‘My heart frightened me’: crisis, repair and the ambivalence of law’s authority at Morant Bay, 1865

Revisiting the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion and the advent of direct rule in Jamaica, this article reads witnesses’ accounts of the uprising and martial law during the Royal Commission of Inquiry ‘against the grain’ à la Walter Benjamin. Exploring the crisis of law’s authority in the wake of mass violence, I highlight how the Commission’s proceedings and the establishment of Crown Colony government were projects of repair. Taking up Reed and Adams’ concept of ‘ambient authority’ and critical theories of colonialism, this study contends that the colony’s renewed structure of imperial control and authority was accompanied by an ambivalence of feeling.