I

The past does not fit conveniently into compartments. People's lives and experiences have always been multi-layered, changeable, overlapping; often they were utterly chaotic. As the influential Caribbean scholar, Sidney Mintz, has recognized, ‘the lifeways of all of the peoples we study are forever subject to influences from elsewhere, and are forever in flux … they are historical products, processual products, such that most categories and continua run the risk of immobilizing and misrepresenting them’.Footnote ² The ‘British Caribbean’, therefore, is a slippery concept. Over the past 500 years, the Antilles as a whole have probably experienced as much externally influenced fluctuation and change as anywhere in the world. The archipelago of islands lying between the mainland Americas and the North Atlantic Ocean – curving around the Caribbean Sea, from the Bahamas and Cuba in the north and west to Barbados and Aruba in the east and south – is, as Mintz puts it, an ‘anciently colonial’ region, the history of which has been shaped by European colonization, global trade, and multiple migrations.Footnote ³ Moreover, scholars do not agree on how we should define the boundaries of the region. Caribbean historians focus on the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, often also including the Bahamas, the Guianas, and Belize on the basis that these areas were shaped by common experiences of colonialism, slavery, and plantation agriculture, particularly sugar growing.Footnote ⁴ Some recent scholarship has extended the Caribbean catchment area, deploying the looser term, ‘Greater Caribbean’, to refer to a wide tropical and sub-tropical American plantation zone, incorporating such areas as the Carolinas and parts of Brazil.Footnote ⁵

The term ‘British Caribbean’ is therefore best seen as a useful working concept, a shorthand to denote places located in and around the Caribbean basin under British rule, socially and economically similar because of the twin institutions of slavery and the sugar plantation. Territories within this region passed in and out of British control, and the areas administered by the British state contained many different peoples, who often did not define themselves as ‘British’. This changeable zone nevertheless contained places that remained under English, and then British, control for centuries. Barbados, Jamaica, and the British Leeward Islands (the most populous of which were St Kitts, Nevis, and Antigua) came under English control in the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century and remained British colonies into the twentieth century.

No part of the British Caribbean can be understood without reference to the wider world. This is of course true of any place, but wider zones of contact have been particularly important in Caribbean history. The colonies were part of a British-American colonial system that stretched across the Atlantic from the metropole. On most of the island territories seized and claimed by the English, there were few or no Amerindian inhabitants. White migrant colonists imported sugar cane to plant, and Caribbean-grown sugar served British consumer demands, as did other regional crops, such as coffee, tobacco, and cotton. Enslaved Africans made up the majority of the population of the British Caribbean, and demographic conditions were such that the planters relied on continual imports of enslaved people from Africa to keep up and expand production on the sugar estates. Around a million enslaved Africans arrived in Jamaica alone during the eighteenth century, before the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.Footnote ⁶ By 1815, enslaved people accounted for approximately 85 per cent of the total population of the British colonies, and about 650,000 enslaved people in the Caribbean became juridically free in 1838 as a consequence of the 1833 Emancipation Bill.Footnote ⁷ These colonial territories were therefore part of the wider diasporic and cultural zone that scholars dub the ‘Black Atlantic’, and as vital elements of expanding British imperial and trading networks, their economic hinterlands stretched around the globe.Footnote ⁸ Inevitably, these dynamic and kaleidoscopic webs of connection have shaped how historians approach the British-colonized Caribbean.

Barry Higman has provided a definitive account of the institutionalization of history writing in the English-speaking Caribbean, noting that many of the first professional historians of the region were British imperial historians. American scholars like Frank Pitman and Lowell Ragatz, having interests that overlapped with those of their British counterparts, also included the Caribbean in their efforts to understand the economics and politics of British-colonial America.Footnote ⁹ They focused mainly on its white minority, particularly on the socially and economically dominant planter class, and they were interested above all in matters of governance and economy.Footnote ¹⁰ Writing in 1927, one British historian was very clear that his interest in the Caribbean did not include ‘the great mass of the population’.Footnote ¹¹ From the middle of the twentieth century, historians changed tack and began to focus their attention on the black majority in the region. The emergence of social history, Philip Curtin's monumental efforts to provide a census of the transatlantic slave trade, and the subsequent rise of slavery studies were crucial in this regard.Footnote ¹² The cultural politics of the decolonization struggle were also an important influence, as Caribbean scholars followed the initiatives of C. L. R. James and Eric Williams to rewrite histories of slavery and empire, highlighting the exploitative nature of Caribbean slavery and emphasizing the agency and achievements of enslaved people.Footnote ¹³

II

New approaches to British-Caribbean history build on the foundations laid by Caribbeanists from within and outside the region. The work of Eric Williams, in particular, acts as a beacon for much new work on the place of the Caribbean in wider Atlantic and global histories. In Capitalism and slavery (1944), Williams sought to make sense of the relationships between eighteenth-century British capitalism, slavery, and colonial trade, arguing that slavery and the slave trade played a part in providing capital to finance the British Industrial Revolution before new forms of industrial capitalism helped to destroy the British-Atlantic slave system.Footnote ¹⁴ This thesis attracted a host of criticism during and after the 1970s as scholars questioned the evidence for Williams's claims about slavery and industrialization and about the role of economic change in the abolition debates.Footnote ¹⁵ More recently, however, works by a wide variety of scholars labouring in different fields have begun to breathe new life into some of Williams's arguments and methodological perspectives. For example, some historians have revisited the influence of Caribbean colonies on changes in Britain.

Interest in the Caribbean by historians of Britain is not new, but globalizing and increasingly multi-cultural societies – within and without the academy – appear to have prompted scholars in Europe and America to re-attend to the ways that Britons imposed themselves on the wider world and explore the diverse ways that the empire ‘came home’ to the British Isles.Footnote ¹⁶ 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 amounts to a sort of methodological Caribbeanization of British history. In her reappraisal of the English island story, Kathleen Wilson notes that she has applied 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, oceans and other islands, and so they are not “insular” but vibrant entrepôts in oceanic networks, linking people, goods and cultures’.Footnote ¹⁷ Debates associated with this ‘new imperial history’ have often focused on the development of metropolitan cultural identity. Influenced by the turn towards cultural analysis in historical research, revisionist historians of Britain and its empire have advanced the view that British identities were formed through connections with the wider worlds of exploration, imperial conquest, and colonial rule.Footnote ¹⁸

Catherine Hall has developed those ideas in Civilising subjects, a book dealing with the Baptist missionary project in Jamaica and the formation of English identities during the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing her research primarily on Birmingham, but using this case-study to draw broader conclusions, Hall notes that ‘in order to understand the specificity’ of the British ‘national formation, we have to look outside it’.Footnote ¹⁹ Her book advances the argument that white English identities were contingent on ideas about race and empire formed in the English encounter with the Caribbean, contending that Baptist missionaries arriving in Jamaican slave society at the beginning of the nineteenth century attempted to create a new Christian society there that was moulded in their own image. The post-emancipation era saw the erosion of these hopes, partly because former slaves had their own ideas about how to live their lives once free. These included a strong drive towards independent landholding and religious beliefs that drew in part on African influences. These post-emancipation developments, brought into stark relief by the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, contributed to hardening British racial attitudes during the mid-nineteenth century. In this formulation, the very idea of what it meant to be a civilized British subject was contingent on an awareness of a wider world of colonial sites like Jamaica.Footnote ²⁰

Susan Dwyer Amussen has taken up these ideas in relation to an earlier period, arguing that we end up with an incomplete understanding of early modern England if we ignore ‘histories of slaveholding and the exchange with the Caribbean’. In her book, Caribbean exchanges, Amussen is concerned with the development of English slave colonies in the Caribbean and with the ways in which those colonies affected life in the metropole. White settlers sought to recreate England in the tropics, but their hopes proved impossible to reconcile with their desire to exploit the wealth-making potential of sugar. They created a labour system devoid of the paternalistic elements of English master–servant relations and a legal system that sought to control all aspects of slaves' lives, jettisoning familiar English principles like the right to trial by jury. Colonists tried to justify their new institutions by making claims about the difference and inferiority of African people.Footnote ²¹

Like Hall, Amussen contends that in the process of transforming societies and landscapes in the Caribbean, English colonial practices, institutions, and ideologies began to shape thinking about race and gender in the wider English Atlantic. For instance, Metropolitan ideas about the sexual availability of working women and the inferiority of black people were contingent on how work and power evolved on colonial plantations. Moreover, Amussen advances the bold claim that, in their efforts to control workers and engage in increasingly commercialized forms of production, capitalists in the British Isles began to develop techniques that were strikingly similar – perhaps even modelled on – those used to control slaves and maximize profit in the Caribbean. ‘The mature factory of the Industrial Revolution’, she observes, bears a striking resemblance ‘to the efficient organisation of the plantation’.Footnote ²² It was not only sugar and the profits of slavery that returned to England from the Caribbean. Ideas and practices were exchanged too and might have shaped more than just British notions of race, nationhood, and civility.

British dependency on Caribbean slavery stretched beyond the discursive to shape the material realities of economic practice and financial gain. These themes emerge in a number of other recent studies about British–Caribbean connections. For example, Simon Smith's book, Slavery, family and gentry capitalism in the British Atlantic, charts the Caribbean connections of the Yorkshire-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 of enslaved plantation workers.Footnote ²³ Pursuing this theme, Nicholas Draper has begun a systematic search for evidence of what he calls Britain's ‘debt to slavery’. The thousands of people in Britain who benefited financially from their ownership of Caribbean slaves in the nineteenth century are the subject of his recent study, The price of emancipation, about the twenty million pounds sterling of compensation paid to British slaveholders by the British parliament in the aftermath of the 1833 Emancipation Bill. From careful and painstaking scrutiny of the compensation records, Draper finds that the number of people living in Britain and owning slaves in the Caribbean was larger than once thought. While his data allow him only to provide a snapshot of British slave-ownership at the very end of slavery, Draper's work makes clear not only that substantial nineteenth-century British family fortunes had their foundations in Caribbean slavery but also that many more modest British incomes were drawn from ownership of enslaved people in the Caribbean.Footnote ²⁴

It is now easier therefore to counteract criticism levelled at Williams's arguments about private British profits derived from Caribbean slavery.Footnote ²⁵ However, recent claims about the direct benefits of slaveholding to individuals, families, and businesses appear modest when compared to two recent studies on British industrialization at the end of the long eighteenth century. Assessing the value of slavery to Britain in broad terms, Joseph Inikori reaches the conclusion that ‘the Industrial Revolution in England was a product of overseas trade’ and that dependence on exports to Atlantic overseas markets was particularly strong in the industrializing regions of West Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West Midlands. The Caribbean sugar islands, as consumers of enslaved labourers and British manufactures, and as exporters of sugar, accounted for a large proportion of this trade. Inikori argues that the value of the slave colonies and of the slave trade meant that Africans, including those enslaved in the Caribbean, made a crucial contribution to the Industrial Revolution.Footnote ²⁶

Kenneth Pomeranz makes similar arguments. The Industrial Revolution, he claims, created a ‘great divergence’ in the world economy. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the most important economic regions of China were relatively close in terms of productivity and technology to those of Europe, which leads to the question of why it was Europe, with Britain setting the pace, and not China, that experienced the first industrial revolution. Pomeranz argues that available reserves of coal and the existence of a transatlantic hinterland hold the key to the conundrum, writing that ‘for a more complete explanation of what occurred in Europe's core, we must also look at its peripheries and understand why they became growing rather than shrinking suppliers of primary products to the “world” market’. The New World not only offered markets for British manufactures, 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, ensured that cane workers had to stick to the task of producing an export for metropolitan consumption, arguments that intersect with Mintz's older contention that Caribbean sugar helped to sustain the British industrial labour force.Footnote ²⁷

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 of capitalist civilisation’, and historians of industrialization might now do well to take note of Amussen's claim that labour regimes in eighteenth-century Britain bear disquieting similarities with the precociously modern sugar plantations of the Caribbean, with their displaced, commodified, and regimented labour force. Such efforts to understand industrialization in Atlantic and global terms represent a broadening of perspective on the part of economic historians, away from nationally bound narratives of British development, an opening of horizons that has much in common with the new approach to British history presented by cultural historians associated with the new imperial history, such as Wilson and Hall. In these analyses, the Caribbean emerges as an important part of the Industrial Revolution and of the forging of British nationhood. As Drayton suggests, there might be good reasons to follow Williams and Mintz by placing ‘the sugar plantation complex into our narratives of temperate as well as tropical history’.Footnote ²⁸

III

Nowhere are the connections between the Caribbean and Europe more obvious than in the transatlantic struggle over slavery. Enslaved people always found ways to resist their oppressors. However, with the development of metropolitan anti-slavery campaigning in the final two decades of the eighteenth century, the lines of conflict were redrawn, with profound implications for the societies and economies of the British Caribbean. Much of the scholarship on abolitionism is necessarily focused on metropolitan themes, but as Hall's recent work emphasizes, the ‘war of representation’ that raged over slavery during the age of abolition was a profoundly transatlantic affair.Footnote ²⁹ New approaches to the topic have revisited some of the debates created by Eric Williams as well as incorporating work on events in the Caribbean into our understanding of how the slave system came to an end.

Williams saw the rise of British anti-slavery as part of a shift in the nature of capitalism and argued that the plantation system was at the beginning of a period of ‘uninterrupted decline’ when it came under sustained metropolitan attack, weakened by the commercial disaggregation of the old Atlantic empire as a result of the American Revolution.Footnote ³⁰ However, Seymour Drescher in his book Econocide, first published in 1977, provided strong evidence of plantation productivity and profitability in the period up to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, arguing that moral arguments trumped economic interests in the debate over abolition.Footnote ³¹ The recent emphasis by Inikori and Pomeranz on the role of Caribbean slavery in British industrialization seems to reaffirm the overall contention that abolitionism helped to destroy a system that was economically productive. As Drescher puts it in a new edition of Econocide, ‘from the seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the leading slave labour zones of the Americas constituted some of the most productive and wealth-producing economies on the face of the earth’.Footnote ³²

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 understanding of the roots of the abolition campaign. Brown's detailed analysis notes that the Revolution halved the number of slaves in the empire, weakened the colonial lobby in London, provided a context in which Britons scrutinized the peculiarities and failings of colonial societies, and strengthened metropolitan resolve with regard to the centralization of imperial governance. Overall, argues Brown, this provided the context whereby anti-slavery politics could be considered useful and worthy of esteem by a wide constituency of Britons, including policy-makers.Footnote ³³ These claims cohere easily with earlier arguments by Linda Colley and C. A. Bayly about the simultaneous rise of a patriotic anti-slavery movement and a more authoritarian approach towards governing colonies as well as with more recent arguments about the definitive political and cultural impact of the American War in the metropole.Footnote ³⁴ In this view, the American Revolution was important to the abolition movement, but not because of its economic effects in the Caribbean, and abolitionism was neither a saintly crusade nor an economically determined force. Rather, it was a political movement with multiple goals which included the reform of the colonial social and economic order within British-Caribbean colonies.

David Beck Ryden has reappraised a later episode in the transatlantic debates about Caribbean slavery: the achievement of the abolition of the slave trade. His book, West Indian slavery and British abolition, revives Williams's contention that the over-production of British West Indian sugar helped prompt parliament to outlaw the trade in 1807. Unlike Williams, Ryden thinks that this was part of a crisis that began at the start of the nineteenth century, not a symptom of a more long-term economic decline in the British-Caribbean sugar industry. The destruction of French output from St Domingue, as a consequence of revolutionary upheaval, precipitated a rapid expansion in British West Indian sugar production during the 1790s. This led to a glut of British-Caribbean sugar and a sharp drop in its price at the turn of the nineteenth century, when British West Indian planters were exposed to competition on European markets from Cuban sugar grown on newly established plantations and transported in American ships. The economic crisis, Ryden argues, played into abolitionist hands. It provided a basis for claims that the colonial slave system was economically as well as morally rotten and it facilitated the argument that curtailing supplies of enslaved workers from Africa might end over-production while encouraging improvements to Caribbean plantation management.Footnote ³⁵

Though recognizing that parliament abolished the slave trade at a time of economic distress for British-Caribbean sugar planters, Drescher disagrees with Ryden's attempt to provide an economic explanation for the timing of abolition, maintaining that West-Indian trade had little to do with the rise or success of anti-slavery.Footnote ³⁶ It is possible, however, to accept that contention while also acknowledging a broader point, established by both Ryden and Brown: moral claims on their own were insufficient for a successful campaign against the slave system; they had to be combined with other, more practical, considerations in order to bring about abolitionist success. Moreover, even if we reject Ryden's watered-down version of the decline thesis, other aspects of his book retain their value. In particular, his close attention to the political organization and lobbying tactics of the transatlantic pro-slavery lobby provides a much-needed insight into the defence of Caribbean slavery, a neglected part of the slavery debates.

Given the meteoric rise of the anti-slavery movement after the American Revolution, historians will need to follow Ryden and Draper by paying more attention to the ‘obstructionist and disruptive effect’ of the pro-slavery lobby if they are to explain why it took over half a century for the abolitionists to bring about an end to Caribbean slaveholding.Footnote ³⁷ Looking at the period before 1807, Ryden builds on work by Andrew O'Shaughnessy to chart the composition and development of the West Indian interest in London, a commercial lobbying group that maintained very strong ties with merchants and planters in the Caribbean.Footnote ³⁸ Others have looked at slaveholders and the pro-slavery lobby at a later period. Draper, for example, charts the ways in which those who owned slaves pressurized British ministers to try to achieve the highest possible compensation settlement from the government in return for slave emancipation.Footnote ³⁹

David Lambert's recent book, White creole culture, politics and identity during the age of abolition, adds another dimension to our understanding of white slaveholders, noting that ‘white colonial identities were a site of struggle during the age of abolition’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Lambert shows, the struggle over slavery was in large part a debate about whether slaveholders in the Caribbean could be counted as civilized and loyal Britons or as a brutish group of renegade whites whose behaviour had degenerated from acceptable British standards. In White creole culture, Lambert unpicks the fault-lines and tensions that emerged within pro-slavery discourse in the colony of Barbados, as local whites sought to impose their mastery over enslaved people while staving off metropolitan criticism of their ‘un-British’ institutions. He develops the idea that ‘the constitution of white identity in Barbados was linked – always – to the (dis)possession of black people’, arguing that poorer whites were more likely to articulate white supremacist identities, while the landed elite tended to prefer a ‘planter ideal’ centred on ideas about gentility and the exercise of benevolent masculine authority over their enslaved workers.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, debates over slavery often revolved around questions of gender: ideas about proper masculine behaviour were, as Lambert suggests, a significant point of contention in disagreements over the identities and practices of white colonial slaveholders, and other scholars, including Henrice Altink, have shown that depictions of enslaved women and their treatment at the hands of slaveholders provided a key point of focus in disputes between abolitionists and their slaveholding opponents.Footnote ⁴²

New approaches to the abolition debates have also improved our awareness of the influence of enslaved people in the struggle over the future of slavery. Claudius Fergus contends that the ‘dread of insurrection’ by newly imported enslaved Africans helped to shape the thinking of slaveholders and abolitionists alike, particularly after the Haitian Revolution, influencing schemes for reforming the slave system, such as those encouraging the development of locally born slave populations, as well as the decision to end the slave trade.Footnote ⁴³ Gelien Matthews has argued that in the period after 1807, abolitionist reactions to slave uprisings began to add urgency to debates about slave emancipation. In her book, Caribbean slave revolts and the British abolition movement, she notes that advocates of emancipation presented the huge slave uprising that began in Jamaica at the end of 1831 as evidence that slavery was an unworkable system. Jamaican slaveholders repressed the uprising, but Matthews contends that the 1833 Emancipation Bill was passed amidst abolitionist claims that the fundamental inhumanity of slavery had caused slaves to confront their masters and that freedom would have to be granted in order to avoid revolutionary chaos in the Caribbean, analysis that adds weight to Williams's contention that enslaved people, by their direct actions, forced the issue of emancipation on to the political agenda.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some historians, including Drescher, remain sceptical about the influence of slave unrest on the progress of abolitionism, but while Williams's idea that abolitionist political success was a direct consequence of long-term decline in the British West Indian slave economy still stands in tatters, Caribbean historians have successfully developed a less-well-known part of his thesis to show that the subaltern politics of Caribbean slave communities mattered in the transatlantic ‘propaganda war’ that culminated in the dismantling of slavery.Footnote ⁴⁵

IV

As well as enhancing our understanding of British history and abolitionism, Caribbean approaches have helped reorient American colonial history. In a review published in 1997, Russell Menard appraised the state of scholarship on British-colonial America and argued that the perspectives that Williams used in Capitalism and slavery might help provide the methodological tools with which to reconstruct a fragmented field. Scholars of early American history, looking at the period before the American Revolution, had tended to work on specific North 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 the Caribbean – was presented as part of an integrated British Atlantic. Moreover, Williams's main focus was slavery, which meant that enslaved Africans as well as free European colonists were at the foreground of his analysis.Footnote ⁴⁶

Since Menard wrote his article, the rise to prominence of Atlantic history has helped to impose just such new breadth and inclusivity on our understanding of colonial America. This move has been driven by a desire to make better sense of the American past, and like historians in Britain, scholars in the US have recognized a need to trace the roots of their globalizing and multi-cultural society. Atlanticists have argued that a transatlantic interculture developed between about 1500 and 1800 within a complex and intensifying system of trade and migration (fused in the institution of slavery) and by an expansion of European empires that was accompanied by the exportation (and transformation) of European legal and political organization. The Americas, where African and European arrivants transformed landscapes and created new societies from Old World templates, have been the main focal points, and scholars have used new Atlantic approaches to reappraise the histories of the thirteen colonies that went on to become the United States.Footnote ⁴⁷ As one practitioner of Atlantic history has noted, the ‘shift toward an Atlantic paradigm in colonial American history’ offers scholars ‘exciting opportunities to reconceptualize early modern North America’, allowing them to ‘take work done within national or regional containers – Canada, the United States, the Caribbean – and reposition it within a more comparative context’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Atlantic approaches have therefore allowed historians of colonial North America to move away from endogenous, nationally bounded, perspectives, undermining assumptions about North American exceptionalism while drawing the Caribbean and Africa into their analysis of early American history.

As Trevor Burnard observes, one of the key achievements of these new Atlantic approaches has been to restore ‘the British West Indies to its rightful position as the most dynamic part of British America’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Scholars, including Burnard, have emphasized the economic productivity of the Caribbean colonies, the wealth of their white inhabitants, and the centrality of the islands to the wider British-Atlantic system in terms of trade and strategic importance.Footnote ⁵⁰ Historians have also built fruitfully on efforts by Richard Dunn and Jack Greene to analyse Caribbean settler societies and politics in relation to those of the North American mainland. In recent years, Greene has expanded his thesis that white West Indian colonists articulated similar sorts of claims about their British constitutional liberties to those voiced by their counterparts in the thirteen mainland colonies, an idea reinforced by Natalie Zacek's recent study of white settler society in the English Leeward islands.Footnote ⁵¹ Diverging from this view, O'Shaughnessy has offered a detailed account of the social and political differences between the islands and the mainland before the American Revolution, reminding us in the process that the incomparable economic success of the Caribbean came at the cost of social combustibility, demographic failure, and – ultimately – metropolitan censure.Footnote ⁵² The Caribbean colonies have therefore been catapulted towards the centre of discussion about early modern America, but historians continue to debate the extent to which these territories diverged or converged with the experiences of the mainland.

The fact that the British West Indies did not secede from the empire and went off on a historical trajectory very different from the thirteen mainland colonies is important to nascent debates about the relationship between the Caribbean and the rest of British America. It is also historiographically significant. Caribbean historians have developed a tradition of Atlantic history, centred on questions about the experiences of enslaved Africans, slavery, and emancipation, that was well established before the more recent rise of Atlantic history in the North American academy. Williams and James, for example, were effective pioneers of Atlantic history during the 1930s and 1940s, although those exploring the roots of Atlantic studies often overlook their contributions.Footnote ⁵³ Philip Curtin emphasized the importance of the Caribbean in the context of the slave trade from Africa and the New World plantation complex, and historians of the Caribbean, including Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles, have also provided Caribbean-centred perspectives on Atlantic history.Footnote ⁵⁴

Moreover, recent work by scholars with interests in the Caribbean bears out William O'Reilly's observation that there are many genealogies of Atlantic history, each addressing layers of a palimpsest of activities in and around the Ocean.Footnote ⁵⁵ For example, Paul Lovejoy, David Trotman, and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall have helped expand our understanding of the black Atlantic, facilitating and presenting detailed research on the transplantation and adaptation of African identities and cultures in societies throughout the Americas.Footnote ⁵⁶ Caribbean case-studies form part of this work, and Audra Diptee's recent book, From Africa to Jamaica, on the slave trade and the creation of Jamaican society, is a good recent example.Footnote ⁵⁷ Attention to the victims of slavery overlaps with studies of what Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh describe as the ‘revolutionary Atlantic’, made up of those who sought to escape and resist the repressive structures put in place by planters, merchants, and governments.Footnote ⁵⁸ Caribbean settler politics, of course, formed an important part of a ‘counter-revolutionary Atlantic’, organized in opposition to popular-radical and anti-slavery pressures.Footnote ⁵⁹ And in an imaginative new approach to the impact of disease in the Caribbean, J. R. McNeill has contributed to a burgeoning literature on the transatlantic lives of flora, fauna, and disease pathogens.Footnote ⁶⁰ In these (and other) ways, multiple forms of Atlantic studies have borne out Diana Paton and Pamela Scully's point that ‘there were many Atlantic worlds, not a unitary and singular Atlantic world’.Footnote ⁶¹

A vibrant treatment of these worlds of overlapping routes, diasporas, and processes is ghoulishly woven together by Vincent Brown in his recent study of death and its meaning in Jamaica before emancipation. The violence, cruelty, and demographic horrors intrinsic to New World slavery are familiar themes to historians, but in The reaper's garden, Brown expands on them to explore Jamaican ‘mortuary politics’: the ways in which people put ideas and practices associated with death to work in pursuit of their struggles and ambitions in the land of the living. Brown focuses strongly on the white minority, whose lives are well documented in the surviving records, examining the ways in which British migrants risked early deaths from tropical diseases in their bid to live ‘the early American dream’ of striking it rich through sugar and slavery in the Caribbean. Brown also comments on the cultural worlds of enslaved Jamaicans. For example, he contends that while the master class hoped that mutilation and gibbeting of enslaved rebels would act as terrible warnings, dead rebels and their remains could become symbols of heroism in the imaginations of enslaved people.Footnote ⁶²

Brown fixes firmly on Jamaica ‘and its transatlantic hinterlands’, a formulation that positions the island as an Atlantic centre, rather than as a peripheral point within the British Atlantic or colonial America, and his conclusions advocate the ‘unsettling’ and ‘illuminating’ effect of reading ‘Jamaican slavery as representative of early America, rather than as anomalous’.Footnote ⁶³ Expanding the boundaries of colonial America to include the Caribbean brings into stark relief the tyranny, slavery, inequality, conflict, and sacrifices of human life central to the creation of the region. Brown aims to lead us down from the city upon a hill – British America as the springboard for the American Revolution and liberty – and encourages us ‘to find the roots of contemporary forms of inequality, domination, and terror, rather than the origins of freedom, rights, and universal prosperity’.Footnote ⁶⁴The reaper's garden fulfils many of Menard's hopes for outward-looking colonial-American history with a strong focus on slavery, and it ends by echoing the plea for a Caribbeanization of American history that complicates narratives of American exceptionalism and highlights the origins of contemporary New World disparities and conflicts.

V

In The reaper's garden, Brown provides a powerful a reminder of the benefits of being drawn away from insular methodologies and looking at the variety of transoceanic networks and co-relations that have shaped modernity. Like other significant recent studies that have addressed the history of Jamaica, including Hall's Civilising subjects, Brown's book is indisputably about the island, but its conclusions also draw our attention elsewhere, inviting us to reconsider colonial-American history and familiar narratives about the genesis of the United States. It is nevertheless a study with profound implications for Caribbeanists who choose, like Franklin Knight, to study the Caribbean not in relation to wider dramas but as the ‘main event’.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Burnard notes, Brown's bleak vision of Jamaican slave society – stalked by death, ‘a catastrophe’, and a failure in social terms – reopens a debate about Caribbean social and cultural life.Footnote ⁶⁶

In the 1960s and 1970s, Caribbean scholars, including Elsa Goveia, Kamau Brathwaite, and Orlando Patterson, began to explore the structure, characteristics, and development of Caribbean slave societies. Patterson argued that Jamaica during slavery had been a ‘monstrous distortion of human society’ because the planters created a system that allowed little space for institutions that might have allowed for social stability and cultural innovation. Brathwaite offered an opposing view. While accepting that slave society was characterized by endemic violence and brutality, he described a process of ‘creolization’ whereby migrants to the Caribbean forged a new social order, emphasizing the construction by enslaved people of a viable ‘folk culture’ through which African influences survived and opposition to the slave system became possible. This was congruent with Williams's argument that the slaves were ‘the most dynamic and powerful social force in the colonies’, and Brathwaite hoped that it might go some way towards achieving a ‘creative reconstruction’ of the modern Caribbean as part of a larger process of cultural decolonization.Footnote ⁶⁷

Brathwaite's model proved influential. For example, it has informed Hilary Beckles's prolific output, which has traced the ‘self-liberation ethos’ of enslaved people, looking at rebellions and quotidian varieties of slave resistance with an emphasis on women and gender.Footnote ⁶⁸ Studies of the heroism and creative achievements of enslaved people remain important to Caribbean historiography, partly because they have served to refute an older colonialist tradition that took little account of ordinary Caribbean people and their agency. Such studies, which have often been associated with the cultural work of decolonization and post-colonial nation building, have framed accounts of slave resistance within a narrative of the ‘larger liberation struggles of the colonial period’.Footnote ⁶⁹

While taking account of this work, particularly the importance of understanding the experiences of enslaved people, some recent studies have offered different perspectives. Like Vincent Brown's work on death and power, Trevor Burnard's study of the slaveholder, Thomas Thistlewood, presents an analysis of the unforgiving violence of mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean slavery, renovating Patterson's vision of a system that ‘stripped slaves of their cultural heritage, brutalized them, and rendered ordinary life and normal relationships extremely difficult’. Thistlewood migrated to Jamaica from England, working first as an overseer on sugar plantations and then as an independent slaveholding proprietor. From Thistlewood's detailed diaries, Burnard weaves a picture of the world occupied by white men ‘involved at the most intimate level with slaves and slavery’ and who perpetuated a local culture based on the principles of white solidarity and the brutal terrorization of enslaved people. The result is a nuanced description of slaveholding society and culture that also seeks to tell us about the lives of Jamaican slaves.Footnote ⁷⁰

Burnard does not ignore the fact that slave resistance occurred in Thistlewood's Jamaica, noting that only the American Revolution created a bigger shock to the eighteenth-century British imperial system than Tacky's revolt, a large-scale Jamaican slave uprising that broke out in 1760. However, he concludes that enslaved people were on the whole vulnerable and afraid, living in a brutal and unpredictable world without the protection of the law. Intimacy was possible, as demonstrated by Thistlewood's long-term sexual relationship with an enslaved woman, Phibbah, but slave communities were generally ‘deeply dysfunctional and conflicted’. In Burnard's analysis, Thistlewood's slaves were ‘damaged to a greater or lesser extent by their participation in a system in which to survive they had to compromise with their oppressors and accept the values and imperatives of their masters’.Footnote ⁷¹ This description of slavery conforms to an analytic model, described by David Scott, which aims ‘not to demonstrate that the slaves resisted, survived and overcame their oppression but to inquire into the nature of the forms that conditioned the lives the slaves were obliged to live’. Burnard aims to explain how slaveholders subjected people to slavery, eschewing romantic narratives of slave resistance in favour of analysing the brutal realities of power relations.Footnote ⁷² What emerges in terms of our understanding of creolization are the deep divisions between masters and slaves. Thistlewood was creolized, adapting to life in Jamaica, but shared little common ground with enslaved people. Moreover, the conditions to which enslaved people were subjected by Thistlewood and his slaveholding contemporaries appear to have severely impeded their chances of successful culture building.Footnote ⁷³

Burnard therefore reopens a debate about the impact of slavery on enslaved people and their ability to resist. His work ought also to provoke greater attention to change over time in British-Caribbean slave societies, as scholars seek to discover whether the lives of Thistlewood's slaves were typical of the region in the eighteenth century and how their experiences differed from those of other periods.Footnote ⁷⁴ Jean Besson's book, Martha Brae's two histories, about a village in north-west Jamaica during and after slavery, indicates some of the potential benefits of such work. Besson describes a process whereby European and African social and cultural practices were ‘transformed by chattel slaves and their descendants in a dynamic process of Caribbean institution-building’, concentrating her attention on questions of family and land tenure.Footnote ⁷⁵ Besson engages with the work of Sidney Mintz, who has recently clarified parts of his thinking about the unique achievement of creolization by enslaved Africans, who ‘were obliged … to figure out how to retain and restructure their humanity under the most trying conditions in world history’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Researching how this happened requires us to consider not just the creativity of enslaved people but also the changing conditions they faced. It seems reasonable to suggest that the sort of Caribbean institution-building that took place at Martha Brae was difficult in the chaotic environment of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, which Burnard describes, and aided by more propitious circumstances brought about by changes to the slave system, the closing of the Atlantic slave trade, and – of course – emancipation.

These changing conditions are an important theme within Diana Paton's recent book, No bond but the law, which explores the period between 1780 and 1870. It is one of a number of recent studies to ‘look across the great divide of the 1830s’ and outline transformations and continuities between slavery and freedom.Footnote ⁷⁷ The 1780s, argues Paton, saw the start of a drive towards state building in colonial Jamaica that reflected powerful planters’ wish to ‘achieve a less precarious form of rule’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This included the creation of an island-wide prison system that operated alongside private plantation-based disciplinary regimes to punish recalcitrant slaves. The prison system became more elaborate following emancipation, when a complete overhaul of criminal justice saw the law – implemented by the state – replace the personalized systems of punishment associated with slavery. Such changes provided ordinary people with new opportunities for resistance and institution building, including the foundation of free villages like Martha Brae and the creation by some freedpeople of unofficial alternative courts.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, Paton emphasizes that, despite important changes in power relations, violence remained integral to the repressive apparatus of the state before and after emancipation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Highlighting the long-term negative impact of these forces for post-colonial Jamaica, her work shares some features in common with that of Burnard and Vincent Brown with its exploration of forces of oppression and of the social and cultural fractures created by slavery.

Paton's work, with its focus on prisons and state formation, can also be seen as part of another shift in Caribbean history writing, away from a traditional focus on sugar plantations and towards exploration of other institutions, with the aim of achieving a more variegated picture of social and economic development in the region.Footnote ⁸¹ Verene Shepherd has called for such changes and has helped to provide a sense of the diversities of the Jamaican economy in her recent work on livestock-rearing pens.Footnote ⁸² Others have studied coffee plantations and on economic activities connected to the sugar industry that have been hitherto overlooked by scholars. Heather Cateau, for instance, has worked on those who hired enslaved workers to the sugar estates, and Barry Higman has shed valuable new light on the local managers, or ‘attorneys’, who managed the Jamaican affairs of absentee slaveholders.Footnote ⁸³

Melanie Newton's recent book also shifts our focus away from the plantations and adds new detail to our understanding of Caribbean social change. The children of Africa in the colonies is about free people of colour in Barbados before and after emancipation.Footnote ⁸⁴ As scholars such as Gad Heuman have demonstrated, mixed-race people were an important part of slave societies across the Caribbean and became a vocal and influential social and political body, particularly in the post-emancipation era.Footnote ⁸⁵ The significance of such groups reminds us that slavery and colonial rule were not straightforward encounters between planters, the colonial state, and a black subaltern majority, played out against the backdrop of the plantation. Wealthy men of colour tended to live in towns and had a stake in shaping local governance in the Caribbean. They often voiced an ‘imperial nationalism’, presenting a self-image as British subjects, and claimed to speak on behalf of the black majority whilst treating poorer Barbadians with condescension.Footnote ⁸⁶ Caribbean historians have recently begun to turn their attention to such power relations within and between colonized groups, and Newton's work suggests that this is an important theme to develop more fully.Footnote ⁸⁷ Attention to these tensions not only promises to uncover important but hitherto hidden dynamics within the power struggles over slavery and emancipation, it can also reveal the multifaceted nature of non-white and subaltern identities. As Newton argues, European empires were ‘not the only “imagined communities” that shaped Afro-Caribbean political subjectivities’. Free people of colour in urban Barbados were connected to the labouring poor in the countryside, to other parts of the Caribbean, and shared ‘political identifications with the African continent and other parts of the African diaspora’. Their lives and outlook were shaped, therefore, by networks of ‘mobility, migration, and communication’ within Barbados, around the eastern Caribbean, and to West Africa.Footnote ⁸⁸

This emphasis seems to be in harmony with calls by scholars working within the Caribbean for new regional perspectives on the pan-Caribbean past. These include pleas for historians to study territories other than Jamaica, which because of its indisputable importance in terms of wealth, size, and population continues to dominate our understanding of the wider British West Indies. Scholars have also highlighted two other key areas in particular need of further study: urban history and intra-Caribbean linkages. Some recent work has begun to redress this neglect. Looking at Kingston, the ‘grand mart’ of Jamaica and the wealthiest city in the eighteenth-century Americas, Kenneth Morgan and Trevor Burnard have examined the economics of the slave trade to the town and have begun to demonstrate its importance as a Caribbean entrepôt.Footnote ⁸⁹ Pedro Welch has uncovered aspects of the social life and economic functions of Bridgetown in Barbados, and James Robertson has also provided an overview of the history of Spanish Town, the administrative capital of colonial Jamaica.Footnote ⁹⁰

Some historians have also begun to make efforts to piece together the multi-lingual fragments of a trans-Caribbean ecumene: the Antillean social and cultural 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 has traditionally been guided by a Eurocentric perspective’, with scholars working within the analytic confines of old colonial structures, and advocate a new pan-Caribbean approach to historical research on the region.Footnote ⁹¹ Newton's suggestions about the pan-Caribbean and pan-African networks of free-coloured Barbadians are useful to this project, and work on the kaleidoscopic and cosmopolitan port towns of the region might also provide a good point of focus. Comparative work on the region has already been done, notably by Franklin Knight and Sidney Mintz, but so far most collaboration between scholars has taken the form of edited collections, and innovative work on Caribbean connections has focused mainly on the Haitian Revolution.Footnote ⁹² The potential for such projects to open up new ways of understanding the Caribbean past is nonetheless very strong. As Juan Giusti-Cordero notes, the region was criss-crossed by various ‘intra-Caribbean circuits’, including trade routes that connected Spanish, French, and British territories.Footnote ⁹³ Studies of intra-Caribbean migration also promise to help to develop explorations of the nature and extent of regional integration. Further work on these themes could uncover a wide range of exchange and communication that integrated different islands and linked them to the world beyond the Caribbean.

VI

The new imperial history and new forms of Atlantic history have helped Caribbean history rise to prominence. They have seen a rejuvenation of many of the arguments and perspectives proposed by Eric Williams in Capitalism and slavery, which has amounted to something of a Caribbeanization of British and early American history. Scholars are now alert to the impact of Caribbean colonies on the British metropole during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing that debates about slavery and emancipation shaped British identities and that Atlantic trade had an impact on metropolitan wealth creation and economic development. Although there is no consensus about the importance of these Caribbean exchanges, their return to prominence sees something of a reorientation back towards Williams's contentions about the links between Caribbean slavery and British history. In the arena of early American history, Atlantic perspectives have encouraged some scholars to refocus studies of colonial America on the lucrative slave colonies of the Caribbean, which were, as Williams recognized, at the heart of the British Atlantic system.

By contrast, there seems to be no prospect of rejuvenating Williams's arguments about a link between the decline of the West Indian sugar economy and the rise of abolitionism, despite well-founded research on the economic crisis immediately before the ending of the slave trade in 1807. New work on the abolition debates has focused on slaveholders and pro-slavery politics. It has also stressed the importance of the American Revolution, but for different reasons to Williams. Nevertheless, developments in this area of study have not entirely militated against Williams's arguments. Studies of abolitionism have reinforced the contention that anti-slavery was inspired by factors other than simple altruism, and historians have also emphasized the impact of slave rebelliousness on the transatlantic conflict over slavery.

New work on the Caribbean means that we now have additional good reasons to be drawn away from what Mimi Sheller has called ‘the heroic narrative of Western modernity’, with its focus on the rise of North American and European cities, industry, democracy, rationality, and individualism, with supposedly non-Western spaces like the Caribbean as backward and undeveloped ‘counterfoils’ to this story.Footnote ⁹⁴ Emphasis on the productive ‘ghost acres’ of slave-worked Caribbean sugar plantations, releasing Europe's economy from its pre-industrial shackles; on the transatlantic political impact of slave resistance; and on the Caribbean colonies as a synecdoche for early America all point to alternative narratives.Footnote ⁹⁵ Slavery, subaltern resistance, violence, and death in this zone of tropical industrialization are propelled to the centre of our understandings of the making of the modern world. The colonies of the region need no longer be seen as peripheral places but as troubled centres of what David Scott calls ‘the modernity which is our tragic inheritance’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The rise of these new approaches has coincided with a renewal of interest in white colonizers and the power structure of the colonial state. This has not entailed a return to a colonialist historiography that ignores the black majority while spinning yarns about the achievements of white merchants, planters, and officials. Rather, the focus has involved critical appraisals of discursive and material strategies that aimed to terrorize and control enslaved people and their descendants, and the most successful recent studies of power in the Caribbean have managed to pay close attention to the political strategies of the disempowered majority, however limited the agency of those within this group might sometimes have been. This work has begun to pose new questions about the nature of creolization and its timing as well as about the ways and means at the disposal of oppressed people to come to terms with changing modes of oppression.

Meanwhile, several Caribbean historians have noted the need to provide a stronger regional historiography that seeks to highlight the shared experiences and networks that connected Antillean territories in the past. A pan-Caribbean approach, it is proposed, could not only compare the processes that went into creating Caribbean social, economic, and cultural spaces but also examine the various networks of trade, migration, and cultural exchange that bound them together. To achieve more than a superficial and uneven treatment of the 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 the Caribbean past takes off, then a focus on the British Caribbean without full reference 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 Williams helped to demonstrate that a broad vision of the importance of the Caribbean region to Western economic development could be advanced alongside calls to study the role of slaves in the struggles of the emancipation era. Much more recently, Vincent Brown has pointed out that the ‘political history of slavery is the story of intertwined (if nevertheless distinct) destinies’ that consequently ‘fails to fit strictly within the fields of British imperial, American colonial, Black Atlantic, or African diaspora history; each is braided together with the others’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Pan-Caribbean history might usefully be added to that list. Whatever their geographical frame of reference or specific field of interest, Caribbeanists must continue to look both inwards and outwards in order to make sense of local societies and to understand their wider importance. Achieving this balance has been one of the strengths of a Caribbean historiography that provides valuable methodological suggestions to historians of all stripes as they eschew endogenous approaches to the histories of nations and colonized territories in their efforts to understand global connections and the making of the modern world.