This article is a conversation with Diana Paton’s study No Bond but the Law, which examines incarceration in emancipation era Jamaica. The analysis in this article focuses first on how Paton situates the Jamaican prison system within social transformations taking place across the late 18th and 19th century Atlantic World. The discussion then moves to Paton’s engagement with Foucault, highlighting the vital importance of rethinking Foucault critically in the contexts of empire, race and gender. Finally, the article argues that the practice of imprisonment was a key aspect of imperial responses to slave trade abolition and slave emancipation. Even as slavery unraveled, imperial governments drew on slavery and slave imprisonment as bases for regulating black movement around the Atlantic World. In the process, incarceration was entrenched as a key feature of modern state responses to refugees, asylum seekers and the migration of the politically and economically dispossessed.
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