Having been found guilty of treason, George William Gordon spent his last hour writing to his wife a letter containing personal goodbyes, business notes, and a firm protestation of innocence. Thanks to the newspaper-savviness of his mother-in-law Ann Shanon and his acquaintance Louis Chamerovzow, the letter was published in dozens of papers around the world. It fell like a thunderclap, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the Jamaica government and the island’s White English governor, Edward John Eyre. Chapter 3 examines Gordon’s use of biblical language in his final letter. Enslaved at birth on the Cherry Garden estate, and rising to become an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest legislative body, Gordon invoked 2 Timothy 4:17 – “I have fought a good fight” – to present an alternative to Paul Bogle’s vision of a Black alliance prepared to meet White violence with a violent Black response. For Gordon, Black advancement would come only through what he considered legitimate forms of protest, namely political agitation and the shaping of public opinion in newspapers.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

Chapter 6 investigates a setting with a narrow policy scope and low expectations. Unlike their Brazilian counterparts, Chilean mayors are not expected to implement important policies; the national government controls most public goods provision. Consistent with the book’s theory regarding settings with low expectations, mayors in Chile enjoy an incumbency advantage. The chapter also establishes that the ayors’ ability to obtain a return from holding office hinges on fiscal transfers and public goods spending. Chile also offers a natural experiment for examining theoretical expectations about the sources of personal versus partisan incumbency bias. During the most recent electoral cycle, some mayors were subject to term limits, while others were allowed to seek reelection. The chapter analyzes the impact of this institutional change using a differences-in-differences design. The results suggest that Chilean mayors’ incumbency advantage is strictly personal, as the theory predicts for settings with personalistic parties.

Chapter 4 estimates the impact of another exogenous shock to incumbent capacity – changes in commodity prices. Brazil is one of the main producers of several commodities, such as coffee, bananas, oranges, and corn. Many municipal economies depend on rural agricultural production. Exploiting this diversified crop portfolio to build a municipal measure of changes in commodity prices, the chapter shows that commodity shocks have a strong impact on incumbency bias in rural municipalities. While negative commodity shocks deepen existing incumbency disadvantages, positive ones remove them. The results also indicate that commodity prices influence incumbency bias not by conditioning spending but through economic growth. This suggests that incumbency bias is partly driven by citizens’ informational limitations for discounting shocks. Brazilian mayoral elections demonstrate that offices with high policy scope but low capacity tend to experience an incumbency disadvantage, but that exogenous shocks to capacity can create heterogeneity in incumbency bias.

Having opposed Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy as an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest elected legislative body, and as a journalist and publisher, mixed-race Jamaican Robert Alexander Johnson migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the Tribune. Chapter 4 recovers Johnson’s body of writing on Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–6. Johnson adopted the position that the events of October 11 were a riot, not a planned, organized rebellion. How, then, could Johnson account for the brutal government suppression? He quoted Hebrew 11:4 – “he, being dead, yet speaketh” – which summarizes Cain’s murder of Abel. Johnson, like a long line of Black interpreters this chapter traces, looked to the Cain and Abel story to provide an etiology of the inexplicable savagery of White violence. Johnson warned readers contemplating Reconstruction not to entrust the rights of free Black Americans to their former White enslavers.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s argument and findings and describes its key contributions. It then turns to discuss potential theoretical limitations that pertain to the strategic behavior by citizens and incumbents, and potential scope conditions for the theory’s ability to explain incumbency bias in presidential and legislative elections. The chapter also examines the normative implications of the book’s main findings for the state of democracy in Latin America and the developing world more broadly. The chapter closes by touching on the book’s policy implications. Taken together, these findings challenge the conventional wisdom that incumbency bias is a form of failed accountability in which clientelism insulates officeholders from electoral control, or that corruption deprives citizens of the ability to select good representatives.The book instead suggests that incumbency bias is the natural result of properly functioning electoral accountability institutions in settings where citizens have low-quality information. While no panacea, the findings suggest that enhancing the quality of democracy requires improving institutional design and citizens’ knowledge.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.