Jamaica in the Age of Revolution

ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING, AND MOST valuable, approaches to Western historiography over the past couple of decades has been the definition of the Atlantic Basin as a space with a shared history of interaction. Trevor Burnard’s text presents us with Jamaica’s eighteenth-century history set in a wider Atlantic context. This is of considerable importance as it shows Jamaica not only as a slave society, but also as one deeply embedded in a complex of relations with the North American colonies that became the United States, with Britain, with the slave trade, and the broader Caribbean in the context of British and French imperial contestation. The book is not so much a monograph as a series of connected essays with Jamaica’s position within the network of connections throughout the North Atlantic region. It is, as a result, a richer examination of what political, economic and social factors existed and mattered for understanding Jamaica’s position in the imperial world of the eighteenth century. This is, thus, an analysis of what it meant to be an economy founded on slavery; an economy substantially affected by the eruption of the American Revolution, and the French and Haitian Revolutions. It is also an examination of the prosperity of a ruling class in a fundamentally oppressive, indeed murderous, colony. As Burnard states, in his introduction, “in 1774, the white residents of Jamaica were the richest group of people in the British Empire” (1). Black Jamaicans were, on the other hand, among the most immiserated people on the planet. Mixed-race Jamaicans lived in a condition of uncertainty, free but disempowered, and excluded from participation in the political life of the colony. These themes form a thread within the text, the chapters each illuminating an aspect of what it meant to be a society founded upon a structure of domination, and oppression; a society that founded great wealth on the basis of human suffering. To a degree this is a twice-told tale, but Burnard brings to light aspects of the story that explain how, and why this came to be the case.