Natalie Zacek joins a growing number of scholars who ask us to reconsider images of the eighteenth-century West Indies as filled with corrupt, lazy, and immoral people. Instead, she argues, the islands all had a socially, ethnically, and religiously diverse white population, and the dominant goal of the white settlers in the Leeward Islands was to build a society, as much as possible, on English social and political values. This meticulously researched and carefully argued study provides ample evidence that the four Leewards, none particularly favored by geography, became, in the century leading up to the American Revolution, prosperous and relatively stable societies incorporating a religiously and ethnically diverse settler population.

Zacek does this in five chapters that survey in turn the challenges the islands faced, the ethnic and religious identity of settlers, sex and sexuality, and politics and political culture. The challenges began with the fact that the Leewards (Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts) were an artificial political unit: the four islands gained a separate administration from Barbados in 1670 but had different topographies, social structures, and economic trajectories. All of them, however, had to cope with the general problems of the eighteenth-century Caribbean—a challenging and mountainous topography, natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, and drought), slave rebellion, and war.

Zacek's astute analysis of the 1678 Stapleton Census of the islands provides a basis for her analysis of ethnicity. She challenges simplistic notions of ethnic identity, even among the British settlers. She shows how wealthy Irish settlers in Montserrat were accommodated as part of the “English” elite, while poor, Gaelic-speaking settlers were outsiders. After 1707, Scottish settlers often came to the islands in semiprofessional capacities, which enabled their integration into the elite. The growth of slavery on all of the Leeward Islands in the eighteenth century meant that race became a salient determinant of work: ethnic labels were markers of class more than accurate representations of national origin. Religion also proves to be more complicated than is often assumed. Zacek demonstrates that even in the ostensibly Anglican islands, Catholicism, as long as it was not too open, was tacitly accepted, and Hugenot and Quaker families slowly merged into the Anglican elite. Jews—common on all the Caribbean islands from the seventeenth century—were endogamous and all but disappeared over the course of the eighteenth century. The interpretations of religious difference were flexible, grounded in a need to protect order more than a concern with orthodoxy. In terms of both religion and ethnicity, it was easier for non-Anglicans and non-English to be identified as “English” and “Anglican” in the Leewards than in England itself.

The religious settlement of the islands also shaped sexuality and marriage. The shortage of Anglican priests led to an acceptance of civil marriage long before it was available in England. In addition, Zacek shows the wide range of relationships between men and women that fell between concubinage and marriage. Some of these were relationships between white men and enslaved women, but not all. Criticism of such relationships, she shows, “functioned as an additional source of opprobrium against someone whose behavior in other respects had antagonized members of his community” (179). Several short case studies illustrate the different judgments made of what could be seen as sexual misconduct. In the early eighteenth century, both the governor, Daniel Parke, and his married mistresses were reviled; some years later, Rachel Levine—the mother of Alexander Hamilton—left her husband in St. Croix and ultimately lived with James Hamilton on Nevis, where she was accepted as “Mrs. Hamilton” even though she was unable to divorce her husband. The difference, Zacek suggests, was in the reputation of the men who were cuckolded as much as the actual behavior.

If a wider range of family and sexual relationships were accepted in the Leewards than in England, political culture was profoundly shaped by the settlers’ understanding of the rights of Englishmen. As other scholars have shown, tensions between the legislative assemblies and governors were endemic in the West Indies, shaped by competition over power and a desire to make the legislature equivalent to the English Parliament. As in her discussion of sexuality, Zacek uses a series of short case studies to illuminate the issues. In some ways, however, this weakens the discussion: two of the case studies in the discussion of politics are discussed from another angle in the discussion of sexuality. By dividing the discussion of these conflicts into two separate chapters, Zacek is unable to fully explore the gendered nature of political thought.

This is an impressive book; it effectively integrates developments on four different islands, and it provides—given the challenges of the sources—an exceptionally rich sense of island life in the eighteenth century. Zacek's discussion of ethnicity, in particular, brings a sophisticated understanding to a subject that has too often been framed by stereotypes. In other contexts, Zacek is perhaps too cautious: her focus on short case studies in her discussion of family and sexuality leads to vague conclusions. She is sometimes reluctant to address broad conceptual questions. What is the relationship between gender and politics? How are the Leewards different from, or similar to, other English possessions in the Caribbean? More significantly, this is a history of white settler society; the African slaves who were (forcibly) settled on the islands are depicted as a “challenge” that the white settlers faced or a side issue in discussions of sexuality. Settler society was more closely intertwined with slave society than this book suggests.

To focus on these issues, however, is to ask for a different book. Zacek has successfully provided an account of settler society that helps us see the “Englishness” of the white settlers, and the societies and polities they built, on the islands. While climate and economy may have been foreign, the settlers, in their political and social values, built on the spirit of English culture, if not its practice.