Gelien Matthews's study traces the links between Caribbean slave revolts and the British campaign to end slavery. Three large-scale slave uprisings in British colonies featured prominently in the metropolitan debate over emancipation. These occurred in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831, and the book's main focus is on abolitionist interventions in the discussion about these events. The book makes good use of an extensive range of evidence. Antislavery tracts, pamphlets, and periodicals form the main documentary basis for the study, but Matthews also makes use of parliamentary papers, reports in colonial newspapers, and contemporary correspondence by abolitionists, planters, and government officials.

The main aim of this book is to analyze the ways in which leading British abolitionists responded to acts of violent rebelliousness on the part of those enslaved in the Caribbean. In doing this, it charts the development of the antislavery campaign through the lens of abolitionist responses to slave uprisings. Matthews argues that antislavery reactions to the Barbadian revolt were largely defensive because abolitionists were uneasy about supporting a violent uprising and attacks on property. This position was modified over time, however, and abolitionists presented the facts of the Jamaican rebellion as clear evidence that slavery was an unworkable system. Matthews contends that the 1833 Emancipation Bill was passed amid abolitionist claims that the fundamental inhumanity of slavery caused slaves to confront their masters and that freedom would have to be granted in order to avoid chaos in the colonies. The ways in which abolitionists discussed rebellions therefore correlated with their shift from conservative gradualism to a more radical stance.

The book is divided into four main chapters. The first of these examines the strategies abolitionists used to integrate rebellions into the antislavery argument. Reformers at first prioritized an approach that denied that they were responsible for violence among slaves, but this gave way to a more proactive stance that presented armed rebellion as an inevitable feature of an inhumane system. The second chapter looks at how abolitionists depicted the three main nineteenth-century slave rebellions in the British colonies. Matthews argues that abolitionists countered proslavery accounts of bloodshed and terror with analyses of the rebels’ motives that stressed the influence of Christianity and the desire for wages, improved conditions, and, above all, freedom. The abolitionists’ marshaling of evidence of colonial brutality provides the theme of the next chapter. Slaveholders repressed slave rebellions using violence that could shock the British public, and the abolitionists furthered their cause by presenting slaveholders as tyrannical rulers and the defeated rebels as innocent victims. The final chapter focuses largely on the Jamaican rebellion and considers the abolitionist argument that, by failing to end slavery, the government and the planters would risk a servile war that could result in the eventual loss of the Caribbean colonies to the mother country. Matthews concludes the analysis by examining the ways in which the debate around the 1833 Emancipation Bill was framed by the argument that it was safer to end than to maintain the slave system.

Matthews's detailed analysis of the slave rebellions and the abolitionist argument provides evidence to reinforce the views of several historians that slave rebellions in the West Indies had an influence over the timing and nature of emancipation. The process was complex, though. Those enslaved did not simply free themselves through rebellion. Slave rebellions failed in their immediate objectives but contributed to the development of the abolitionist campaign, forcing antislavery campaigners to take more radical stances against the slaveholders. Uprisings in the Caribbean left abolitionists with little choice other than to accommodate the subject of slaves’ actions in their arguments and thereby develop a humanitarian critique of slavery that focused at least in part on the motivations of enslaved people. Therefore, while enslaved people were rarely invited to speak for themselves in the metropolitan war of words over slavery, their actions could force those in the metropole to take notice of them and influence the approaches and tactics of reformers across the Atlantic.

Caribbean Slave Revolts suggests some areas for further inquiry. For example, the book is concerned mainly with the problems that slave rebellions posed for the abolitionists’ political strategy, and so there is relatively little analysis of the language used to represent slave rebels. In fact, Matthews's discussion of abolitionist rhetoric hints at how much of it resembled that of the proslavery West India interest, even after the radicalization of abolitionism in the 1830s. While reformers and planters clearly had different aims and took opposing views of the rebellions, each group saw enslaved people as an unpredictable element ruled by passion, not reason, one stressing their passion for freedom and the other their passion for licentiousness. The book also ends with the abolition of slavery in 1834 and might have done more to suggest some of the ways in which the debate over slave rebellions prefigured postemancipation discussions about the consequences of freedom in the British West Indian colonies. Nevertheless, this book addresses important themes that have received relatively little attention from historians. It is well researched and clearly written and will be of undoubted use to scholars of slavery, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world, providing an important contribution to our understanding of how, why, and when slavery was abolished in the British Empire.