In studies of British and white identities, the Caribbean has usually featured as a place of otherness against which metropolitan identities were defined. Yet whiteness was made in the colonies as well, and, as David Lambert shows in this important book, Caribbean colonial whiteness was distinct from whiteness in Britain itself, existing in tension with other creole identities and metropolitan white Britishness. Focusing on Barbados, the Caribbean colony with the largest white population, from roughly the American Revolution to the abolition of apprenticeship in 1838, Lambert argues that British Atlantic debates over slavery were organized through a contestation over space in which white West Indians were increasingly on the defensive, responding to metropolitan discourses that projected the problem of slavery as a problem of colonial whiteness.

Lambert's method is to map white identities by reading key moments of controversy in Barbadian history. Several chapters examine responses to minority arguments within white society in order to demonstrate dominant formations of identity. Thus in one chapter Lambert discusses the writings in the 1780s of Joshua Steele, who proposed to reform slavery by transforming it into what he termed a system of “copyhold” modeled on his notion of medieval British society, in which slaves would become “bondsmen” rather than chattels, attached to the land but not subject to corporal punishment. Although he lived in Barbados for sixteen years, Steele's suggestions were interpreted by white Barbadians as metropolitan impositions. His opponents elaborated early versions of what Lambert sees as two competing discourses of colonial whiteness: the “planter ideal,” a mode of white identity that idealized the paternalist “good master” while simultaneously disparaging poor whites, and “white supremacism,” a more fearful, threatened mode of whiteness that mobilized fear of black rebellion while promoting cross-class white solidarity. White supremacism in the long run was more widely adopted among white Barbadians than the planter ideal. Lambert finds it as well in the early nineteenth-century writings of the settler historian John Poyer, who attempted to unify white identity by promoting poor whites—the “redlegs”—and attacking free people of color. White supremacism also dominated the anti-Methodist campaign of the 1820s and responses to the prominent prosecution and later release of Robert James, an enslaved man, for rape in 1832–33. (A different but complementary analysis of this case has recently been published by Melanie Newton in Comparative Studies in Society and History.) The polarity between white supremacism and the planter ideal was complemented, Lambert argues, by a parallel tension between “colonial loyalty” and “colonial opposition,” that is, between arguments that positioned Barbadian whites as loyal British subjects and those that presented them as potential members of an independent nation, modeled after the United States.

Lambert's analysis of these complex identities is impressive. Although he does not explore gender in detail himself, his elucidation of these discourses should also prove useful to future historians of gender and in particular of masculinity in the Atlantic world. The constructions of colonial whiteness that Lambert investigates were surely more specifically modes of white masculinity. The planter ideal mobilized a particular form of class- and race-bound masculinity; a white woman could not be the ideal planter. Meanwhile discourses of “black peril”—fear of rape of white women by black men—formed a constitutive part of white supremacist ideology in ways that emphasize white men's role as protectors of “their” women. Neither “white supremacy” nor the “planter ideal” seems to provide space for white women to inhabit as subjects rather than as objects of white male protection. In part because he does not manage to locate any texts by white women for analysis, the forms of identity available to white women remain a tantalizing space not clearly revealed by Lambert's analysis.

Most of White Creole Culture, Politics, and Identity focuses on elite white constructions of whiteness, but Lambert is concerned not to produce a white-centric account, and he attends to the complexities of the construction of whiteness by free people of color, poor whites, and enslaved people as well as by elite whites. Among the best chapters is Lambert's examination of the 1816 Barbados rebellion, an event that, he argues, provides clues that allow us insight into enslaved people's understanding of whiteness, in particular through the banners carried by the rebels. These banners are described in several textual sources, and there is one watercolor sketch of images from the flags, probably produced by a white Barbadian. Many of the images used by the rebels depict interracial couples or at least groups, and Lambert skillfully analyzes these to argue that the rebels deliberately “played on and played up” white terror about black male sexuality (133). In this way, he demonstrates, the rebels “were actively involved in contesting articulations of colonial whiteness” (139).

Lambert is to be commended for his clear and effective writing style throughout the book. His work is theoretically sophisticated and attentive to the subtleties of language but remains accessible to a wide readership. White Creole Culture marks an important development in studies of whiteness, colonialism, and slavery, and it should be read by scholars of colonial societies with interests far beyond Barbados.