The Murder of Prosper: Planter Crimes and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Leeward Islands

In April, 1811, a jury on the island of Tortola declared a wealthy planter, Arthur Hodge, guilty of the murder of a slave named Prosper.  Witnesses described an eight-year reign of terror on the Hodge plantation involving the torture and murder of more than a dozen slaves.  When the governor rejected the jury’s recommendation for mercy, Arthur Hodge became the first British slave owner in the West Indies to be hanged for the murder of a slave.  Hodge’s trial has figured mainly as a footnote in histories of abolition.  This paper offers a different view of the trial’s connections to debates about order and the imperial constitution.  The paper first analyzes the trial’s immediate context of calls to contain petty despotism and remove corrupt magistrates, themes that had emerged sharply in prior planter trials.  It then traces the ways that Hodge’s crimes were cited in support of slave law reform, attacks on colonial legislatures, and attempts to end contraband trade in slaves.  Finally, the paper explores the local geography of inter-island slave trading and widespread corruption in the Tortola vice-admiralty court.  Micro-regional trends generated local conflicts over the control of contraband and courtrooms; such struggles led directly to the charges against Hodge.  Moving from micro-history to macro-analysis, the conclusion suggests that the early nineteenth century Caribbean should not be characterized as a site for the diffusion of nation-state sovereignty and the widespread influence of universal rights discourse.  At the same time, the complexities of imperial legal reform call into question alternative narratives of the rise of indivisible sovereignty and waves of neo-authoritarianism.  The Hodge case shows that colonial conflicts both strengthened imperial jurisdiction and continued legal variegation in the empire.  Contemporaries envisioned the extension of imperial jurisdiction as the key to local and global order.