Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire makes it clear that Thomas Thistlewood was more than simply the sadist white slave owner who gets a casual mention in most books about Jamaican slave society. Thistlewood lived in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786 and left behind daily diaries consisting of some 10,000 pages of factual and unreflective notes on activities stemming from his role in Jamaican society as an overseer, a pen keeper, a man who hired out his slaves, a local landowner and civic actor, and a would-be Enlightenment scientist. In immersing himself (and his readers) in these diaries and other archival papers, Trevor Burnard sets out to examine “the operation of power in Jamaica” and to “explore what it meant to be a white immigrant” in this eighteenth-century slave society (34, 7).

Thistlewood is notorious among historians for listing every punishment he inflicted on his slaves and cataloging his thousands of sexual encounters with slave women, and in the end, Thistlewood cannot transcend that identity, despite his other activities. For Burnard, Thistlewood's pathology is symptomatic of the larger dysfunction and violence of eighteenth-century Jamaica and the traumatizing effects of living in a “war zone” (7) upon Jamaica's inhabitants. Burnard casts Thistlewood's desire to exert mastery over his slaves as another facet of the needs that drove Thistlewood to establish himself as a man worthy of being a master in many arenas by setting up as a landowner and presenting himself as a natural scientist and botanist. Thistlewood met his goals because the white Jamaican society that Burnard depicts was peculiarly suited to all three of these aims: as a slave society, it forced advancement of any men with white skin; as an imperial outpost, it valued culture and education; and as an egalitarian, anarchic frontier society, it esteemed independence.

Burnard cleverly makes more than a biography out of a book that necessarily concentrates on one subject and, in a way, ends up writing two books in one. In direct contrast to the chronological organization of Douglas Hall's earlier synthesis of the diaries in his In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–1786 (London, 1989), Burnard structures his book thematically. The first half focuses on Thistlewood and white society in Jamaica, as sketched above; the second half strives to sort out what Thistlewood's papers can tell us about the life of slaves in Jamaica, with one chapter on Thistlewood's general relationship with his slaves, then a chapter each centered on his male slaves and his female slaves. This section on Thistlewood's slaves is the part that seems almost to be a second book.

Burnard makes a good attempt at weaving the material on slaves into his overall characterization of eighteenth-century Jamaica, but the conclusions that come out of the second half sit somewhat uneasily with his depiction of a violent and anarchic Jamaica. Burnard rejects the scholars of slavery who argue that there could be no real human relationship between master and slave within a slave society, and he presents two slaves as friends, companions, and partners of Thistlewood: Phibbah, Thistlewood's longtime mistress whom he hired from a former employer; and Lincoln, the first slave Thistlewood purchased. Despite portraying Jamaica as a war zone, Burnard concludes that slaves accepted slavery, eliding the distinction between slave perception of a master's “right” and a master's “capacity” to control them (152). He demonstrates that life as a slave involved a process of constant negotiation but refuses to accept that negotiation as a form of resistance. Burnard differentiates between slave opposition to the master on an individual basis and slave resistance to the system, allowing him to define Phibbah as simultaneously both a collaborator and “the greatest challenge to Jamaica's slave system of any slave under Thistlewood's control,” as a slave who accumulated property, socially entertained whites (once), and controlled her domestic domain even to the extent of refusing sex with Thistlewood (35).

Regardless of the broader conclusions, the partial reconstruction of the lives of some twelve slaves that Burnard manages to pull out of Thistlewood's lists is excellent. Rich evidence speaks to Thistlewood's daily and intimate involvement with his slaves. The analysis of slave household dynamics over thirty years and the introduction of enslaved characters in roles less privileged than those of Lincoln and Phibbah make a worthy addition to our stock of knowledge about slave experience. Sadly, Burnard says he had more such evidence than he used. The thick description and heavy use of quotations from Thistlewood's papers that pervade the entire book seem to be put to better use in the second half of the work—although it may simply be that I am more interested, for example, in lists of the tasks slaves were asked to do, than in lists of the names of white men with whom Thistlewood exchanged books. Indeed, in the second half more description and quotation would have been welcomed. Twelve pages each to analyze thirty years of Phibbah and Lincoln does not seem enough. A summary of every appearance Phibbah made might have been a better use of space than the multiple summaries of the punishments Thistlewood noted.

As do all books, this one leaves some unanswered questions. After opening by situating Thistlewood as a “foot soldier of imperialism” (7) and Jamaica as a “powerhouse of the British Empire” (13), the imperial context seems to be neglected, despite mentions of Thistlewood's earlier trip to Africa and India with the East India Company. Perhaps those diaries have not survived. Burnard does an excellent job of pointing out the effects of the heavily African workforce at this moment in Jamaican history, but that makes us wonder whether any of Burnard's conclusions apply to other British Caribbean islands. We should also note that while the book is divided into chapters, the real building block of this work is the short thematic essay of three to eight pages, a stylistic choice that may account for some repetitive moments. However, these miniessays also offer a great range of readable pieces that could be assigned to undergraduate students who are very likely to appreciate the balance of generalizations and character-driven detail.