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.”

During the nineteenth century in Ireland, agents of the colonial state like the police, along with the administrators that they served, forged an association between political motivations and Irish agrarian violence. They did so not only through the policing of Irish violence, but through the methods used by the colonial state to categorize, process, record, and archive it. Central to this endeavor was the category of “outrage.” Using this category, the Irish Constabulary created a record that impressed an association between Irish violence or criminality and political resistance. Because the British colonial state had control over the production of the archive, it also dictated the metanarratives present in this “archive of outrages” that gave form and function to the colonial state's fears that Irish violence represented a budding insurrection or a desire to fracture the Union. By perpetuating this logic in document and archival form, Dublin Castle (the seat of the British government's administration of Ireland) helped create the very demon that it sought to exorcise—that of Irish nationalist action and sentiment.