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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERY ANDEMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN

CHRISTER PETLEY

The Historical Journal / Volume 54 / Issue 03 / September 2011, pp 855 - 880DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X11000264, Published online: 29 July 2011

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0018246X11000264

How to cite this article:CHRISTER PETLEY (2011). NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERY ANDEMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN. The Historical Journal, 54, pp855-880 doi:10.1017/S0018246X11000264

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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERYAND EMANCIPATION IN THE

BRIT ISH CARIBBEAN

CHR I S TER PETLE YUniversity of Southampton

A B S T R AC T . New approaches to British imperial history and the rise of Atlantic history have had astrong influence on historians specializing in the history of the British-colonized Caribbean during theera of slavery. Caribbean scholars have always stressed the importance of transatlantic and colonialconnections, but these new perspectives have encouraged historians to rethink the ways that Caribbeancolonies and the imperial metropole shaped one another and to reconsider the place of the Caribbeanregion within wider Atlantic and global contexts. Attention to transatlantic links has becomeespecially important in new work on abolition and emancipation. Scholars have also focused more oftheir attention on white colonizing elites, looking in particular at colonial identities and at strategiesof control. Meanwhile, recent calls for pan-Caribbean approaches to the history of the region arecongruent with pleas for more detailed and nuanced understandings of the development of slave andpost-slave societies, focusing on specifically Caribbean themes while setting these in their widerimperial, Atlantic, and global contexts.

Over the past decade, there has been an exciting and productive outpouringof research on the British-colonized Caribbean. Many of those scholarsinvolved in the revitalization of this historiography have approached the historyof the Caribbean in relation to wider geographical and political contexts,notably Atlantic history and British imperial history. Moreover, recent attemptsto explain global history at the end of the long eighteenth century have demon-strated the role and importance of tropical New World colonies to Europeaneconomic development. This review examines some recent work about theBritish-colonized Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,focusing on studies of slavery and emancipation. The field of Caribbean historyhas grown to an extent that it is impossible to include discussion of all recentworks relating to the region, even on the Anglophone subsection that is themain topic here. I have tended therefore to focus on the monograph literature,

Humanities (History), University of Southampton, Southhampton SO BJ [email protected] The categorization, ‘British-colonized Caribbean’, strikes me as the most appropriate for

those parts of the Caribbean under British rule. It is somewhat unwieldy, however, and I havetended to use British Caribbean as serviceable shorthand.

The Historical Journal, , (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press doi:./SX

exploring the application over the past decade of global, imperial, Atlantic, andCaribbean conceptual frameworks.

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The past does not fit conveniently into compartments. People’s lives andexperiences have always been multi-layered, changeable, overlapping; oftenthey were utterly chaotic. As the influential Caribbean scholar, Sidney Mintz,has recognized, ‘the lifeways of all of the peoples we study are forever subject toinfluences from elsewhere, and are forever in flux . . . they are historicalproducts, processual products, such that most categories and continua run therisk of immobilizing and misrepresenting them’. The ‘British Caribbean’,therefore, is a slippery concept. Over the past years, the Antilles as a wholehave probably experienced as much externally influenced fluctuation andchange as anywhere in the world. The archipelago of islands lying between themainland Americas and the North Atlantic Ocean – curving around theCaribbean Sea, from the Bahamas and Cuba in the north and west toBarbados and Aruba in the east and south – is, as Mintz puts it, an ‘ancientlycolonial’ region, the history of which has been shaped by European coloni-zation, global trade, and multiple migrations. Moreover, scholars do not agreeon how we should define the boundaries of the region. Caribbean historiansfocus on the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, often also including theBahamas, the Guianas, and Belize on the basis that these areas were shaped bycommon experiences of colonialism, slavery, and plantation agriculture, par-ticularly sugar growing. Some recent scholarship has extended the Caribbeancatchment area, deploying the looser term, ‘Greater Caribbean’, to refer to awide tropical and sub-tropical American plantation zone, incorporating suchareas as the Carolinas and parts of Brazil.

The term ‘British Caribbean’ is therefore best seen as a useful workingconcept, a shorthand to denote places located in and around the Caribbeanbasin under British rule, socially and economically similar because of the twininstitutions of slavery and the sugar plantation. Territories within this regionpassed in and out of British control, and the areas administered by the Britishstate contained many different peoples, who often did not define themselves as

Sidney W. Mintz, ‘Enduring substances, trying theories: the Caribbean region asoikoumenê ’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, (), pp. –, at p. .

Sidney W. Mintz, Three ancient colonies: Caribbean themes and variations (Cambridge, MA,), p. .

See Mintz, ‘Enduring substances’; Juanita De Barros, Audra Diptee, and David V. Trotman,‘Introduction’, in Juanita De Barros, Audra Diptee, and David V. Trotman, eds., Beyondfragmentation: perspectives on Caribbean history (Princeton, NJ, ), pp. xi–xxiv, at pp. xi–iii.

Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and society in the British Greater Caribbean (Baltimore, MD,); J. R. McNeill, Mosquito empires: ecology and war in the Greater Caribbean, –(Cambridge, ).

H I S TO R I C A L J O U R N A L

‘British’. This changeable zone nevertheless contained places that remainedunder English, and then British, control for centuries. Barbados, Jamaica, andthe British Leeward Islands (the most populous of which were St Kitts, Nevis,and Antigua) came under English control in the early and middle decades ofthe seventeenth century and remained British colonies into the twentiethcentury.

No part of the British Caribbean can be understood without reference to thewider world. This is of course true of any place, but wider zones of contact havebeen particularly important in Caribbean history. The colonies were part of aBritish-American colonial system that stretched across the Atlantic from themetropole. On most of the island territories seized and claimed by the English,there were few or no Amerindian inhabitants. White migrant colonists importedsugar cane to plant, and Caribbean-grown sugar served British consumer de-mands, as did other regional crops, such as coffee, tobacco, and cotton.Enslaved Africans made up the majority of the population of the BritishCaribbean, and demographic conditions were such that the planters relied oncontinual imports of enslaved people from Africa to keep up and expandproduction on the sugar estates. Around a million enslaved Africans arrived inJamaica alone during the eighteenth century, before the abolition of the slavetrade in . By , enslaved people accounted for approximately percent of the total population of the British colonies, and about , enslavedpeople in the Caribbean became juridically free in as a consequence ofthe Emancipation Bill. These colonial territories were therefore part ofthe wider diasporic and cultural zone that scholars dub the ‘Black Atlantic’, andas vital elements of expanding British imperial and trading networks, theireconomic hinterlands stretched around the globe. Inevitably, these dynamicand kaleidoscopic webs of connection have shaped how historians approach theBritish-colonized Caribbean.

Barry Higman has provided a definitive account of the institutionalization ofhistory writing in the English-speaking Caribbean, noting that many of the first

Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, ‘The dynamics of the slave market and slavepurchasing patterns in Jamaica, –’, William and Mary Quarterly, (),pp. –, at p. .

J. R. Ward, ‘The British West Indies in the age of abolition, –’, in P. J. Marshall,ed., The Oxford history of the British empire: the eighteenth century (Oxford, ), pp. –, atp. ; Nicholas Draper, The price of emancipation: slave-ownership, compensation and British societyat the end of slavery (Cambridge, ), p. . There was variation in population structureacross the region. For example, in in Barbados, enslaved people were about per cent ofthe population. The corresponding figure for Jamaica was per cent, for Demerara it was per cent. The Emancipation Bill, passed by the British parliament in , dictated thatenslaved people would remain in the service of their former masters as part of a system of‘apprenticeship’, which was lifted in .

See Paul Gilroy, The black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (Cambridge, MA,); Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, eds., Origins of the black Atlantic (London, ). Seealso Lauren Benton, ‘The British Atlantic in global context’, in David Armitage and MichaelJ. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world (Basingstoke, ; st edn ), pp. –.

H I S T O R I O G R A P H I C A L R E V I E W S

professional historians of the region were British imperial historians. Americanscholars like Frank Pitman and Lowell Ragatz, having interests that overlappedwith those of their British counterparts, also included the Caribbean in theirefforts to understand the economics and politics of British-colonial America.

They focused mainly on its white minority, particularly on the socially andeconomically dominant planter class, and they were interested above all inmatters of governance and economy. Writing in , one British historianwas very clear that his interest in the Caribbean did not include ‘the great massof the population’. From the middle of the twentieth century, historianschanged tack and began to focus their attention on the black majority in theregion. The emergence of social history, Philip Curtin’s monumental efforts toprovide a census of the transatlantic slave trade, and the subsequent rise ofslavery studies were crucial in this regard. The cultural politics of the de-colonization struggle were also an important influence, as Caribbean scholarsfollowed the initiatives of C. L. R. James and Eric Williams to rewrite histories ofslavery and empire, highlighting the exploitative nature of Caribbean slaveryand emphasizing the agency and achievements of enslaved people.

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New approaches to British-Caribbean history build on the foundations laid byCaribbeanists from within and outside the region. The work of Eric Williams, inparticular, acts as a beacon for much new work on the place of the Caribbean inwider Atlantic and global histories. In Capitalism and slavery (), Williamssought to make sense of the relationships between eighteenth-century Britishcapitalism, slavery, and colonial trade, arguing that slavery and the slave tradeplayed a part in providing capital to finance the British Industrial Revolutionbefore new forms of industrial capitalism helped to destroy the British-Atlanticslave system. This thesis attracted a host of criticism during and after thes as scholars questioned the evidence for Williams’s claims about slaveryand industrialization and about the role of economic change in the abolition

B.W. Higman,Writing West Indian histories (London and Basingstoke, ). See also B. W.Higman, ed., General history of the Caribbean, VI: methodology and historiography of the Caribbean(London and Oxford, ).

For some examples of British imperial histories of the Caribbean see W. L. Burn,Emancipation and apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London, ); Richard Pares, A WestIndia fortune (London, ). Significant American publications include Frank Wesley Pitman,The development of the British West Indies, – (New Haven, CT, ); Lowell JosephRagatz, The fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean, – (New York, NY, ).

Burn, Emancipation and apprenticeship, p. . See Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic slave trade: a census (Madison, WI, ). For a recent

collection drawing together significant contributions to the historiography on slavery since thes, see Gad Heuman and James Walvin, eds., The slavery reader (London, ).

See C. L. R. James, The black Jacobins (London, ; first edn ); Eric Williams,Capitalism and slavery (London, ; st edn ). Ibid.


debates. More recently, however, works by a wide variety of scholars labouringin different fields have begun to breathe new life into some of Williams’sarguments and methodological perspectives. For example, some historians haverevisited the influence of Caribbean colonies on changes in Britain.

Interest in the Caribbean by historians of Britain is not new, but globalizingand increasingly multi-cultural societies – within and without the academy –appear to have prompted scholars in Europe and America to re-attend to theways that Britons imposed themselves on the wider world and explore thediverse ways that the empire ‘came home’ to the British Isles. Increasingly,historians see the empire – British colonies and the metropole – as a single,conjoined entity, viewing it as a series of interconnected networks and treating‘the metropole and colonies as interconnected analytical fields’. This amountsto a sort of methodological Caribbeanization of British history. In herreappraisal of the English island story, Kathleen Wilson notes that she hasapplied a perspective that ‘Caribbeanists have stressed for some time’ that‘islands can be said to exist only in relation to other things, such as seas, oceansand other islands, and so they are not “insular” but vibrant entrepôts in oceanicnetworks, linking people, goods and cultures’. Debates associated with this‘new imperial history’ have often focused on the development of metropolitancultural identity. Influenced by the turn towards cultural analysis in historicalresearch, revisionist historians of Britain and its empire have advanced the viewthat British identities were formed through connections with the wider worldsof exploration, imperial conquest, and colonial rule.

David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and David Richardson offered stern critiques of theargument that wealth generated in the British slave system financed the Industrial Revolution,arguing that profits derived directly from the Atlantic slave trade and Caribbean slavery werenot large enough to have made a big difference in financing industrialization. See Stanley L.Engerman, ‘The slave trade and British capital formation in the eighteenth century: acomment on the Williams thesis’, Business History Review, (), pp. –; DavidRichardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade, –’, in Marshall, ed.,Oxford history of the British empire, pp. –, at p. ; David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman,‘The importance of slavery and the slave trade to industrializing Britain’, Journal of EconomicHistory, (), pp. –. Roger Anstey and Seymour Drescher have attacked the ideathat falling plantation profits allowed new types of capitalist to administer the coup de grâce tothe slave system, proposing that the plantations remained profitable before the end of the slavetrade and that economics played little role in the debates over abolition. See Roger Anstey,‘Capitalism and slavery: a critique’, Economic History Review, (), pp. –; SeymourDrescher, Econocide: British slavery in the era of abolition (Chapel Hill, NC, ; st edn ).

Such new approaches to British history intersect with the genesis of Atlantic approachesdiscussed below. For influential efforts by outward looking historians to recast the study of theBritish Isles in a wider Atlantic context, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British history: a plea for a newsubject’, Journal of Modern History, (), pp. –; J. G. A. Pocock, Three Britishrevolutions: , , (Princeton, NJ, ); David Armitage, The ideological origins of theBritish empire (Cambridge, ).

Kathleen Wilson, The island race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century(London, ), pp. , .

See Kathleen Wilson, ed., A new imperial history: culture, identity and modernity in Britain andthe empire, – (Cambridge, ); Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At home with


Catherine Hall has developed those ideas in Civilising subjects, a book dealingwith the Baptist missionary project in Jamaica and the formation of Englishidentities during the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing her research primarilyon Birmingham, but using this case-study to draw broader conclusions, Hallnotes that ‘in order to understand the specificity’ of the British ‘nationalformation, we have to look outside it’. Her book advances the argument thatwhite English identities were contingent on ideas about race and empireformed in the English encounter with the Caribbean, contending that Baptistmissionaries arriving in Jamaican slave society at the beginning of thenineteenth century attempted to create a new Christian society there that wasmoulded in their own image. The post-emancipation era saw the erosion ofthese hopes, partly because former slaves had their own ideas about how to livetheir lives once free. These included a strong drive towards independentlandholding and religious beliefs that drew in part on African influences. Thesepost-emancipation developments, brought into stark relief by the Morant Bayrebellion of , contributed to hardening British racial attitudes during themid-nineteenth century. In this formulation, the very idea of what it meant to bea civilized British subject was contingent on an awareness of a wider world ofcolonial sites like Jamaica.

Susan Dwyer Amussen has taken up these ideas in relation to an earlierperiod, arguing that we end up with an incomplete understanding of earlymodern England if we ignore ‘histories of slaveholding and the exchange withthe Caribbean’. In her book, Caribbean exchanges, Amussen is concerned withthe development of English slave colonies in the Caribbean and with the ways inwhich those colonies affected life in the metropole. White settlers sought torecreate England in the tropics, but their hopes proved impossible to reconcilewith their desire to exploit the wealth-making potential of sugar. They created alabour system devoid of the paternalistic elements of English master–servantrelations and a legal system that sought to control all aspects of slaves’ lives,jettisoning familiar English principles like the right to trial by jury. Coloniststried to justify their new institutions by making claims about the difference andinferiority of African people.

the empire: metropolitan culture and the imperial world (Cambridge, ). For a critique of thisposition, see Bernard Porter, The absent-minded imperialists: empire, society, and culture in Britain(Cambridge, ).

Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, –(Cambridge, ), p. .

Ibid. Covering some of the same ground as Thomas Holt, The problem of freedom: race, labor,and politics in Jamaica and Britain, – (Baltimore, MD, ), Hall places far greateremphasis on British metropolitan discussions about empire and identity. See also Andrew,Sartori’s critique of Hall’s culturalist approach and praise for Holt in ‘The British empire andits liberal mission’, Journal of Modern History, (), pp. –, at pp. –.

Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean exchanges: slavery and the transformation of English society,– (Chapel Hill, NC, ), quote at p. .


Like Hall, Amussen contends that in the process of transforming societiesand landscapes in the Caribbean, English colonial practices, institutions, andideologies began to shape thinking about race and gender in the wider EnglishAtlantic. For instance, Metropolitan ideas about the sexual availability ofworking women and the inferiority of black people were contingent on howwork and power evolved on colonial plantations. Moreover, Amussen advancesthe bold claim that, in their efforts to control workers and engage inincreasingly commercialized forms of production, capitalists in the BritishIsles began to develop techniques that were strikingly similar – perhaps evenmodelled on – those used to control slaves and maximize profit in theCaribbean. ‘The mature factory of the Industrial Revolution’, she observes,bears a striking resemblance ‘to the efficient organisation of the plantation’.

It was not only sugar and the profits of slavery that returned to England from theCaribbean. Ideas and practices were exchanged too and might have shapedmore than just British notions of race, nationhood, and civility.

British dependency on Caribbean slavery stretched beyond the discursive toshape the material realities of economic practice and financial gain. Thesethemes emerge in a number of other recent studies about British–Caribbeanconnections. For example, Simon Smith’s book, Slavery, family and gentrycapitalism in the British Atlantic, charts the Caribbean connections of theYorkshire-based Lascelles family as traders and then as plantation owners. It is,in part, a case-study of how metropolitan wealth was made on the backs ofenslaved plantation workers. Pursuing this theme, Nicholas Draper has beguna systematic search for evidence of what he calls Britain’s ‘debt to slavery’. Thethousands of people in Britain who benefited financially from their ownershipof Caribbean slaves in the nineteenth century are the subject of his recent study,The price of emancipation, about the twenty million pounds sterling ofcompensation paid to British slaveholders by the British parliament in theaftermath of the Emancipation Bill. From careful and painstaking scrutinyof the compensation records, Draper finds that the number of people living inBritain and owning slaves in the Caribbean was larger than once thought. Whilehis data allow him only to provide a snapshot of British slave-ownership at thevery end of slavery, Draper’s work makes clear not only that substantialnineteenth-century British family fortunes had their foundations in Caribbeanslavery but also that many more modest British incomes were drawn fromownership of enslaved people in the Caribbean.

It is now easier therefore to counteract criticism levelled at Williams’sarguments about private British profits derived from Caribbean slavery.

Amussen, Caribbean exchanges, pp. –, quote at p. . S. D. Smith, Slavery, family and gentry capitalism in the British Atlantic: the world of the Lascelles,

– (Cambridge, ). Draper, Price of emancipation, quote at p. . Draper’s work provides a riposte to claims by W. D. Rubinstein that few large nineteenth-

century British fortunes had their foundations in slavery. See Draper, Price of emancipation, p. .


However, recent claims about the direct benefits of slaveholding to individuals,families, and businesses appear modest when compared to two recent studieson British industrialization at the end of the long eighteenth century. Assessingthe value of slavery to Britain in broad terms, Joseph Inikori reaches theconclusion that ‘the Industrial Revolution in England was a product of overseastrade’ and that dependence on exports to Atlantic overseas markets wasparticularly strong in the industrializing regions of West Yorkshire, Lancashire,and the West Midlands. The Caribbean sugar islands, as consumers of enslavedlabourers and British manufactures, and as exporters of sugar, accounted for alarge proportion of this trade. Inikori argues that the value of the slave coloniesand of the slave trade meant that Africans, including those enslaved in theCaribbean, made a crucial contribution to the Industrial Revolution.

Kenneth Pomeranz makes similar arguments. The Industrial Revolution, heclaims, created a ‘great divergence’ in the world economy. In the middle of theeighteenth century, the most important economic regions of China were rela-tively close in terms of productivity and technology to those of Europe, whichleads to the question of why it was Europe, with Britain setting the pace, and notChina, that experienced the first industrial revolution. Pomeranz argues thatavailable reserves of coal and the existence of a transatlantic hinterland hold thekey to the conundrum, writing that ‘for a more complete explanation of whatoccurred in Europe’s core, we must also look at its peripheries and understandwhy they became growing rather than shrinking suppliers of primary productsto the “world” market’. The New World not only offered markets for Britishmanufactures, as Inikori notes, but also expanding sources of industrial inputs,such as cotton and food. Sugar with its high calorie-per-acre yield was crucial,and New World slavery, as well as keeping the costs of production low, ensuredthat cane workers had to stick to the task of producing an export formetropolitan consumption, arguments that intersect with Mintz’s oldercontention that Caribbean sugar helped to sustain the British industrial labourforce.

These studies add substance to Richard Drayton’s observation that the slave-run sugar plantations of Jamaica and St Domingue were ‘at the cutting edge ofcapitalist civilisation’, and historians of industrialization might now do well totake note of Amussen’s claim that labour regimes in eighteenth-century Britainbear disquieting similarities with the precociously modern sugar plantations ofthe Caribbean, with their displaced, commodified, and regimented labourforce. Such efforts to understand industrialization in Atlantic and global termsrepresent a broadening of perspective on the part of economic historians, away

J. E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: a study in international trade anddevelopment (Cambridge, ), quote at p. .

Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern worldeconomy (Princeton, NJ, ), quote at p. ; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and power: the place ofsugar in modern history (New York, NY, ). See also Inikori, Africans and the IndustrialRevolution, p. .


from nationally bound narratives of British development, an opening ofhorizons that has much in common with the new approach to British historypresented by cultural historians associated with the new imperial history, such asWilson and Hall. In these analyses, the Caribbean emerges as an importantpart of the Industrial Revolution and of the forging of British nationhood.As Drayton suggests, there might be good reasons to follow Williams and Mintzby placing ‘the sugar plantation complex into our narratives of temperate aswell as tropical history’.

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Nowhere are the connections between the Caribbean and Europe moreobvious than in the transatlantic struggle over slavery. Enslaved people alwaysfound ways to resist their oppressors. However, with the development of metro-politan anti-slavery campaigning in the final two decades of the eighteenthcentury, the lines of conflict were redrawn, with profound implications for thesocieties and economies of the British Caribbean. Much of the scholarship onabolitionism is necessarily focused on metropolitan themes, but as Hall’s recentwork emphasizes, the ‘war of representation’ that raged over slavery during theage of abolition was a profoundly transatlantic affair. New approaches to thetopic have revisited some of the debates created by Eric Williams as well asincorporating work on events in the Caribbean into our understanding of howthe slave system came to an end.

Williams saw the rise of British anti-slavery as part of a shift in the nature ofcapitalism and argued that the plantation system was at the beginning of aperiod of ‘uninterrupted decline’ when it came under sustained metropolitanattack, weakened by the commercial disaggregation of the old Atlantic empireas a result of the American Revolution. However, Seymour Drescher in hisbook Econocide, first published in , provided strong evidence of plantationproductivity and profitability in the period up to the abolition of the slave tradein , arguing that moral arguments trumped economic interests in thedebate over abolition. The recent emphasis by Inikori and Pomeranz onthe role of Caribbean slavery in British industrialization seems to reaffirm theoverall contention that abolitionism helped to destroy a system that waseconomically productive. As Drescher puts it in a new edition of Econocide, ‘fromthe seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the leading slave labour zones of

Richard Drayton, ‘The collaboration of labour: slaves, empires, and globalizations in theAtlantic world, c. –’, in A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in world history (London,), pp. –, quotes at pp. , .

Hall, Civilising subjects, p. . Williams, Capitalism and slavery, p. . Drescher, Econocide. See also J. R. Ward, ‘The profitability of sugar planting in the British

West Indies, –’, Economic History Review, (), pp. –; John McCusker,‘The economy of the British West Indies, –’, in John McCusker, Essays in the economichistory of the Atlantic world (London, ), pp. –.


the Americas constituted some of the most productive and wealth-producingeconomies on the face of the earth’.

Avoiding economic analysis, Christopher Leslie Brown’s book, Moral capital,represents a valuable new contribution to the scholarship on British anti-slavery,placing the American Revolution back at centre stage of our understandingof the roots of the abolition campaign. Brown’s detailed analysis notes that theRevolution halved the number of slaves in the empire, weakened the coloniallobby in London, provided a context in which Britons scrutinized thepeculiarities and failings of colonial societies, and strengthened metropolitanresolve with regard to the centralization of imperial governance. Overall, arguesBrown, this provided the context whereby anti-slavery politics could beconsidered useful and worthy of esteem by a wide constituency of Britons,including policy-makers. These claims cohere easily with earlier arguments byLinda Colley and C. A. Bayly about the simultaneous rise of a patriotic anti-slavery movement and a more authoritarian approach towards governingcolonies as well as with more recent arguments about the definitive political andcultural impact of the American War in the metropole. In this view, theAmerican Revolution was important to the abolition movement, but notbecause of its economic effects in the Caribbean, and abolitionism was neither asaintly crusade nor an economically determined force. Rather, it was a politicalmovement with multiple goals which included the reform of the colonial socialand economic order within British-Caribbean colonies.

David Beck Ryden has reappraised a later episode in the transatlantic debatesabout Caribbean slavery: the achievement of the abolition of the slave trade. Hisbook, West Indian slavery and British abolition, revives Williams’s contention thatthe over-production of British West Indian sugar helped prompt parliament tooutlaw the trade in . Unlike Williams, Ryden thinks that this was part ofa crisis that began at the start of the nineteenth century, not a symptom of amore long-term economic decline in the British-Caribbean sugar industry.The destruction of French output from St Domingue, as a consequence ofrevolutionary upheaval, precipitated a rapid expansion in British West Indiansugar production during the s. This led to a glut of British-Caribbean sugarand a sharp drop in its price at the turn of the nineteenth century, when BritishWest Indian planters were exposed to competition on European markets from

Drescher, Econocide, p. xxv. Christopher Leslie Brown:Moral capital: foundations of British abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC,

), especially pp. –. See also Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An empire divided: theAmerican Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA, ), pp. –.

Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, – (London, ; st edn ), pp.–; C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, – (London,); Troy Bickham, Making headlines: the American Revolution as seen through the British press(DeKalb, IL, ), p. ; Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of AmericanIndependence (Oxford, ), p. ; Dror Wahrman, The making of the modern self: identity andculture in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT, and London, ).


Cuban sugar grown on newly established plantations and transported inAmerican ships. The economic crisis, Ryden argues, played into abolitionisthands. It provided a basis for claims that the colonial slave system was econ-omically as well as morally rotten and it facilitated the argument that curtailingsupplies of enslaved workers from Africa might end over-production whileencouraging improvements to Caribbean plantation management.

Though recognizing that parliament abolished the slave trade at a time ofeconomic distress for British-Caribbean sugar planters, Drescher disagrees withRyden’s attempt to provide an economic explanation for the timing ofabolition, maintaining that West-Indian trade had little to do with the rise orsuccess of anti-slavery. It is possible, however, to accept that contention whilealso acknowledging a broader point, established by both Ryden and Brown:moral claims on their own were insufficient for a successful campaign againstthe slave system; they had to be combined with other, more practical, con-siderations in order to bring about abolitionist success. Moreover, even if wereject Ryden’s watered-down version of the decline thesis, other aspects of hisbook retain their value. In particular, his close attention to the political organ-ization and lobbying tactics of the transatlantic pro-slavery lobby provides amuch-needed insight into the defence of Caribbean slavery, a neglected part ofthe slavery debates.

Given the meteoric rise of the anti-slavery movement after the AmericanRevolution, historians will need to follow Ryden and Draper by paying moreattention to the ‘obstructionist and disruptive effect’ of the pro-slavery lobby ifthey are to explain why it took over half a century for the abolitionists to bringabout an end to Caribbean slaveholding. Looking at the period before ,Ryden builds on work by Andrew O’Shaughnessy to chart the composition anddevelopment of the West Indian interest in London, a commercial lobbyinggroup that maintained very strong ties with merchants and planters in theCaribbean. Others have looked at slaveholders and the pro-slavery lobby at alater period. Draper, for example, charts the ways in which those who ownedslaves pressurized British ministers to try to achieve the highest possible com-pensation settlement from the government in return for slave emancipation.

David Lambert’s recent book, White creole culture, politics and identity during theage of abolition, adds another dimension to our understanding of whiteslaveholders, noting that ‘white colonial identities were a site of struggle during

David Beck Ryden,West Indian slavery and British abolition, – (Cambridge, ). Drescher, Econocide, pp. xxiii–xxiv; Seymour Drescher, ‘Review of Ryden, West Indian

slavery and British abolition’, Slavery and Abolition, (), pp. –. Williams, Capitalism and slavery, p. . Ryden, West Indian slavery, pp. – and passim; Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, ‘The

formation of a commercial lobby: the West India Interest, British colonial policy and theAmerican Revolution’, Historical Journal, (), pp. –.

Draper, Price of emancipation, pp. –; Christer Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: colonialsociety and culture during the era of abolition (London, ).


the age of abolition’. As Lambert shows, the struggle over slavery was in largepart a debate about whether slaveholders in the Caribbean could be counted ascivilized and loyal Britons or as a brutish group of renegade whites whosebehaviour had degenerated from acceptable British standards. In White creoleculture, Lambert unpicks the fault-lines and tensions that emerged within pro-slavery discourse in the colony of Barbados, as local whites sought to imposetheir mastery over enslaved people while staving off metropolitan criticism oftheir ‘un-British’ institutions. He develops the idea that ‘the constitution ofwhite identity in Barbados was linked – always – to the (dis)possession of blackpeople’, arguing that poorer whites were more likely to articulate whitesupremacist identities, while the landed elite tended to prefer a ‘planter ideal’centred on ideas about gentility and the exercise of benevolent masculineauthority over their enslaved workers. Indeed, debates over slavery oftenrevolved around questions of gender: ideas about proper masculine behaviourwere, as Lambert suggests, a significant point of contention in disagreementsover the identities and practices of white colonial slaveholders, and otherscholars, including Henrice Altink, have shown that depictions of enslavedwomen and their treatment at the hands of slaveholders provided a key point offocus in disputes between abolitionists and their slaveholding opponents.

New approaches to the abolition debates have also improved our awareness ofthe influence of enslaved people in the struggle over the future of slavery.Claudius Fergus contends that the ‘dread of insurrection’ by newly importedenslaved Africans helped to shape the thinking of slaveholders and abolitionistsalike, particularly after the Haitian Revolution, influencing schemes forreforming the slave system, such as those encouraging the development oflocally born slave populations, as well as the decision to end the slave trade.

Gelien Matthews has argued that in the period after , abolitionist reactionsto slave uprisings began to add urgency to debates about slave emancipation. Inher book, Caribbean slave revolts and the British abolition movement, she notes thatadvocates of emancipation presented the huge slave uprising that began inJamaica at the end of as evidence that slavery was an unworkable system.Jamaican slaveholders repressed the uprising, but Matthews contends that the Emancipation Bill was passed amidst abolitionist claims that thefundamental inhumanity of slavery had caused slaves to confront their masters

David Lambert,White creole culture, politics and identity during the age of abolition (Cambridge,), p. .

Ibid., pp. , –. See also Christer Petley, ‘“Home” and “this country”: Britishness andcreole identity in the letters of a transatlantic slaveholder’, Atlantic Studies, (), pp. –.

Henrice Altink, Representations of slave women in discourses on slavery and abolition,– (London, ); See also Diana Paton, ‘Decency, dependence and the lash:gender and the British debate over slave emancipation, –’, Slavery and Abolition, (), pp. –.

Claudius Fergus, ‘“Dread of insurrection”: abolitionism, security, and labor in Britain’sWest Indian colonies, –’, William and Mary Quarterly, (), pp. –.


and that freedom would have to be granted in order to avoid revolutionarychaos in the Caribbean, analysis that adds weight to Williams’s contention thatenslaved people, by their direct actions, forced the issue of emancipation on tothe political agenda. Some historians, including Drescher, remain scepticalabout the influence of slave unrest on the progress of abolitionism, but whileWilliams’s idea that abolitionist political success was a direct consequence oflong-term decline in the British West Indian slave economy still stands in tatters,Caribbean historians have successfully developed a less-well-known part of histhesis to show that the subaltern politics of Caribbean slave communitiesmattered in the transatlantic ‘propaganda war’ that culminated in thedismantling of slavery.

I V

As well as enhancing our understanding of British history and abolitionism,Caribbean approaches have helped reorient American colonial history. In areview published in , Russell Menard appraised the state of scholarship onBritish-colonial America and argued that the perspectives that Williams used inCapitalism and slaverymight help provide the methodological tools with which toreconstruct a fragmented field. Scholars of early American history, looking atthe period before the American Revolution, had tended to work on specificNorth American colonial regions, without sufficient focus on the wider picture.Moreover, many of them struggled to fit Native-Americans and African-Americans into their accounts of the colonial past. Williams, Menard noted,had taken a broader view, in which colonial America – including theCaribbean – was presented as part of an integrated British Atlantic. Moreover,Williams’s main focus was slavery, which meant that enslaved Africans as well asfree European colonists were at the foreground of his analysis.

Since Menard wrote his article, the rise to prominence of Atlantic history hashelped to impose just such new breadth and inclusivity on our understanding ofcolonial America. This move has been driven by a desire to make better sense ofthe American past, and like historians in Britain, scholars in the US haverecognized a need to trace the roots of their globalizing and multi-culturalsociety. Atlanticists have argued that a transatlantic interculture developedbetween about and within a complex and intensifying system oftrade and migration (fused in the institution of slavery) and by an expansion of

Gelien Matthews, Caribbean slave revolts and the British abolition movement (Baton Rouge, LA,); Williams, Capitalism and slavery, p. . See also, Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica,pp. –.

Seymour Drescher, ‘The limits of example’, in David P. Geggus, ed., The impact of theHaitian Revolution in the Atlantic world (Columbia, SC, ), pp. –; The term ‘propagandawar’ is from Hall, Civilising subjects, p. .

Russell R. Menard, ‘Reckoning with Williams: Capitalism and slavery and the reconstruc-tion of early American history’, Callaloo, (), pp. –.


European empires that was accompanied by the exportation (and transfor-mation) of European legal and political organization. The Americas, whereAfrican and European arrivants transformed landscapes and created newsocieties from Old World templates, have been the main focal points,and scholars have used new Atlantic approaches to reappraise the histories ofthe thirteen colonies that went on to become the United States. As onepractitioner of Atlantic history has noted, the ‘shift toward an Atlantic paradigmin colonial American history’ offers scholars ‘exciting opportunities toreconceptualize early modern North America’, allowing them to ‘take workdone within national or regional containers –Canada, the United States, theCaribbean – and reposition it within a more comparative context’. Atlanticapproaches have therefore allowed historians of colonial North America tomove away from endogenous, nationally bounded, perspectives, underminingassumptions about North American exceptionalism while drawing theCaribbean and Africa into their analysis of early American history.

As Trevor Burnard observes, one of the key achievements of these newAtlantic approaches has been to restore ‘the British West Indies to its rightfulposition as the most dynamic part of British America’. Scholars, includingBurnard, have emphasized the economic productivity of the Caribbeancolonies, the wealth of their white inhabitants, and the centrality of the islandsto the wider British-Atlantic system in terms of trade and strategic importance.

Historians have also built fruitfully on efforts by Richard Dunn and Jack Greeneto analyse Caribbean settler societies and politics in relation to those of theNorth American mainland. In recent years, Greene has expanded his thesis thatwhite West Indian colonists articulated similar sorts of claims about their Britishconstitutional liberties to those voiced by their counterparts in the thirteenmainland colonies, an idea reinforced by Natalie Zacek’s recent study of whitesettler society in the English Leeward islands. Diverging from this view,

See Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic world; Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic history:concept and contours (Cambridge, MA, ); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds.,Atlantic history: a critical appraisal (Oxford, ).

Stephen J. Hornsby, British Atlantic, American frontier: spaces of power in early modern BritishAmerica (Hanover and London, ), p. .

Trevor Burnard, ‘The British Atlantic’, in Greene and Morgan, eds., Atlantic history,pp. –, at p. .

Trevor Burnard, ‘“Prodigious riches”: the wealth of Jamaica before the AmericanRevolution’, Economic History Review, (), pp. –; Trevor Burnard, ‘Europeanmigration to Jamaica, –’, William and Mary Quarterly, (), pp. –;O’Shaughnessy, An empire divided.

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and slaves: the rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, – (Chapel Hill, NC, ); Jack P. Greene, ‘The Jamaica privilege controversy, –:an episode in the process of constitutional definition’, Journal of Imperial and CommonwealthHistory, (), pp. –; Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty, slavery, and the transformationof British identity in the eighteenth-century West Indies’, Slavery and Abolition, (),pp. –; Jack P. Greene,‘Liberty and slavery: the transfer of British liberty to the West Indies,–’, in Jack P. Greene, ed., Exclusionary empire: English liberty overseas, –


O’Shaughnessy has offered a detailed account of the social and politicaldifferences between the islands and the mainland before the AmericanRevolution, reminding us in the process that the incomparable economicsuccess of the Caribbean came at the cost of social combustibility, demographicfailure, and – ultimately –metropolitan censure. The Caribbean colonies havetherefore been catapulted towards the centre of discussion about early modernAmerica, but historians continue to debate the extent to which these territoriesdiverged or converged with the experiences of the mainland.

The fact that the British West Indies did not secede from the empire and wentoff on a historical trajectory very different from the thirteen mainland coloniesis important to nascent debates about the relationship between the Caribbeanand the rest of British America. It is also historiographically significant.Caribbean historians have developed a tradition of Atlantic history, centredon questions about the experiences of enslaved Africans, slavery, andemancipation, that was well established before the more recent rise of Atlantichistory in the North American academy. Williams and James, for example, wereeffective pioneers of Atlantic history during the s and s, althoughthose exploring the roots of Atlantic studies often overlook their contrib-utions. Philip Curtin emphasized the importance of the Caribbean in thecontext of the slave trade from Africa and the New World plantation complex,and historians of the Caribbean, including Verene Shepherd and HilaryBeckles, have also provided Caribbean-centred perspectives on Atlantichistory.

Moreover, recent work by scholars with interests in the Caribbean bears outWilliam O’Reilly’s observation that there are many genealogies of Atlantichistory, each addressing layers of a palimpsest of activities in and around theOcean. For example, Paul Lovejoy, David Trotman, and Gwendolyn MidloHall have helped expand our understanding of the black Atlantic, facilitatingand presenting detailed research on the transplantation and adaptation of

(Cambridge, ), pp. –; Natalie Zacek, Settler society in the English Leeward Islands,– (Cambridge, ).

O’Shaughnessy, An empire divided. On demographic failure and its consequences, seeTrevor Burnard, ‘A failed settler society: marriage and demographic failure in early Jamaica’,Journal of Social History, (), pp. –; Trevor Burnard, ‘ “The countrie continuessicklie”: white mortality in Jamaica, –’, Social History of Medicine, (), pp. –;Trevor Burnard, ‘“Rioting in goatish embraces”: marriage and improvement in early BritishJamaica’, History of the Family, (), pp. –.

See Bernard Bailyn, ‘The idea of Atlantic history’, Itinerario, (), pp. –; PhilipD. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, ‘Introduction: the present state of Atlantic history’, in Greeneand Morgan, eds., Atlantic history, pp. –.

See Philip D. Curtin, The rise and fall of the plantation complex: essays in Atlantic history(Cambridge, ); Verene A. Shepherd and Hilary McD. Beckles, eds., Caribbean slavery in theAtlantic world (Oxford, Princeton, NJ, and Kingston, ).

See William O’Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic history’, Atlantic Studies, (),pp. –, at p. .


African identities and cultures in societies throughout the Americas.

Caribbean case-studies form part of this work, and Audra Diptee’s recentbook, From Africa to Jamaica, on the slave trade and the creation of Jamaicansociety, is a good recent example. Attention to the victims of slavery overlapswith studies of what Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh describe as the‘revolutionary Atlantic’, made up of those who sought to escape and resist therepressive structures put in place by planters, merchants, and governments.

Caribbean settler politics, of course, formed an important part of a ‘counter-revolutionary Atlantic’, organized in opposition to popular-radical and anti-slavery pressures. And in an imaginative new approach to the impact ofdisease in the Caribbean, J. R. McNeill has contributed to a burgeoningliterature on the transatlantic lives of flora, fauna, and disease pathogens. Inthese (and other) ways, multiple forms of Atlantic studies have borne out DianaPaton and Pamela Scully’s point that ‘there were many Atlantic worlds, not aunitary and singular Atlantic world’.

A vibrant treatment of these worlds of overlapping routes, diasporas, andprocesses is ghoulishly woven together by Vincent Brown in his recent study ofdeath and its meaning in Jamaica before emancipation. The violence, cruelty,and demographic horrors intrinsic to New World slavery are familiar themes tohistorians, but in The reaper’s garden, Brown expands on them to exploreJamaican ‘mortuary politics’: the ways in which people put ideas and practicesassociated with death to work in pursuit of their struggles and ambitions in theland of the living. Brown focuses strongly on the white minority, whose lives are

See Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the shadow of slavery (New York, NY, ); Paul E.Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds., Transatlantic dimension of ethnicity in the African diaspora(New York, NY, ); Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, ‘Enslaved Africans and theirexpectations of slave life in the Americas: towards a reconsideration of models of“creolisation”’, in Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, eds., Questioning creole: creolisationdiscourses in Caribbean culture (Kingston, ), pp. –; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery andAfrican ethnicities in the Americas: restoring the links (Chapel Hill, NC, ).

Audra Diptee, From Africa to Jamaica: the making of an Atlantic slave society, –(Gainesville, FL, ).

Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The many-headed hydra: the hidden history of therevolutionary Atlantic (Boston, MA, ). See also Julius S. Scott, ‘ “Negroes in foreignbottoms”: sailors, slaves, and communication’, in Dubois and Scott, eds., Origins of the blackAtlantic, pp. –.

David Lambert, ‘The counter-revolutionary Atlantic: white West Indian petitions and pro-slavery networks’, Social and Cultural Geography, (), pp. –.

McNeill, Mosquito empires. See also Richard Drayton, Nature’s government: science, imperialBritain, and the ‘improvement’ of the world (Yale, CT, ); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and empire:colonial bioprospecting in the Atlantic world (Cambridge, MA, ); Vincent Brown, The reaper’sgarden: death and power in the world of Atlantic slavery (Cambridge, MA, ).

Diana Paton and Pamela Scully, ‘Introduction: gender and slave emancipation incomparative perspective’, in Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and slave emancipationin the Atlantic world (Durham, NC, and London, ), pp. –, at p. . For important recentstudies of Atlantic families and the Scottish-Atlantic world, see Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic families:lives and letters in the later eighteenth century (Oxford, ); Douglas J. Hamilton, Scotland, theCaribbean and the Atlantic world, – (Manchester, ).


well documented in the surviving records, examining the ways in which Britishmigrants risked early deaths from tropical diseases in their bid to live ‘the earlyAmerican dream’ of striking it rich through sugar and slavery in the Caribbean.Brown also comments on the cultural worlds of enslaved Jamaicans. Forexample, he contends that while the master class hoped that mutilation andgibbeting of enslaved rebels would act as terrible warnings, dead rebels andtheir remains could become symbols of heroism in the imaginations of enslavedpeople.

Brown fixes firmly on Jamaica ‘and its transatlantic hinterlands’, aformulation that positions the island as an Atlantic centre, rather than as aperipheral point within the British Atlantic or colonial America, and hisconclusions advocate the ‘unsettling’ and ‘illuminating’ effect of reading‘Jamaican slavery as representative of early America, rather than as anom-alous’. Expanding the boundaries of colonial America to include theCaribbean brings into stark relief the tyranny, slavery, inequality, conflict, andsacrifices of human life central to the creation of the region. Brown aims to leadus down from the city upon a hill – British America as the springboard for theAmerican Revolution and liberty – and encourages us ‘to find the roots ofcontemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than theorigins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity’. The reaper’s garden fulfilsmany of Menard’s hopes for outward-looking colonial-American history with astrong focus on slavery, and it ends by echoing the plea for a Caribbeanizationof American history that complicates narratives of American exceptionalismand highlights the origins of contemporary NewWorld disparities and conflicts.

V

In The reaper’s garden, Brown provides a powerful a reminder of the benefits ofbeing drawn away from insular methodologies and looking at the variety oftransoceanic networks and co-relations that have shaped modernity. Like othersignificant recent studies that have addressed the history of Jamaica, includingHall’s Civilising subjects, Brown’s book is indisputably about the island, but itsconclusions also draw our attention elsewhere, inviting us to reconsidercolonial-American history and familiar narratives about the genesis of theUnited States. It is nevertheless a study with profound implications forCaribbeanists who choose, like Franklin Knight, to study the Caribbean not inrelation to wider dramas but as the ‘main event’. As Burnard notes, Brown’sbleak vision of Jamaican slave society – stalked by death, ‘a catastrophe’, and a

Brown, Reaper’s garden, pp. , , –. Ibid., quotes at pp. , . Ibid., p. . Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: the genesis of a fragmented nationalism (Oxford, ; st

edn ), p. xv.


failure in social terms – reopens a debate about Caribbean social and culturallife.

In the s and s, Caribbean scholars, including Elsa Goveia, KamauBrathwaite, and Orlando Patterson, began to explore the structure, charac-teristics, and development of Caribbean slave societies. Patterson argued thatJamaica during slavery had been a ‘monstrous distortion of human society’because the planters created a system that allowed little space for institutionsthat might have allowed for social stability and cultural innovation. Brathwaiteoffered an opposing view. While accepting that slave society was characterizedby endemic violence and brutality, he described a process of ‘creolization’whereby migrants to the Caribbean forged a new social order, emphasizing theconstruction by enslaved people of a viable ‘folk culture’ through which Africaninfluences survived and opposition to the slave system became possible. This wascongruent with Williams’s argument that the slaves were ‘the most dynamic andpowerful social force in the colonies’, and Brathwaite hoped that it might gosome way towards achieving a ‘creative reconstruction’ of the modernCaribbean as part of a larger process of cultural decolonization.

Brathwaite’s model proved influential. For example, it has informed HilaryBeckles’s prolific output, which has traced the ‘self-liberation ethos’ of enslavedpeople, looking at rebellions and quotidian varieties of slave resistance with anemphasis on women and gender. Studies of the heroism and creativeachievements of enslaved people remain important to Caribbean historiogra-phy, partly because they have served to refute an older colonialist tradition thattook little account of ordinary Caribbean people and their agency. Such studies,which have often been associated with the cultural work of decolonization andpost-colonial nation building, have framed accounts of slave resistance within anarrative of the ‘larger liberation struggles of the colonial period’.

Brown, Reaper’s garden, p. ; Trevor Burnard, ‘Jamaica as America, America as Jamaica:hauntings from the past in Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden’, Small Axe, (),pp. –.

Elsa V. Goveia, Slave society in the British Leeward Islands at the end of the eighteenth century(New Haven, CT, ); Orlando Patterson, The sociology of slavery: an analysis of the origins,development, and structure of negro slavery in Jamaica (London, ), quote at p. ; KamauBrathwaite, The development of creole society in Jamaica, – (Kingston, ; st edn), quotes at pp. , ; Williams, Capitalism and slavery, p. .

See Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Caribbean anti-slavery: the self-liberation ethos of enslavedblacks’, Journal of Caribbean History, (), pp. –; Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural rebels: asocial history of enslaved black women in Barbados (New Brunswick, NJ, ); Hilary McD. Beckles,‘Black female slaves and white households in Barbados’, in David Barry Gaspar and DarleneClark Hine, eds., More than chattel: black women and slavery in the Americas (Bloomington andIndianapolis, IN, ), pp. –.

Higman, Writing West Indian Histories, pp. –; Verene A. Shepherd, ‘ “Petticoatrebellion”? the black woman’s body and voice in the struggles for freedom in colonial Jamaica’,in Alvin O. Thompson, ed., In the shadow of the plantation: Caribbean history and legacy (Kingston,), pp. –, at p. .


While taking account of this work, particularly the importance of under-standing the experiences of enslaved people, some recent studies have offereddifferent perspectives. Like Vincent Brown’s work on death and power, TrevorBurnard’s study of the slaveholder, Thomas Thistlewood, presents an analysis ofthe unforgiving violence of mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean slavery, renovat-ing Patterson’s vision of a system that ‘stripped slaves of their cultural heritage,brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal relationshipsextremely difficult’. Thistlewood migrated to Jamaica from England, workingfirst as an overseer on sugar plantations and then as an independentslaveholding proprietor. From Thistlewood’s detailed diaries, Burnard weavesa picture of the world occupied by white men ‘involved at the most intimatelevel with slaves and slavery’ and who perpetuated a local culture based on theprinciples of white solidarity and the brutal terrorization of enslaved people.The result is a nuanced description of slaveholding society and culture that alsoseeks to tell us about the lives of Jamaican slaves.

Burnard does not ignore the fact that slave resistance occurred inThistlewood’s Jamaica, noting that only the American Revolution created abigger shock to the eighteenth-century British imperial system than Tacky’srevolt, a large-scale Jamaican slave uprising that broke out in . However, heconcludes that enslaved people were on the whole vulnerable and afraid, livingin a brutal and unpredictable world without the protection of the law. Intimacywas possible, as demonstrated by Thistlewood’s long-term sexual relationshipwith an enslaved woman, Phibbah, but slave communities were generally‘deeply dysfunctional and conflicted’. In Burnard’s analysis, Thistlewood’sslaves were ‘damaged to a greater or lesser extent by their participation in asystem in which to survive they had to compromise with their oppressors andaccept the values and imperatives of their masters’. This description of slaveryconforms to an analytic model, described by David Scott, which aims ‘not todemonstrate that the slaves resisted, survived and overcame their oppression butto inquire into the nature of the forms that conditioned the lives the slaves wereobliged to live’. Burnard aims to explain how slaveholders subjected people toslavery, eschewing romantic narratives of slave resistance in favour of analysingthe brutal realities of power relations. What emerges in terms of ourunderstanding of creolization are the deep divisions between masters and

Trevor Burnard, Mastery, tyranny, and desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican world (Chapel Hill, NC, ), quotes at pp. , . On Thistlewood, see also DouglasHall, In miserable slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, – (London, ); JamesWalvin, The trader, the owner, the slave: parallel lives in the age of slavery (London, ).

Burnard, Mastery, tyranny, and desire, pp. , . For a similarly sombre interpretation ofslavery in the US, see William Dusinberre, Them dark days: slavery in the American rice swamps(New York, NY, and Oxford, ).

David Scott, ‘Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean’, HistoryWorkshop Journal, (), pp. –, at p. . See also Scott’s work on the replacementof romantic historical narratives of slave liberations with bleaker, tragic narratives in Conscripts ofmodernity: the tragedy of colonial enlightenment (Durham, NC, ).


slaves. Thistlewood was creolized, adapting to life in Jamaica, but shared littlecommon ground with enslaved people. Moreover, the conditions to whichenslaved people were subjected by Thistlewood and his slaveholding con-temporaries appear to have severely impeded their chances of successfulculture building.

Burnard therefore reopens a debate about the impact of slavery on enslavedpeople and their ability to resist. His work ought also to provoke greaterattention to change over time in British-Caribbean slave societies, as scholarsseek to discover whether the lives of Thistlewood’s slaves were typical of theregion in the eighteenth century and how their experiences differed from thoseof other periods. Jean Besson’s book,Martha Brae’s two histories, about a villagein north-west Jamaica during and after slavery, indicates some of the potentialbenefits of such work. Besson describes a process whereby European andAfrican social and cultural practices were ‘transformed by chattel slaves andtheir descendants in a dynamic process of Caribbean institution-building’,concentrating her attention on questions of family and land tenure. Bessonengages with the work of Sidney Mintz, who has recently clarified parts of histhinking about the unique achievement of creolization by enslaved Africans,who ‘were obliged . . . to figure out how to retain and restructure their humanityunder the most trying conditions in world history’. Researching how thishappened requires us to consider not just the creativity of enslaved people butalso the changing conditions they faced. It seems reasonable to suggest that thesort of Caribbean institution-building that took place at Martha Brae wasdifficult in the chaotic environment of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, whichBurnard describes, and aided by more propitious circumstances brought aboutby changes to the slave system, the closing of the Atlantic slave trade, and – ofcourse – emancipation.

These changing conditions are an important theme within Diana Paton’srecent book, No bond but the law, which explores the period between and

Diana Paton’s observation that the fact that all people living in Jamaica were creoles ‘doesnot mean that all Jamaicans shared a culture’ seems appropriate to this case-study. Diana Paton,No bond but the law: punishment, race, and gender in Jamaican state formation, – (Durham,NC, and London, ), pp. –. See also Trevor Burnard, ‘Thomas Thistlewood becomesa creole’, in Bruce Clayton and John A. Salmond, eds., Varieties of Southern history: new essays on aregion and its people (Westport, CT, ), pp. –. In some respects, these analyses bearcommon features with the idea of the West Indies as ‘plural society’, divided along racial lines, amodel that Brathwaite criticized. See M. G. Smith, The plural society in the British West Indies(Berkeley, CA, ); Brathwaite, The development of creole society, p. .

The British Caribbean lacks the sort of scholarly panoptic survey of the development ofslave culture that is offered by Phlip D. Morgan’s study Slave counterpoint: black culture in theChesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, ), which charts the development of thetobacco areas of the Chesapeake and rice plantations of the Lowcountry from ‘infant’ to‘mature’ slave societies.

Jean Besson, Matha Brae’s two histories: European expansion and Caribbean culture-building inJamaica (Chapel Hill, NC, ), quote at p. .

Mintz, Three ancient colonies, p. .


. It is one of a number of recent studies to ‘look across the great divide ofthe s’ and outline transformations and continuities between slavery andfreedom. The s, argues Paton, saw the start of a drive towards statebuilding in colonial Jamaica that reflected powerful planters’ wish to ‘achieve aless precarious form of rule’. This included the creation of an island-wideprison system that operated alongside private plantation-based disciplinaryregimes to punish recalcitrant slaves. The prison system became more elaboratefollowing emancipation, when a complete overhaul of criminal justice saw thelaw – implemented by the state – replace the personalized systems of punish-ment associated with slavery. Such changes provided ordinary people with newopportunities for resistance and institution building, including the foundationof free villages like Martha Brae and the creation by some freedpeople ofunofficial alternative courts. However, Paton emphasizes that, despiteimportant changes in power relations, violence remained integral to therepressive apparatus of the state before and after emancipation. Highlightingthe long-term negative impact of these forces for post-colonial Jamaica, herwork shares some features in common with that of Burnard and Vincent Brownwith its exploration of forces of oppression and of the social and culturalfractures created by slavery.

Paton’s work, with its focus on prisons and state formation, can also be seen aspart of another shift in Caribbean history writing, away from a traditional focuson sugar plantations and towards exploration of other institutions, with the aimof achieving a more variegated picture of social and economic development inthe region. Verene Shepherd has called for such changes and has helped toprovide a sense of the diversities of the Jamaican economy in her recent workon livestock-rearing pens. Others have studied coffee plantations and oneconomic activities connected to the sugar industry that have been hithertooverlooked by scholars. Heather Cateau, for instance, has worked on those who

Paton, No bond but the law, quote at p. . For examples of other recent studies that seek toexplore continuities between slavery and freedom, see Mimi Sheller, Democracy after slavery: blackpublics and peasant radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL, ); Demitrius Eudell, Thepolitical languages of emancipation in the British Caribbean and the US South (Chapel Hill, NC,); Hall, Civilising subjects; Melanie Newton, The children of Africa in the colonies: free people ofcolor in Barbados in the age of emancipation (Baton Rouge, LA, ).

Paton, No bond but the law, p. . Ibid. On free villages, see also Besson, Martha Brae; Hall, Civilising subjects, pp. –. Paton, No bond but the law, pp. –. See Verene A. Shepherd, ed., Slavery without sugar: diversity in Caribbean economy and society

since the seventeenth century (Gainesville, FL, ); Heather Cateau and Rita Pemberton, eds.,Beyond tradition: reinterpreting the Caribbean historical experience (Kingston, ).

Verene A. Shepherd, ‘Land, labour and social status: non-sugar producers in Jamaica inslavery and freedom’, in Verene A. Shepherd, ed.,Working slavery, pricing freedom: perspectives fromthe Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora (Kingston, ), pp. –; Venere A. Shepherd,‘Questioning creole: domestic producers in Jamaica’s plantation economy’, in Shepherd andRichards, eds., Questioning creole, pp. –; Verene A. Shepherd, Livestock, sugar and slavery:contested terrain in colonial Jamaica (Kingston, ).


hired enslaved workers to the sugar estates, and Barry Higman has shedvaluable new light on the local managers, or ‘attorneys’, who managed theJamaican affairs of absentee slaveholders.

Melanie Newton’s recent book also shifts our focus away from the plantationsand adds new detail to our understanding of Caribbean social change. Thechildren of Africa in the colonies is about free people of colour in Barbados beforeand after emancipation. As scholars such as Gad Heuman have demonstrated,mixed-race people were an important part of slave societies across theCaribbean and became a vocal and influential social and political body,particularly in the post-emancipation era. The significance of such groupsreminds us that slavery and colonial rule were not straightforward encountersbetween planters, the colonial state, and a black subaltern majority, played outagainst the backdrop of the plantation. Wealthy men of colour tended to live intowns and had a stake in shaping local governance in the Caribbean. They oftenvoiced an ‘imperial nationalism’, presenting a self-image as British subjects, andclaimed to speak on behalf of the black majority whilst treating poorerBarbadians with condescension. Caribbean historians have recently begun toturn their attention to such power relations within and between colonizedgroups, and Newton’s work suggests that this is an important theme to developmore fully. Attention to these tensions not only promises to uncoverimportant but hitherto hidden dynamics within the power struggles over slaveryand emancipation, it can also reveal the multifaceted nature of non-white andsubaltern identities. As Newton argues, European empires were ‘not the only

Kathleen E. A. Monteith, ‘The labour regimen on Jamaican coffee plantations duringslavery’, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards, eds., Jamaica in slavery and freedom:history, heritage and culture (Kingston, ), pp. –; Simon D. Smith, ‘Coffee and the“poorer sort of people” in Jamaica during the period of slavery’, Plantation Society in the Americas, (), pp. –; Heather Cateau, ‘The new “negro” business: hiring in the British WestIndies, –’, in Thompson, ed., In the shadow of the plantation, pp. –; B. W.Higman, Plantation Jamaica, –: capital and control in a colonial economy (Kingston,). Newton, The children of Africa in the colonies.

See Gad J. Heuman, Between black and white: race, politics, and the free coloreds in Jamaica,– (Westport, CT, ); Jerome S. Handler, The unappropriated people: freedmen in theslave society of Barbados (Baltimore, MD, ); Christer Petley, ‘“Legitimacy” and socialboundaries: free people of colour and the social order in Jamaican slave society’, Social History, (), pp. –.

Newton, The children of Africa in the colonies, quote at p. . For example, Mimi Sheller has explored ‘subaltern masculinities’ and gendered power

dynamics within communities of former slaves, concluding that ‘freedmen in Jamaicastrategically articulated their rights of citizenship in relation not only to white men, but alsoto other subaltern groups such as black women and indentured foreigners’. Mimi Sheller,‘Acting as free men: subaltern masculinities and citizenship in postslavery Jamaica’, in Scullyand Paton, eds., Gender and slave emancipation, pp. –, quote at p. . See also Diana Paton,‘The flight from the fields reconsidered: gender ideologies and women’s labor after slavery inJamaica’, in Gilbert M. Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the political in Latin American history: essays from thenorth (Durham, NC, ), pp. –.


“imagined communities” that shaped Afro-Caribbean political subjectivities’.Free people of colour in urban Barbados were connected to the labouring poorin the countryside, to other parts of the Caribbean, and shared ‘politicalidentifications with the African continent and other parts of the Africandiaspora’. Their lives and outlook were shaped, therefore, by networks of‘mobility, migration, and communication’ within Barbados, around the easternCaribbean, and to West Africa.

This emphasis seems to be in harmony with calls by scholars working withinthe Caribbean for new regional perspectives on the pan-Caribbean past. Theseinclude pleas for historians to study territories other than Jamaica, whichbecause of its indisputable importance in terms of wealth, size, and populationcontinues to dominate our understanding of the wider British West Indies.Scholars have also highlighted two other key areas in particular need of furtherstudy: urban history and intra-Caribbean linkages. Some recent work has begunto redress this neglect. Looking at Kingston, the ‘grand mart’ of Jamaica and thewealthiest city in the eighteenth-century Americas, Kenneth Morgan andTrevor Burnard have examined the economics of the slave trade to the townand have begun to demonstrate its importance as a Caribbean entrepôt.

Pedro Welch has uncovered aspects of the social life and economic functionsof Bridgetown in Barbados, and James Robertson has also provided an over-view of the history of Spanish Town, the administrative capital of colonialJamaica.

Some historians have also begun to make efforts to piece together the multi-lingual fragments of a trans-Caribbean ecumene: the Antillean social andcultural region united by common historical experiences of colonization,slavery, and anti-colonial resistance. In a recent essay, Juanita De Barros,Audra Diptee, and David Trotman argue that ‘the history of the region hastraditionally been guided by a Eurocentric perspective’, with scholars workingwithin the analytic confines of old colonial structures, and advocate a new pan-Caribbean approach to historical research on the region. Newton’s sugges-tions about the pan-Caribbean and pan-African networks of free-colouredBarbadians are useful to this project, and work on the kaleidoscopic andcosmopolitan port towns of the region might also provide a good point of focus.Comparative work on the region has already been done, notably by FranklinKnight and Sidney Mintz, but so far most collaboration between scholars hastaken the form of edited collections, and innovative work on Caribbean

Newton, The children of Africa in the colonies, quotes at pp. –. Trevor Burnard, ‘ “The grand mart of the island”: the economic function of Kingston,

Jamaica in the eighteenth century’, in Monteith and Richards, eds., Jamaica in slavery andfreedom, pp. –; Burnard and Morgan, ‘Dynamics of the slave market’.

Pedro V. Welch, Slave society in the city: Bridgetown, Barbados, – (Kingston, );James Robertson, Gone is the ancient glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, – (Kingston, ).

De Barros, Diptee, and Trotman, ‘Introduction’, quote at p. xiii; see also Mintz, ‘Enduringsubstances’.


connections has focused mainly on the Haitian Revolution. The potential forsuch projects to open up new ways of understanding the Caribbean past is none-theless very strong. As Juan Giusti-Cordero notes, the region was criss-crossed byvarious ‘intra-Caribbean circuits’, including trade routes that connectedSpanish, French, and British territories. Studies of intra-Caribbean migrationalso promise to help to develop explorations of the nature and extent ofregional integration. Further work on these themes could uncover a wide rangeof exchange and communication that integrated different islands and linkedthem to the world beyond the Caribbean.

V I

The new imperial history and new forms of Atlantic history have helpedCaribbean history rise to prominence. They have seen a rejuvenation of many ofthe arguments and perspectives proposed by Eric Williams in Capitalism andslavery, which has amounted to something of a Caribbeanization of British andearly American history. Scholars are now alert to the impact of Caribbeancolonies on the British metropole during the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, emphasizing that debates about slavery and emancipation shapedBritish identities and that Atlantic trade had an impact on metropolitan wealthcreation and economic development. Although there is no consensus about theimportance of these Caribbean exchanges, their return to prominence seessomething of a reorientation back towards Williams’s contentions about thelinks between Caribbean slavery and British history. In the arena of earlyAmerican history, Atlantic perspectives have encouraged some scholars torefocus studies of colonial America on the lucrative slave colonies of theCaribbean, which were, as Williams recognized, at the heart of the BritishAtlantic system.

By contrast, there seems to be no prospect of rejuvenating Williams’sarguments about a link between the decline of the West Indian sugar economyand the rise of abolitionism, despite well-founded research on the economiccrisis immediately before the ending of the slave trade in . New work onthe abolition debates has focused on slaveholders and pro-slavery politics. It hasalso stressed the importance of the American Revolution, but for different

Knight, The Caribbean; Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean transformations (Chicago, IL, );Mintz, Three ancient colonies. For some examples of edited collections and work on the HaitianRevolution, see David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A turbulent time: the FrenchRevolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, ); Gad Heuman and David V.Trotman, eds., Contesting freedom: control and resistance in the post-emancipation Caribbean (Oxford,); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity disavowed: Haiti and the cultures of slavery in the age of revolution(Durham, NC, ); Scott, ‘ “Negroes in foreign bottoms”’.

Juan Giusti-Cordero, ‘Beyond sugar revolutions: rethinking the Spanish Caribbean in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in George Baca, Aisha Khan, and Stephen Palmié, eds.,Empirical futures: anthropologists and historians engage the work of Sidney W. Mintz (Chapel Hill, NC,), pp. –, at p. .


reasons to Williams. Nevertheless, developments in this area of study have notentirely militated against Williams’s arguments. Studies of abolitionism havereinforced the contention that anti-slavery was inspired by factors other thansimple altruism, and historians have also emphasized the impact of slaverebelliousness on the transatlantic conflict over slavery.

New work on the Caribbean means that we now have additional good reasonsto be drawn away from what Mimi Sheller has called ‘the heroic narrative ofWestern modernity’, with its focus on the rise of North American and Europeancities, industry, democracy, rationality, and individualism, with supposedlynon-Western spaces like the Caribbean as backward and undeveloped ‘counter-foils’ to this story. Emphasis on the productive ‘ghost acres’ of slave-workedCaribbean sugar plantations, releasing Europe’s economy from its pre-industrial shackles; on the transatlantic political impact of slave resistance; andon the Caribbean colonies as a synecdoche for early America all point toalternative narratives. Slavery, subaltern resistance, violence, and death in thiszone of tropical industrialization are propelled to the centre of our understand-ings of the making of the modern world. The colonies of the region need nolonger be seen as peripheral places but as troubled centres of what David Scottcalls ‘the modernity which is our tragic inheritance’.

The rise of these new approaches has coincided with a renewal of interest inwhite colonizers and the power structure of the colonial state. This has notentailed a return to a colonialist historiography that ignores the black majoritywhile spinning yarns about the achievements of white merchants, planters, andofficials. Rather, the focus has involved critical appraisals of discursive andmaterial strategies that aimed to terrorize and control enslaved people and theirdescendants, and the most successful recent studies of power in the Caribbeanhave managed to pay close attention to the political strategies of thedisempowered majority, however limited the agency of those within this groupmight sometimes have been. This work has begun to pose new questions aboutthe nature of creolization and its timing as well as about the ways and means atthe disposal of oppressed people to come to terms with changing modes ofoppression.

Meanwhile, several Caribbean historians have noted the need to provide astronger regional historiography that seeks to highlight the shared experiencesand networks that connected Antillean territories in the past. A pan-Caribbeanapproach, it is proposed, could not only compare the processes that went intocreating Caribbean social, economic, and cultural spaces but also examine thevarious networks of trade, migration, and cultural exchange that bound themtogether. To achieve more than a superficial and uneven treatment of the

Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to zombies (London and New York, NY,), pp. –.

The term ‘ghost acres’ is used by Pomeranz in The great divergence, pp. –. Scott, ‘Modernity that predated the modern’, p. .


connected histories of the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic, and Dutch-speaking parts of the region will require more intensive scholarly collaboration,and many of us will need to learn new languages. But if this approach to theCaribbean past takes off, then a focus on the British Caribbean without fullreference to a wider Antillean regional context will no longer seem relevant.

Imperial, Atlantic, global, and regional methodologies are not, of course,mutually exclusive; they complement one another in many ways. Eric Williamshelped to demonstrate that a broad vision of the importance of the Caribbeanregion to Western economic development could be advanced alongside calls tostudy the role of slaves in the struggles of the emancipation era. Much morerecently, Vincent Brown has pointed out that the ‘political history of slavery isthe story of intertwined (if nevertheless distinct) destinies’ that consequently‘fails to fit strictly within the fields of British imperial, American colonial, BlackAtlantic, or African diaspora history; each is braided together with the others’.

Pan-Caribbean history might usefully be added to that list. Whatever theirgeographical frame of reference or specific field of interest, Caribbeanists mustcontinue to look both inwards and outwards in order to make sense of localsocieties and to understand their wider importance. Achieving this balance hasbeen one of the strengths of a Caribbean historiography that provides valuablemethodological suggestions to historians of all stripes as they eschewendogenous approaches to the histories of nations and colonized territories intheir efforts to understand global connections and the making of the modernworld.

Brown, Reaper’s garden, p. .
