In Caribbean Exchanges, Susan Dwyer Amussen charts the relationship between England and the Caribbean in the second half of the seventeenth century, integrating analysis of Caribbean and English social and cultural developments. She explores the ways in which English men and women created new societies in the colonies of the Caribbean, focusing her study on Barbados and Jamaica, the two most significant English colonial possessions in this period. In common with recent work on metropole-colony relations, Amussen conceives of the linkage between the Caribbean and England as a two-way exchange. Ideas about race, work, and gender forged in the West Indies found their way back to the metropole, shaping society there, she contends. Amussen has worked previously on English social history and has come to the view that seventeenth-century England cannot be understood without reference to its connections with the wider world. In this regard, the intellectual journey that has led to Caribbean Exchanges is comparable to those taken by other scholars seeking to relate British and global history, notably Catherine Hall and Linda Colley.

Amussen develops her argument over six chapters, using an eclectic range of sources, including legal codes, official and private correspondence, newspapers, plays, travelers’ accounts, and paintings. She examines English society in order to understand the values and expectations of the men and women who migrated to the Caribbean, demonstrating that settlers sought to re-create England in the tropics. Their hopes proved impossible to achieve, and the production of sugar using enslaved labor required planters to innovate. New systems of labor were devoid of the paternalistic elements of English master-servant relations, and the English in the Caribbean developed new legal codes that made provision for slavery and that sought to control all aspects of slaves’ lives, rejecting familiar principles such as the right to trial by jury. These attempts to codify slavery were fraught with difficulties and anxieties, as settlers attempted to come to terms with the fact that the institution was a colonial innovation with no counterpart in English life. From its beginning, slavery created problems for colonial elites, who had to justify it to metropolitan observers, many of whom were uncomfortable with the concepts and practices associated with slaveholding. Amussen argues that as English colonists tried to justify the enslavement of others, they claimed liberties for themselves. From the foundation of the colonies, the planters claimed to be free to order their societies as they wished, relating these rights to the concept of English liberty. Metropolitan authorities sought to limit the power of colonists, especially concerning the treatment of slaves, and these tensions between the imperial government and local settlers continued during the eighteenth century.

While settlers were creating and trying to justify slave societies in the Caribbean, aspects of these transformations were also affecting life in England. In the final chapters of Caribbean Exchanges, Amussen contends that England was being shaped by its empire from as early as the seventeenth century. She argues that the flow of commodities such as sugar from colony to metropole is only part of the story. People, attitudes, and ideas also made the journey. By the late seventeenth century, Jamaican and Barbadian planters had begun to travel back to England, and they often brought enslaved people with them. Black people were therefore a visible presence in rural and urban English society. Planters and slaves were a source of fascination and were represented in plays that articulated English misgivings about slaveholding and its corrupting influence on whites. Slaves, especially children, also appeared in portraits as the attendants of the English gentry. Amussen also makes bold claims about Caribbean influences on English patterns of labor and on gender relations. She notes how eighteenth-century English transformations, such as increasingly systematized industrial production, the reduction of people to commodities, and the use of the law to protect the propertied from the disenfranchised, all had Caribbean precedents. Furthermore, she argues that the idea of the English lady as passive and confined to the domestic sphere was shaped by Caribbean developments that associated these characteristics with white femininity.

Amussen provides an excellent and detailed account of how English settlers adapted familiar ideas and expectations to Caribbean realities. Her analysis of the development of West Indian slave codes is particularly impressive. For instance Amussen provides a compelling explanation of how the term “Negro” was used in preference to the term “slave” by those framing colonial laws. Planters avoided calling slavery by its name and collapsed legal status with color and origin in part because they were uneasy about codifying a practice of doubtful legitimacy that had no English counterpart. They also sought to try to justify the institution by making claims about the difference and inferiority of African people. In these ways, the social and economic transformation of the Caribbean began to shape English racial thinking. Amussen's work demonstrates that metropolitan English reactions to slavery were varied and ambivalent. As consumers, the English benefited from it, and many accepted the institution. There were also many with doubts about the morality of slaveholding. In this context, the ways in which the Caribbean provided a template for industrialization and eighteenth-century legislation designed to protect property require further substantiation. There were parallels between Caribbean and English developments, as Amussen suggests, but more work could usefully be done on the nature of these apparent connections. Caribbean Exchanges therefore provides an important analysis of metropole-colony linkages as well as suggesting directions for further research. It will be of interest to historians working in areas such as empire, the Caribbean, and early modern England. It also helps to highlight the difficulty of continuing to think of these areas as separate fields of inquiry.