| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. By Trevor Burnard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 320 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2856-4. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5525-1.)

Trevor Burnard has written significant articles on demography, inheritance, wealth distribution, race, and sexuality in Jamaica, providing important quantitative information. In Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, he builds on his previous work and explores the thirty-seven-volume manuscript diary of Thomas Thistlewood (1721–1786) to discern the nature of power in rural Jamaica during the second half of the eighteenth century. The diary offers Burnard an opportunity to explore "what it meant to be a white man" in a society based on tremendous inequality (p. 7). The result is an impressively intricate view of Jamaican culture from the perspective of Thistlewood, an Englishman of modest means who immigrated in 1750, took advantage of opportunities presented to him, and rose economically to become a moderately successful planter who depended on his slaves' productivity for his wealth. To Burnard, Thistlewood's story matters not because of his political influence (he possessed little) or intellectual achievement (though he engaged in botanical investigations and corresponded with like-minded individuals), but because Thistlewood represents a "foot soldier of imperialism" (p. 7).

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