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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
1 See Peter Fitzpatrick, “Custom as Imperialism,”in J. M. Abun-Nasr et al., eds., Law, Society and National Identity in Africa 15–30 (Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1990); id., The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992); Jane F. Collier, “Intertwined Histories: Islamic Law and Western Imperialism,”28 Law & Soc'y Rev. 395 (1994); Sally E. Merry, “Legal Pluralism,”22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 869; id., “Law and Colonialism,” 25 Law & Soc'y Rev. 889.Google Scholar
2 See Merry, 22 Law & Soc'y Rev. Google Scholar
3 Much of this research represents the law as a relatively monolithic repressive arm of the colonial state. See Kim Johnson, “The Dialectics of Legal Repression in Neo-Colonial Capitalist Societies: Notes on the Caribbean.”Working Papers on Caribbean Society ser. D, no. 1 (Dept. of Sociology, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, 1980); A. Edwards, “The Evolution of Obeah Laws in Jamaica,”Jamaica L.J., April 1973; H. Fraser, “Law and Cannabis in the West Indies,”Jamaica L.J., April 1973; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York: Russell & Russell, 1944 [1961]); Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Bridgetown, Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1970); David Cohen & Jack Green, eds., Neither Slave Nor Free (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).Google Scholar
Some of these works on slavery could be seen as part of a tradition of regional legal commentary on slave law and indenture, e.g., J. Stephen, Slavery of the British West Indian Colonies Delineated as It Exists Both in Law and in Practice (2 vols.; orig. London, 1824; New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969); William G. Sewell, The Ordeal of Free Labour in the British West Indies (New York: Harper & Row, 1861); Edward Jenkins, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (New York: Routledge, 1871).Google Scholar
On contemporary Caribbean labor law, see Zin Henry, Labor Relations and Industrial Conflict in Commonwealth Caribbean Countries (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Columbus Publishers, 1972); and Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Contemporary research on land law also continues a tradition of regional literature. See R. J. Cust, A Treatise on West Indian Incumbered Estates Act (London, 1865); compare Jean Besson, “Symbolic Aspects of Land in the Caribbean: The Tenure and Transmission of Land Rights among Caribbean Peasantries,”in M. Cross & A. Marks, eds., Peasants, Plantations and Rural Communities in the Caribbean 86-116 (Dept. of Sociology, University of Surrey, 1971); Besson, “Family Land and Caribbean Society: Toward an Ethnography of Afro-Caribbean Peasantries,” in E. Thomas-Hope, ed., Perspectives on Caribbean Regional Identity 13-45 (Liverpool: Center for Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool, 1984). See also Charles Carnegie, “Is Family Land an Institution?”in C. Carnegie, ed., Afro-Caribbean Villages in Historical Perspective 83-99 (Kingston, Jamaica: African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, 1987).Google Scholar
More recent works include Cynthia Mahabir, Crime and Nation Building in the Caribbean: The Legacy of Legal Barriers (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman, 1985); Jerome Wendell Lurry-White, Custom and Conflict on a Bahamian Out-Island (Lanham, Md.: University Presses of America, 1987); and Bill Maurer, “Recharting the Caribbean: Land, Law and Citizenship in the British Virgin Islands” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994).Google Scholar
This list is far from comprehensive. See generally the sources listed in Keith Patchett & Valerie Jenkins, A Bibliograghical Guide to Law in the Commonwealth Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Institute of Social & Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1973); and Velma Newton, Commonwealth Caribbean Legal Literature (Cave Hill, Barbados: Faculty of Law Library, University of the West Indies, 1987).Google Scholar
4 With the exception of C. Jayawardena's Conflict and Society on a Guyanese Plantation (London: Althone, 1963), the “village ethnography” genre of Caribbeanist anthropology virtually ignores law and state-level political issues. Classic examples of this genre include M. & F. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York: Knopf, 1947); M. Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (New York: Knopf, 1937); M. G. Smith, Kinship and Community in Carriacou (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962); Michael Horowitz, Morne Paysan (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston). For a critique of Horowitz, see Willie Baber, “Social Change and the Peasant Community: Horowitz's Morne-Paysan Reinterpreted,” 21 Ethnology 227 (1982).Google Scholar
5 For example, Robert Gordon, “Critical Legal Histories,” 36 Stanford L. Rev. 57 (1984); Alan Hunt, Explorations in Law and Society: Towards a Constitutive Theory of Law (New York: Routledge, 1993); David Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique (New York: Pantheon, 1982); P. Fitzpaaick & A. Hunt, eds., Critical Legal Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar
6 Frances Fox-Piven & Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).Google Scholar
7 Citations to page numbers in the text are to Lazarus-Black's volume.Google Scholar
8 At present, the following territories are not politically autonomous from European or American powers: Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands (all under the U.K.); Guadelopue, Martinique, St. Martin, St. Barthelemy (all under France, although Guadeloupe and Martinique have status as departements); Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, St. Maarten, Saba, St. Eustatius (under the Netherlands); Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands (US. possessions).Google Scholar
9 See Sally E. Merry, “Anthropology, Law and Transnational Processes,” 21 Ann. Rev. Anthropology 357, 363 (1992); John Comaroff & Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar
10 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory,” 21 Ann. Rev. Anthropology 19 (1992); Richard Price, Ethnographic History, Caribbean Pasts, University of Maryland Working Paper No. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
11 On the invention of “customary law,” see sources cited in Merry, 21 Ann. Rev. Anthropology under “Colonial and Postcolonial Situations” (at 363–66).Google Scholar
12 Trouillot, 21 Ann. Rev. Anthropology at 20.Google Scholar
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14 Susan Hirsch, “Subjects in Spite of Themselves: Legal Consciousness among Working Class New Englanders,” 17 Law & Soc. Inquiry 839, 843 (1992). See Sally Engle Merry, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See also Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1982), and Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing the Transformation of Power through Bedouin Women,” 17 American Ethnologist 4 (1990).Google Scholar
15 Barbara Yngvesson, Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Complaint in a New England Court 10 (New York: Rourtedge, 1993).Google Scholar
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17 Diane Austin-Broos, “Redefining the Moral Order: Interpretations of Christianity in Postemancipation Jamaica,”in S. Drescher & F. McGlynn, eds., The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery 239-40 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).Google Scholar
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19 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, or The Happy Republic 5 (Glasgow: Robert Foulis, 1743; orig. pub. 1516).Google Scholar
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23 Carl Joachim Friedrich, The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective 65 (2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).Google Scholar
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25 Trouillot, 21 Ann. Rev. Anthropology at 20 (cited in note 9). See also Trouillot, “Good Day, Columbus: Silences, Power and Public History (1492–1992),” 3(1) Public Culture 1 (1990), and id., “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Richard Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology 17 (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press, 1991).Google Scholar
26 Most notably, in the work of Ricardo and his critic, Marx.Google Scholar
27 See Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986) (“Hulme, Colonial Encounters”); Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (orig. 1718; New York: Norton, 1994); William Shakespeare, The Tempest (orig. 1608-12; London: J. M. Dent, 1994).Google Scholar
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29 J.-J. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,” in The Social Contract and the Discourses 78 (London: Everyman's Library, 1990; orig. pub. 1755).Google Scholar
30 Peter Laslett, ed., John Locke's Two Treatises of Government 325 (New York: Mentor, 1960). Laslett also notes: “The Instructions to Governor Nicholson of Virginia, which Locke did so much to draft in 1698 …, regard negro slaves as justifiably enslaved because they were captives taken in a just war” (at 326). See also Laslett, “John Locke, the Great Recoinage and the Board of Trade, 1695-1698,” 14 (3d ser.) Wm. & Mary Q. 3 July 1957; and Raymond Polin, Le Politique Morale de John Lock (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960).Google Scholar
31 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I-III, 488-89 (New York: Penguin, 1986, orig. pub. 1776).Google Scholar
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33 See Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar
34 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).Google Scholar
35 Sidney Mintz, “The So-called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response,” 2 (4) Dialectical Anthropology 253, 265 (1977).Google Scholar
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37 See Peter Fitzpatrick, Law and State in Papua New Guinea 29-30 (London: Academic Press, 1980); Jane Collier, Bill Maurer, & Liliana Suarez-Navaz, “Sanctioned Identities: Legal Constructions of ‘Modern’ Personhood,” in 2 (1 & 2) Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 1 (1995) (“Collier et al., ‘Sanctioned Identities’”); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act 262-64 (New York Pantheon Books, 1975); Rosemary Coombe, “Cultural and Intellectual Properties: Occupying the Colonial Imagination,” 16 (1) PoLAR: Political & Legal Anthropology Rev. 8 (1993).Google Scholar
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39 See, e.g., Sheldon Liss, Fidel! Castro's Political and Social Thought (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), and Bill Maurer, “Review of Liss,” 27:3 Rev. Radical Pol. Econ. 111 (1995). On provincializing the categories of European social thought, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the Critique of History,”6 Cultural Stud. 337 (1992).Google Scholar
40 See the works by Besson and Carnegie cited in note 3.Google Scholar
41 That is, rights to specific kinds of use for specific time periods. For example, a restricted form of usufruct might permit a person to harvest coconuts from the trees growing on a piece of land but not to graze cattle there. With family land, usufruct is usually unrestricted; all persons have rights to use the land.Google Scholar
42 Trouillot, “Review of Peasants and Poverty: A Study of Haiti, by Mats Lundahl,” 8 J. Peasant Stud. 112, 114(1980).Google Scholar
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47 Compare to Carol Greenhouse, “Interpreting American Litigiousness,”in J. Starr & J. Collier, eds., History and Power in the Study of Law 252 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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54 See Bryan Edwards, 2 The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies 16–18 (London: John Stockdale, 1794); Smith, Kinship and Class at 84; Barry Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834, at 139 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Martinez-Alier, Marriage. Google Scholar
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65 In addition to Robothom, Trouillot, and Smith cited in the notes above, see Brackeette Williams, Stains on My Name, War In My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
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