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WHIGS AND HUNTERS: THE PATH NOT TAKEN*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2017

LUISE WHITE
LUISE WHITE*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

E. P. Thompson's Whigs and Hunters has had an enormous impact on African historiography in its articulation of the relationship between property and law and the subsequent criminalization of customary practices. Some of the other themes in this book – indistinct bands of law-breaking peasants, people and animals, notions of the wild, and the near impossibility of commonplace judicial murder in peacetime – have not been taken up. This article argues for a broader engagement with this book and to remind African historians that the many facets and eras of Thompson's scholarship should encourage a more flexible reading of his work.

Keywords

East AfricaSouthern Africalawhuntingcolonialism
Type
JAH Forum: E. P. Thompson in African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 58 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 51 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I gave an earlier version of this article at a workshop on E. P. Thompson and African History at the University of Michigan, 15–18 Nov. 2015. I am grateful to the organizers and the participants for their comments, especially Keith Breckenridge, Geoff Eley, and Stephen Sparks, and to Jeffrey Adler, Bill Freund, and Douglas Howland for their comments on subsequent drafts. Author's email: lswhite@ufl.edu

References

1 This turned out to be wrong. A cursory glance at contemporary reviews reminded me that the arguments of Whigs and Hunters were honed and perhaps made more succinctly in Thompson's students’ volume published the same year, D. Hay, et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1975).

2 Lombard, L., ‘Threat economies and armed conservation in northeastern Central African Republic’, Geoforum, 69 (2016), 218–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Thompson, E. P., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London, 2013 [orig. pub. 1975]), 153 Google Scholar.

4 Such ownerships were contested. See K. Maine: ‘The seed is mine. The ploughshare is mine. The span of oxen is mine. Only the land is theirs’, in van Onselen, C., The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine A South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar, n. p.

5 I take these figures from D. Hay, ‘Poaching and game laws on Cannock Chase’, in Hay, et al., Albion's Fatal Tree, 189. The fine for killing rabbits or keeping snares was perhaps half a laborer's annual income, or three months in jail.

6 The text of the law itself did not suppress other, local ways of maintaining legal order, a point I take from Hartog, H., ‘Pigs and positivism’, Wisconsin Law Review, 899:4 (1985), 899–933 Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, W. Worger, ‘Workers as criminals: the rule of law in early Kimberly’, in Cooper, F. (ed.), Struggle for the City: Migrant, Labor, Capital and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, 1983), 51–90 Google Scholar; Chanock, M., Law, Custom and Social Order (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Cooper, F., ‘Contracts, crime, and agrarian conflict: from slave to wage labor on the East African coast’, in Snyder, F. and Hay, D. (eds.), Labour, Law and Crime: Historical Perspectives (London, 1987), 228–52Google Scholar; Steinhart, E. I., Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Kenya (Athens, OH, 2006)Google Scholar. Thomson's fingerprints are all over research on crimes that do not involve property, see Geschierre, P., The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post-colonial Africa (Charlottesville, 1997)Google Scholar; and Epprecht, M., Hungochani: The History of Dissident Sexuality in Southern Africa (Montreal, 2004)Google Scholar.

8 Fair, L., Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens, 2001), 110–68Google Scholar; Cooper, ‘Contracts, crime, and agrarian conflict’.

9 Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 152.

10 To give two examples from colonial Kenya: Anderson, D., Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York, Norton, 2005)Google Scholar; and see Shadle, B. L., The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya 1900s–1920s (Manchester, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 See Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, A. (New York, 1979 [orig. pub. 1975]), 124–5Google Scholar, 231–3.

12 D. Hay, ‘Property, authority, and criminal law’, in Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree, 23.

13 Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order, 67, and ‘A peculiar sharpness: an essay on property in the history of customary law in Colonial Africa’, The Journal of African Hisory, 32:1 (1991), 65–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Paradigms, policies and property: a review of the customary law of land tenure’, in Mann, K. and Roberts, R. (eds.), Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1991), 61–84 Google Scholar.

14 There are enough noteworthy examples that I may have overstated my case, see Moore, S. F., Social Facts and Fabrications: ‘Customary’ Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1960 (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar; D. W. Cohen, ‘A case for Busoga’: Lloyd Fallers and the construction of an African legal system’, in Mann and Roberts (eds.), Law, 239–53; MacKenzie, F., Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952 (Portsmouth, NH, 1998)Google Scholar; Berry, S., Chiefs Know Their Boundaries: Essays on Property, Power and the Past in Asante, 1896–1996 (Portsmouth, NH, 2000)Google Scholar; Shadle, B. L., Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (Portsmouth, NH, 2006)Google Scholar.

15 Whigs and Hunters, 63.

16 See, for example, Mutwira, R., ‘Southern Rhodesian Wildlife Policy (1890–1953): a question of condoning game slaughter?’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15:2 (1989), 250–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Personal communication, 8 Apr. 2016. For an earlier, academic version of this, see Vail, L., ‘Ecology and history: the example of eastern Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 3:2 (1977), 129–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Mavhunga, C. C., Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (Cambridge, MA, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 See Adamson, J., Elsa: The Story of a Lioness (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Carr, Norman, Return to the Wild: A Story of Two Lions (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Breytenbach, Jan, Eden's Exiles (Cape Town, 2015 [orig. pub. 1991])Google Scholar.

20 I live in Florida, where the sea mammal theme park Sea World now runs TV commercials announcing that they will no longer have whales perform in the park, but that they cannot return them to the ocean. They were born in captivity, and they may not survive a return to the sea. The commercial reminds its listeners that one returned whale died there. So Sea World's whales will live out their non-performing lives in huge tanks, with good medical care.

21 Stuart Marks has noted that the end of this process is the fox, a social demonstration of power and privilege for an inedible animal. See Marks, S., Life as a Hunt: Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape (Oxford, 2016)Google Scholar. John MacKenzie describes officials’ tiger hunts in nineteenth-century India in which hunters were seated on the backs of elephants and tigers were driven toward them. Elephants were positioned according to the status of their passenger and there was a fixed order in which hunters could shoot. MacKenzie, J., The Empire of Nature: Conservation and Nature in British Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), 181 Google Scholar.

22 The first version of this article ended with the untimely demise of Cecil the Lion in 2015. We might want to imagine that lions or the tigers we want to save are part of a universal human heritage, but they are property, they belong to states and local communities and resort companies and without question rights to their lives can be bought and sold (or not on offer at all, as in protected species). To whom or what did Cecil belong? Was he the property of Zimbabwe, or of a game park, or could rights to his (or any lion's) life be sold? The Black Act made deer disposable property and while I don't want to draw a straight line from 1723 to 2015, it does allow me to make my point about using Whigs and Hunters in our work. Cecil vs the Minnesota dentist isn't a struggle between nature and man, and, as Zimbabwe's courts have assured us, it was not an illegal contest, but a bureaucratically sound way that property was transferred. If animals are the disposable property of the owner, and those rights can be bought and sold, then even the most beloved old lion is fair game.

23 ‘E. P. Thompson, ‘Custom, law, and common right’, and ‘The moral economy reviewed’, in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1993), 97–184 Google Scholar, 259–351. Yes, some of these essays were published in the 1960s, but my point is that they are published as a book under the rubric of ‘popular culture’ in 1993.

24 ‘Introduction: Culture and custom’, and ‘The sale of wives’, Customs, 1–15, 404–66.

25 Cooper, F., ‘Work, class and empire: an African historian's retrospective on E. P. Thompson’, Social History, 20:2 (1995), 235–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.