Fire in Jamaica, 1831–32

Abstract

Fire is a material and social process that is different in different periods and places. This article examines the fires set during the largest, and last, uprising of the enslaved in Jamaica, which occurred in the island's western parishes after Christmas 1831. It argues that different sorts of fire were central to processes of production and everyday life under plantation slavery, and examines what the burnings of 1831–32 reveal about the fight against enslavement in the early nineteenth century. A close reading of the records of the trials that followed the uprising details the methods used to burn plantations; the decisions over what to burn and what to save; and the contested social and political relations involved in encouraging or extinguishing the flames. This demonstrates that fire was a material means of creative destruction for the rebels that turned the everyday practices of commodity production and coerced social reproduction against the plantation infrastructure; that destroying buildings by fire both denied and made claims on the land, and sought to remake the Jamaican landscape for other forms of inhabitation; and that the collectivities forged through fire were inevitably shaped by both shared endeavors and tensions within and between groups of plantation inhabitants facing an uncertain future. Overall, it seeks to understand the use of fire in the 1831–32 uprising to fight for freedom as part of a “politics of habitation.”