The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic SlaveryReview by: VINCENT BROWNCaribbean Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 1/2, Slavery, Memory and Meanings: The Caribbean and theBicentennial of the Passing of the British Abolition of the Trans Atlantic Trade in Africans(March-June, 2010), pp. 165-168Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40654960 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 06:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of the West Indies and Caribbean Quarterly are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Caribbean Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:59:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

165

These criticisms speak to a central dilemma in Menard's text: the book's

larger point can sometimes get lost in the author's smaller, revisionist claims. In

examining the sugar revolution, Menard does not argue against the notion that the

mega profits of sugar vitally and fundamentally transformed Barbados. Rather, he counters the assertion that sugar farming itself brought about the core structural

changes associated with the Caribbean plantation. Sugar, in Menard's analysis, was just one more crop - albeit a radically successful one - contributing to the

emergence of Barbados' plantation economy. In this way, Menard's overarching argument is much more subtle than his individual criticisms would indicate.

Indeed, with the author's strong resolve to demonstrate continuity in Barbados in the face of such dramatic changes, some chapters read more like semantic quibbles over the meaning of "revolution," than reconsiderations of long economic transformations. This can leave, at times, the impression that Menard presses his smaller points too forcefully, in order to bolster his larger conclusions.

Regardless of these concerns over interpretation, Menard's work presents an invaluable recalculation of the origins of Britain's Atlantic Empire. In assessing the sugar revolution, Menard has exposed the scholarly deficits behind a much-beloved meta-narrative in Caribbean and British historiography. At the same time, his account of the emergence of Barbados' plantation economy also

presents compelling scholarship on the importance of the island in the wider

development of the Americas. While some may need more convincing before

abandoning the sugar revolution model, Menard's work provokes a vital discussion for the field. It is to be hoped that others will take up the debate.

DANIEL LIVESAY

The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Young Scotsman, Robert Renny, was greeted early on by the stark reality that faced countless of his contemporaries, both white and black - eighteenth century Jamaica was a graveyard. Vincent Brown presents a fascinating study of death's cultural and political ramifications on the island in his work The Reaper 's Garden. His impressive research moves through a myriad of correspondence, diaries, wills, cemeteries, visual images, archaeology, church minutes, autobiographies, and contemporary histories, ultimately constructing a much more

convincing analysis than seen in other cultural histories of the Caribbean. Driven

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:59:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

166

by narrative, the style is easily digestible and the subject matter disturbingly compelling.

Brown's Jamaica is two distinct worlds united by death. As a subject, death exists as a grim and original component that is "integral to both social organization and political mobilization, and therefore vital to historical transformation. "(6) Death was ubiquitous. It welcomed newcomers, both enslaved and free, and somehow simultaneously created and destroyed, according to Brown, "everything" in this most profitable and promising of the British West Indies. What Brown terms "mortuary politics" governs virtually every social, political, historical, religious, and geographical aspect on the island. He uses this perception of death's consequences to substantiate his characters' actions, struggles to both maintain and resist authority, and classify virtually every social feature on the island. Death was translated into "idioms of power and protest." Funerals served to "articulate communal values, bequests served to buttress familial networks against future fluctuations, and claimants to authority made partisan use of the dead."(59)

The picture of this hellish outpost comes into focus early. Robert Renny (the quintessential "Jonny New-Come") would record in his 1807 A History of Jamaica the quizzical singing of a small rowboat of black enslaved girls that

brought out fresh produce to the "sea-weary passengers." The portentous lyrics, "New-Come buckra, He get sick, He tak fever, He be die, He be die" reveal a morbid truth about Jamaica's reputation as 'the graveyard for Europeans.' Eager to capitalize on Jamaica's astounding wealth, Britons flocked to the island in

droves, not out of desperation, but, as Brown illustrates, these individuals

expected to make quick profits and then return to England. This was not a

migration but a "sugar rush."

Death had far-reaching political ramifications for the living as well.

Funerary practices like that of Florentius Vassall underscored "meaningful social

arrangements" (91). For white plantation owners like Vassall, death ceremonies functioned to cement status, race, wealth and his prominence within in Jamaican

planter society. Brown also notes that remembrance in the form of monuments and

grave markers served as tools for blacks and whites alike. Through the "enduring form of physical landmark" (232), symbols provided memorials to the dead and

promised shreds of immortality to an otherwise turbulent environment. Standing as reminders to earlier sacrifices, events, and deeds they also illustrated earlier

political positions and allowed, as Brown observes, a subjective reading of the past and its participants. In this way death serves more than just a reminder of how horrible life could be on the island at this time. Brown wants to underscore how

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:59:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

167

'death' and the 'dead' were able to shape the living's perception of the world in

profound ways.

Brown's effort is a welcome contribution to West Indian scholarship and fits

nicely with other analyses of life on Jamaica. While Trevor Burnard's seminal

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the

Anglo-Jamaican World provides a more personal, intimate look at this strange, degrading environment, it certainly couples best with Brown's work. Where Brown offers a broader perspective of the Jamaican plantocracy as a whole, Burnard uses the life of Thomas Thistlewood - diarist, small landowner and overseer - to illustrate how life on the island provided opportunities for a man of

inauspicious origins. Thistlewood was a mere product of Brown's Jamaican universe of violence and death, perpetrator of heinous and twisted pathologies that ran rampant on the island. He seemed to personify the Enlightenment both as a committed horticulturalist and prolific chronicler of daily events, yet his tyrannical treatment of his slaves was as much a commentary about the sociopathic tendencies of the man as they were about his environment and the time in which he lived. Brown helps us understand that Thistlewood was not necessarily atypical. He was a product of the Atlantic world - a player sustaining the emerging capitalist order of which Jamaica served as a key component.

The suffering incurred by the Africans on the island surpassed that of the whites. Brown creatively demonstrates the fear that new arriving slaves felt of

being eaten alive by their white masters as being grounded in some metaphorical reality. They were, in a sense, consumed for various commodities, dying in Jamaica in astonishing numbers. As the "fulcrum of British Atlantic slavery," (9) Jamaica was the largest importer of slaves in the British world. Its high mortality prevented the establishment of a large, self-sustaining Creole population. Jamaica remained an island of first-generation British and African immigrants.

Shrouded in a socially disruptive atmosphere, Jamaican culture developed profoundly unique characteristics and habits. Death destroyed while it created, functioning as a means of cultural interaction between blacks and whites. Using terror in the form of public torture and execution of slaves, the plantocracy was able to establish a system of racial hierarchy. It is Brown's contention, however, that as the especially brutal reality of life maintained Jamaica's status quo it also, ironically enough, brought about its eventual demise. The evangelical moralism of

early nineteenth-century metropolitan England became increasingly critical to the institutionalized tactics of death and terror. Without the slave trade (which ended in 1 807), planters were unable to sustain adequate numbers of labourers, a censure

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:59:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

168

in itself of the mortal crisis existent in Jamaica. Slaves, on the other hand, used death in rituals such as obeah (folk magic), more specifically in the form of

necromancy. They used these expressions to manipulate "cultural practices in a world where the dead were an active social presence" (151-152). Where whites used death to instill order and prolong the legacy through inheritance, slaves

regulated in their ownership of property, ritualistically employed death to resist white supremacy.

At times Brown is overly speculative. He freely assumes his subjects' positions and interpretations without adequate documentation. For instance, he

argues that Europeans rationalized the deplorable conditions of their empire's periphery by accepting colonial marginalization. This seems like a twenty-first century interpretation of an eighteenth-century mindset. Is he suggesting that these were the limits to their worldview? Brown's use of the enslaved girl's song in the rowboat implies a conscious understanding of a culture interlocked in the struggle against death. While it may be true that witnessing the mortality of so many Europeans had far-reaching implications for Slave resistance, can we honestly say for sure that subjects such as these girls truly understood the social

commentary expressed in those lyrics.

Furthermore, Brown never fails to describe the feelings of his often illiterate, mute subjects, assuming that slaves "recovered a sense of their common humanity at funerals" (69) or frequently employing of the words "probably," "undoubtedly," or "imagine" when discussing Slave burial rites and rituals. These seem to be tell-tale signs of a scholar arriving at his sources with a particular agenda. Indeed, he readily acknowledges this problem in the prologue, claiming he was forced to employ innovations to "discern the actions, meanings, and motivations" of his subjects (10). For that, he can be forgiven because, in the end, Brown's contribution provides an invaluable understanding of life in this nightmarish paradise.

VINCENT BROWN

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.58 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:59:30 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions