The Problem of Freedom

The Jamaican slave revolt of 1831-32 precipitated the abolition of slavery throughout the British colonial empire. A century later, the labor rebellion of 1938 marked the beginning of that empire's end. Each event embraced a particular form of emancipation: at issue in the first revolt was the freedom of the individual slave; at issue in the second was the freedom of the society itself. The century that separated these watersheds in British colonial history was one of extraordinary transformations in British ideology, in economic and social policy, and in the lives of Jamaican freed people and tehir descendants. In The Problem of Freedom, Thomas C. Holt offers an intriguing analysis of this period, exploring the meaning and reality of freedom in the context of slave emancipation in Jamaica—the largest West indian colony of the nineteenth century's major world power.