Historians often depict the early modern Caribbean as a place of extremes: of imperial competition, of slavery's cruelty, of greed, and even, as Kristen Block points out in her expansive and creative new work, of cynicism when it comes to matters of faith. In this interlocking series of microhistories spanning the seventeenth century, Block succeeds in providing a historical context for that cynicism. In a work “centering on the struggles of ordinary people to survive in this burgeoning capitalistic world,” Block demonstrates first how Christianity, both Catholicism and Protestantism, served “as a force for social inclusion and exclusion in the early Caribbean,” and then explains how “racial categories began to trump shared religious identities by the end of the seventeenth century,” particularly for enslaved peoples of African descent (2).

Block uses the stories of the enslaved and downtrodden as a springboard for a fresh contribution to the growing field of interimperial histories of the Caribbean. She opens the hierarchical social world of Cartegena de Indias and its environs through Isabel Criolla, a runaway slave who deployed the concept of “un-Christian cruelty” to seek relief from her sadistic mistress for herself and her fellows (39). The Inquisitorial prosecution of Nicolas Burundel, a French Protestant who failed to stay on the right side of religious authorities, highlights the multiple ways that interimperial commerce was in fact creating space for a form of functional tolerance. The fortunes of Henry Whistler, who participated in Cromwell's Western Design, serve to show how the failures of the Puritan adventurers ultimately worked to erode ideas of Christian community in favor of racial hierarchies. In a similar narrative for the late seventeenth century, the story of Barbadian Quaker Isaac Morris and some of his slaves demonstrates that even the most idealistic Christians eventually conformed to dominant expectations of racialized enslavement.

In each of her discrete studies, Block shows how her protagonists “actively engaged with the rhetoric and rituals of Christianity” to negotiate the challenging situations in which they found themselves, often in unexpected ways (2). Criolla, for example, appears as both pitiable and admirably assertive in her efforts to use the tenets and structures of Catholicism to achieve freedom. Yet this example of subaltern agency is balanced by the story of Cromwell's despairing soldiers, who, by protesting any connection with enslaved Africans, participated in the creation of an “unspoken association between the rights of ‘free-born Englishmen’ [and] Christianity [that] would silence any concerted attempts to establish puritan-style evangelization missions for Africans” (146). The diverse tradition of Christianity, therefore, served both to soften and to strengthen colonial regimes of servitude and enslavement. Some of these stories are richer than others, a necessary result of divergent record bases, but Block's care in ensuring that the broader context is always foremost ensures that the work's overall argument neither flags nor drops into distracting minutia.

As a whole, Ordinary Lives argues that events in the Caribbean are essential to understanding the increasing power and reach of slavery, and the concomitant decline of religion as a means to restrain slavery and racial hierarchy in the early modern era. Increasing commerce, within and between empires, drove the change that Block describes, because it pulled the Spanish and English empires into business with one another, and the business of slavery above all else. This perspective allows Block to deftly handle the issue of confessional antipathies between Protestants and Catholics. The rules forbidding religious others provided the impetus for both persecution and the “performance” of conversions, and yet commercially minded governments ensured that ever greater numbers of outsiders ultimately weakened confessional identities in favor of racial ones. The study thus emphasizes the commonalities between the Spanish and English empires rather than the contrasts. Spanish Inquisitors and Puritan adventurers each grappled with the limits of spiritual persuasion and community, and enslaved peoples around the region saw their options to maneuver an oppressive system steadily in decline. Placing the growth of racial slavery in the context of early modern “disenchantment,” Block argues that “by the turn of the eighteenth century the greater Caribbean was at the center of this messy transition, giving rise to a culture permeated by uncertainty, opportunism, and distrust” (203). If it is right to view the religious culture of the eighteenth-century Caribbean with cynicism, this image has to be understood as the end result of decades of attempts by at least some individuals to act in ways that would suggest a different narrative.

The title Ordinary Lives may be a bit of a misnomer, because the book's reach extends to some of the most pivotal narratives of the seventeenth century: empire, commerce, religion, and slavery. The book's most creative contribution, however, is in its superb depiction of the dynamics of religion. Block skillfully avoids reducing religion to a mere marker of imperial identity or an extension of denominational trajectories determined in Europe. By thoughtfully engaging the diverse discourses available to Christians (Protestant and Catholic) to confront Caribbean situations, the religion of her protagonists is both powerful and subtle, even as it ultimately fails to provide the answers they seek. Ordinary Lives is readable, engaging, and thought provoking. It will be of great interest to scholars of the early modern world generally.