The Morant Bay Rebellion

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rebellion that broke out in Jamaica on 11th October 1865 when Paul Bogle (1822-65) led a protest march from Stony Gut to the courthouse in nearby Morant Bay. There were many grounds for grievance that day and soon anger turned to bloodshed. Although the British had abolished slavery 30 years before, the plantation owners were still dominant and the conditions for the majority of people on Jamaica were poor. The British governor suppressed this rebellion brutally and soon people in Jamaica lost what right they had to rule themselves. Some in Britain, like Charles Dickens, supported the governor’s actions while others, like Charles Darwin, wanted him tried for murder.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Matthew J Smith No other episodes
  Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London
• Diana Paton No other episodes
  The William Robertson Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh
• Lawrence Goldman 10 episodes
  Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter's College, University of Oxford

Reading list

• The History of Jamaica
  Clinton V. Black (Collins Educational, 1983) Google Books →
• The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre
  Catherine Hall (Cultural Critique, 1989)
• Free Jamaica: An Economic History, 1838-1865
  Douglas Hall (Yale University Press, 1959)
• The 'Killing Time': The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica
  Gad Heuman (University of Tennessee Press, 1995) Google Books →
• The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938
  Thomas Holt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) Google Books →
• Colour for Colour, Skin for Skin: Marching with the Ancestral Spirits Into War Oh at Morant Bay
  Clinton A. Hutton (Ian Randle, 2015) Google Books →
• Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion: Brutality and Outrage in the British Empire
  Richard Huzzey (History Extra, October 2021)
• A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law
  R. W. Kostal (Oxford University Press, 2005) Google Books →
• No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870
  Diana Paton (Duke University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• The Governor Eyre Controversy
  Bernard Semmel (MacGibbon & Kee, 1962) Google Books →
• On the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and the Governor Eyre-George William Gordon Controversy, 1865-70
  Sarah Winter (BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga, May 2012)

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Programme ID: m001dnlr

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001dnlr

Auto-category: 972.92 (Jamaica - History - 19th century)