Lodgers, Landlords and Landladies in Georgian London

Abstract

European interactions with native peoples, such as the Miskito Indians and the Black Caribs, have sometimes emphasised local agency and negotiation, especially Peter Linebaugh’s latest study of Edward Marcus Despard and his clashes with the white Baymen or loggers in British Honduras in support of the Miskito. Once again, Rogers has little time for this. ‘Recent attempts to dress these Zambos and Amerindian Miskito as freedom-loving smallholders and fishermen outside the parameters of capitalism will not do’ (p. 164), he says, arguing instead that the Miskito ‘were hard-headed ethnic soldiers between empires, part of a predatory landscape of adventurers and slavers’. This is a bleak, desperate world he offers instead, in which the British cynically exploited the Miskitos and then abandoned them to their fate under the Spanish after 1783. Rogers, therefore, offers a powerful set of arguments and proofs, ones intended to shake the twin narratives he identifies of complacent British imperial nostalgia and triumphalism on the one hand, and the ‘identity politics and racial reductionism’ (p.10) of the Black Lives Matter movement and its fellow travellers on the other. This may limit its impact, but that would be regrettable, since Rogers offers a sober, serious attempt to assess the truth of these matters, one which tries to see the past on its own terms rather than reading modernity back into it. It does so though using much the same approach as its predecessors, a series of case studies – in some cases the same case studies – that have been used to make different points elsewhere. The interpretive and analytical mutability of such case studies, and the question of whether they are representative of wider experiences, suggest that this approach may be reaching its limits, and that a wider analytical framework is needed, one which can adequately contextualise and appropriately weight all of these singular experiences. For the meantime though, those looking for an alternative to existing interpretations will find much in this book that is of value.