Abstract

This essay surveys the ways in which the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 pushed British thinkers and administrators to rethink central issues of freedom, labour, and sovereignty. Reinterpreting some of the political and administrative documents used by historians from a conceptual perspective, I argue that the rebellion and the consequent abolition of the Jamaican house of assembly can be interpreted not as episodes of a «war of races», but rather as moments of a much larger phenomenon, started in the 1830s: the government of the emancipation in the British West Indies.