Ryan Tristram-Walmsley | August 2026
In a narrative published in 1837, James Williams described a magistrate in Jamaica helping his former owner to frame an accusation against him. Williams, a formerly enslaved Black Jamaican still compelled to work under ‘apprenticeship’, had been accused of insolence. A constable denied the charge. The magistrate suggested ‘insolence by manner’, and the owner agreed. Williams received twenty lashes.[i]
Williams gives no description of the supposedly insolent manner. I would hesitate to extract ‘anger’ or ‘contempt’ from this account as evidence of his feelings. The exchange concerns the deference a formerly enslaved person was expected to show, and the ability of a magistrate to turn a judgement about his manner into a reason for punishment.
Historians of emotions study how people learn to recognise and express feelings, including the expectations attached to a person’s race or social position. Their work encourages us to ask how a gesture or expression acquired its meaning in an encounter.[ii] Within Prisons, Drugs, and Mental Health, I am interested in how officials judged the conduct of people they could punish. The project’s concern with drugs, mental health and incarceration across colonial and postcolonial settings makes such questions particularly pertinent.[iii] Descriptions in a prison register need to be read alongside the rules of behaviour the institution sought to enforce, and the circumstances in which someone wrote them down.
In British Guiana, racial assumptions reached into explanations of mental suffering. Kellie Moss and colleagues describe how the nineteenth-century asylum doctor Robert Grieve discounted anxiety and domestic troubles as causes of insanity among people of African and Indian descent. Such strains were considered important in cases in England. In the colony, he favoured alcohol and cannabis as explanations for African and Indian patients respectively. Those explanations carried assumptions about how deeply different people could be troubled by their circumstances, with consequences for whose account of distress a doctor might credit.[iv]
Prison officials’ feelings also entered the official record. Clare Anderson and colleagues discuss an 1875 observation by British Guiana’s Director of Prisons: incarceration caused terror among convicts and exerted ‘a depressing influence’ on officers.[v] Both experiences appeared in his report, but he spoke with authority for people whose imprisonment he administered. I would want to know what he sought to establish through the comparison. Did concern about officers’ feelings prompt action, and what consideration did prisoners’ fear receive? We cannot answer either question by treating the report as a neutral description of life inside.
Williams offered his own explanation of fear. After threats of punishment, he fled and tried to seek the governor’s protection. He later told the magistrate that he had run away because he was frightened by the threats made against him. The magistrate sentenced him to the workhouse.[vi] Williams’s narrative was published within an abolitionist campaign against apprenticeship, giving readers reasons to question the authorities who had punished him.[vii] Its purpose matters when interpreting his account. So does his effort to explain conduct for which he had already been penalised.
For historians of emotions, these sources make reconstructing shared expectations difficult. A run of entries describing prisoners as insolent might establish a habit among record-keepers while telling us little about the prisoners’ own understanding of their behaviour. An official’s emotional vocabulary could acquire the appearance of a collective portrait simply through repetition and preservation. We would have to compare those entries with complaints and testimony, attending to the circumstances in which each account was produced.
I would like to follow these competing descriptions through the decisions made about a prisoner. A complaint, a punishment entry and a medical assessment might preserve different accounts of the same encounter. Reading them together could show where a prisoner’s explanation was accepted, altered or set aside, and whether that affected the treatment they received. Where a prisoner’s own wording survives, changes between accounts might also show which feelings they believed a particular official would be prepared to hear.
[i] James Williams, A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica (London, 1837), later edited with an introduction by Diana Paton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). The passage concerns the Brown’s Town hearing at which ‘insolence by manner’ was proposed as the accusation against Williams. Digitised original: https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/williamsjames/williams.html
[ii] Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion’, History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 193–220. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2012.00621.x
[iii] Prisons, Drugs, and Mental Health: An Interdisciplinary Global Study, Wellcome-funded research project, University of Birmingham: Prisons, Drugs and Mental Health: an interdisciplinary global study – Bringing together researchers to transform understandings of drugs, addiction and mental health, among prison communities.
[iv] Kellie Moss, Estherine Adams and Deborah Toner, ‘Immigration, Intoxication, Insanity, and Incarceration in British Guiana’, Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 4 (2022): 705–729. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2114635
[v] Clare Anderson, Kellie Moss and Estherine Adams, ‘Insanity and Imprisonment in British Guiana, 1814–1966’, LIAS Working Paper Series 4 (2021). https://doi.org/10.29311/lwps.202143750. Their discussion quotes the 1875 report of British Guiana’s Director of Prisons, J. Brumel.
[vi] Williams, A Narrative of Events, account no. 9. Williams explained that he went away because he was ‘frightened’ by threats made against him and was subsequently sentenced to the St Ann’s Bay workhouse.
[vii] Diana Paton, introduction to James Williams, A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834 (Duke University Press, 2001). Williams’s testimony was published in Britain as part of the campaign against the Jamaican apprenticeship system.