithic quality of dominant cultures, ignoring the ways in which they are fissured, patched, and sometimes in disarray. Gertrude Himmelfarb, from a political