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home to several groups of so- called
Maroons, runaway slaves and their
descendants, who controlled semiau-
tonomous strongholds in its mountain-
ous interior and whose relations with
the British fluctuated between uneasy
truce and outright war.
White supremacy was always unsta-
ble and incomplete. Despite the vast im-
balance of power between slaveholders
and enslaved people, Jamaican slavery
was marked by continuous violent resis-
tance. In addition to numerous smaller
conspiracies, and full- blown wars be-
tween the colonists and Maroons in
1728–1739 and 1795–1796, we know of
major plots, involving hundreds, some-
times thousands, of slaves, in 1673,
1676, 1678, 1685–1687, 1690, 1745, 1760,
1766, 1776, 1791–1792, 1808, 1815, 1819,
1823 –1824, and 1831–1832. Through-
out this period, too, the Caribbean was
an important theater in the ongoing hot
and cold global contests among Brit-
ain, Spain, and France. The threat of an
invasion that would spark slave mutiny
was never far away; nor was the inflam-
matory news of risings in neighboring
colonies. In the 1790s, following a mass
slave insurrection on Saint- Domingue
and the outbreak of the French revolu-
tionary wars, repeated military expe-
ditions from Jamaica and Britain tried
unsuccessfully to capture the territory
from rival French and Spanish forces
and to reimpose slavery. Altogether,
perhaps as many as 350,0 0 0 people died
on all sides before the establishment of
the free black republic of Haiti in 1804.
Between 1500 and 1865, in the lands
that became the United States, en-
slaved people were almost always out-
numbered, physically separated, and
economically disempowered. By the
mid- eighteenth century most of them
were locally born and had no experi-
ence of any other life. In such circum-
stances, open revolt was rare, difficult,
and relatively easy to suppress. But in
the West Indies, for as long as it lasted,
slavery was always a much more sharp-
edged state of conflict.
How did people—black, brown, and
white, male and female, master and
slave—speak to one another under
such conditions? That is the simple
but rich question the English geogra-
pher Miles Ogborn sets out to explore
in his fascinating new book, The Free-
dom of Speech. It’s a daunting task.
Speech has always to be reconstructed
from fragmentary, unreliable, written
traces, and it’s notorious that in such re-
cords the enslaved are given voice only
through the hostile ears and pens of
their oppressors. But Ogborn’s concern
is not to recover exactly what people in
eighteenth- century Jamaica and Barba-
dos said, but rather to analyze how they
spoke. Like Indian Ink, his previous
book on imperial geography and com-
munication,^4 The Freedom of Speech
draws on an eclectic range of social the-
orists, above all Bruno Latour, whose
methods Ogborn uses here to explore
various forms of talk: legal, political,
scientific, religious, and abolitionist. In
each of these domains, the rules and
effects of spoken words were different,
and the force and meaning of speech
acts always contingent and relational;
yet in each, too, the conditions of speak-
ing—who could say what, when, where,
and how—were invariably shaped by
race, gender, class, and religion.
A limitation of this approach is that
each chapter turns into a self- contained
case study of a particular discourse,
with different speakers, sources, and
subjects. One takes us deep into the
world of gentleman botanists, their
“plant talk,” correspondence, pub-
lic lectures, and patronage networks;
the next surveys ideas about religious
speech among Anglicans, Methodists,
Baptists, and adherents of obeah (a
contemporary term for the spiritual
practices of enslaved West Africans).
Moreover, as Ogborn is well aware,
his records and categories of talk are
essentially those of white propertied
men: they map only imperfectly onto
the mental and discursive worlds of
his other subjects. Because of this, we
mainly learn how educated white col-
onists and abolitionists saw the world,
and how they interpreted and (mis)un-
derstood enslaved men and women. The
voices and outlook of black and brown
people themselves come into focus only
piecemeal and intermittently.
Nonetheless, taken as a whole, this
is a remarkably original and insight-
ful contribution. As Ogborn contends,
speech was central to the culture of
enslavement. Spoken words were both
representations and actions: their ut-
terance was the most ubiquitous way
in which the boundaries between lib-
erty and bondage were constantly
reinforced, negotiated, or contested.
During the eighteenth century, “free-
dom of speech,” a concept previously
associated only with parliamentary de-
bates, came to be seen as foundational
to all political liberty. For propertied,
Protestant, white male Britons of this
era, it was both an immensely potent
new ideology and a constant practi-
cal marker of their superiority over
others. Colonial law and politics alike
were transacted through verbal ritu-
als—like the taking of oaths, the giving
of evidence, or the making of public
speeches—from which women, slaves,
and other lesser humans (such as Jews,
Quakers, mulattoes, Indians, and free
blacks) were to a greater or lesser ex-
tent excluded. The exact contours of
this power to speak, to be heard, and
to silence others were frequently dis-
puted, both within the colonial popu-
lation and across the different legal and
political zones of empire, but that’s pre-
cisely because it was so central to the
meaning of freedom.
Even more than that, speech was piv-
otal in eighteenth- century definitions
of humankind. Abolitionists claimed
that the eloquence of slaves and Af-
ricans proved their equal humanity,
but most Europeans had long taken
for granted that black utterances were
inherently inferior, even bestial. This
was why, when the philosopher David
Hume set out to prove in 1753 that
“whites” were intrinsically superior
to all other human “breeds,” he confi-
dently discounted a seemingly contrary
West Indian example by appealing to
the same prejudice: “In JAMAICA^ in-
deed they talk of one negroe, as a man
of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he
is admir’d for very slender accomplish-
ments, like a parrot, who speaks a few
words plainly.”^5 No black voice could
ever be more than a brutish squawk.Reasoning like this buttressed accep-
tance of the slave trade. But though
Hume disdained to name him, the
subject of his dismissive remark was
no slave but an unusually privileged
free black Jamaican, Francis Williams,
a man of property who had been edu-
cated at the Inns of Court in London,
was an accomplished Latin poet and
mathematician, and owned slaves him-
self. Because white West Indians were
so heavily invested in trying to make
the distinction between slavery and
freedom synonymous with the suppos-
edly straightforward difference between
black and white, it was deeply aggravat-
ing that (as one leading slaveowner com-
plained) Williams “had not the modesty
to be silent” and instead publicly insisted
that skin color was irrelevant to intelli-
gence (“virtue and understanding have
no color; there is no color in an honest
mind, nor in art,” he wrote). White Ja-
maicans tried repeatedly to quiet his
voice, yet never with complete success.
When in 1730 the island’s Assembly
passed a law degrading his legal rights
(as an uppity negro), Williams success-
fully petitioned the imperial authorities
in England (as an educated, wealthy,
free- born slaveowner) to overturn it. He
knew that how speech was received and
what force it carried always depended
on its audience, not just its author.
Through their martial prowess, the
Maroons likewise compelled the Brit-
ish to accept the authority of their
words. When in 1739 they ended their
decade- long war with the colonists and
entered into peace treaties, neither side
gave much credence to the written doc-
uments that were drawn up and signed.
Instead, they reposed their trust pri-marily in a carefully choreographed,
ritualized public exchange of verbal
oaths: under the right conditions, such
performative speech acts were more
authoritative than any piece of paper.
Slave utterances, of course, were nor-
mally granted no such power. And yet
it’s striking how much effort was put
into physically, as well as legally, silenc-
ing enslaved people. As a young boy on
a Virginia plantation in the mid- 1750s,
Olaudah Equiano (recently trans-
ported there, via the West Indies, from
the Guinea coast) was terrified by the
appearance of a black house slave who
moved around fixed in an iron muzzle,
“which locked her mouth so fast that
she could scarcely speak; and could
not eat nor drink.” Some slaveowners
ordered such equipment from London;
others, like Thistlewood, improvised
their own revolting gags.
Freedom of speech and the power
to silence may have been preeminent
markers of white liberty, Ogborn ar-
gues, but at the same time, slavery de-
pended on dialogue: slaves could never
be completely muted. Even in condi-
tions of extreme violence and unfree-
dom, their words remained ubiquitous,
ephemeral, irrepressible, and poten-
tially transgressive. In that sense, even
the speech of the unfree was always
free. Talk was the most common way
for enslaved men and women to sub-
vert the rules of their bondage, to gain
more agency than they were supposed
to have. Moreover, Africans, too, came
from societies in which oaths, orations,
and invocations carried great potency,
both between people and as a connec-
tion to the all- powerful spirit world. To
be prevented from speaking, an Akan(^4) Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Mak-
ing of the English East India Company
(University of Chicago Press, 2007).
(^5) David Hume, Essays and Treatises on
Several Subjects (1758 ed.), p. 125.
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