Christer Petley's White Fury shows what scholars of the American Revolution gain by paying attention to the wider world—in this case, the slaveocracy of colonial Jamaica. Most sugar planters in Jamaica stayed loyal to the British Empire during the War of American Independence. Like the loyalists in the thirteen colonies, they saw their future linked to British prosperity and to British constitutional protection. Trade with the empire had ensured the wealth of the Jamaicans and they saw no reason to disavow political ties. But by the early 1780s, the Caribbean planters, like the loyalists in the mainland colonists, realized they had mistaken their faith in the empire. Never again would the Jamaican elites’ most meaningful possessions—their property in sugar or slaves—be as protected.
The British attitude toward the mainland loyalists and the Caribbean loyalists had surprising similarities, and it had less to with the character of the loyalists than with the preoccupations of the empire in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The empire that had elevated them to magnificence failed to protect them from economic disaster during the last two decades of the century. The island struggled to recover from hurricanes and food shortages during the revolution. Beginning in 1787, British abolitionists advanced proposals in Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade, foreshadowing the decline of the planter class. Sugar and the interests of the sugar planters came to occupy a reduced position. As if overnight, the richest and most loyal of British subjects faced a catastrophic turn in their fortunes, unimaginable just years earlier. With the British turn to Asia and Africa, the Caribbean colonies became just one more British possession in the Americas—still more weighty than the British North Atlantic colonies but no longer as precious.
Petley hopes to illuminate a Jamaican slave planter's mindset by focusing on a single figure, Simon Taylor, who, in his fifty years, experienced the headiness of British favor as well as the fall from grace. As have other scholars who study elites such as Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Thistlewood (also of Jamaica), Petley examines Taylor's correspondence closely, searching for temperament, attachment, discontent, and mindset in general. The portrait of Taylor that emerges from Petley's work confirms scholarly understanding of a typical West Indian planter. We encounter a rich son preoccupied with profitable entrepreneurship, involved in sexual liaisons with black women, and, because he has no wife or legitimate children of his own, concerned about the moral and financial status of his extended white family. During the American and Saint-Domingue revolutions, Taylor, like other planters, worried about the unpredictable effects of hurricanes and pests, about slave famine, and about the terrible consequences of French or Spanish attacks against Jamaica. When the revolution ended, Taylor agonized about the miseries the planters would suffer without importations of enslaved labor.
The late eighteenth-century rise of moral sensibility—best seen with the rise of British abolition—is the turning point in Petley's book. White abolitionists joined “Vagabond negroes” like Equiano to call slavery a moral sin (157). Evangelical leaders such as William Wilberforce viewed the plight of slaves sympathetically, finding the ambitions and proslavery attitudes of white masters more suspect. This “tidal” revolution from England shocked the Caribbean planters. Feeling helpless and anxious, Taylor even considered moving to the United States, where slavery remained legal and respectable. For the first time, Taylor's loyalty to his slaveholding empire conflicted with his loyalty to staying British.
Petley's work reveals the waning of the Jamaican planter class during and after the Age of Revolution. In a new humanitarian age, Taylor and other planters found themselves cast aside as immoral and unnatural in their slaveholding aspirations. Despite their resistance to British decisions—such as arming blacks and establishing the West India Regiment or abolishing the Atlantic slave trade in 1807—they could not alter the trajectory of empire. Simon Taylor cursed the abolitionists and tried to protect his fortune by protecting slavery. But to no avail. The slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue created a fault line. Proslavery Jamaicans regarded the rebellion as the worst consequence of slave indiscipline. Antislavery proponents viewed the crisis as the inevitable battle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and rushed to defend the former. Proslavery arguments emphasized black villainy and white massacres, whereas antislavery tracts showcased the brutality of plantation slavery. There was no middle ground. Slave owners in Jamaica, as elsewhere in the empire, were put on the defensive, left grasping for alternatives.
Britain abolished slavery in 1833, through proclamation, and not through Civil War as in the United States. Petley's work shows that this less violent means of ending slavery may have occurred because the planters could only use ink and paper against the empire. Simon Taylor and his cronies could not wage a militant war to protect slavery: They did not have the independence, the arms, or the army. They could only respond with “white fury” to the sudden and dramatic decline in their power.
