Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

From the amazing temporal, topical, and spacial diversity of the more than one thousand works annually published on slavery, Verene Shepherd and Hilary Beckles have brought together the best of Caribbean slave scholarship in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World, a reader intended for large-scale student seminars and comparative slave systems lecture courses. The eighty-one articles and extracts (almost all secondary sources) the editors selected aim to "provide a pan-Caribbean, trans-imperial thematic focus" through which readers can study development and patterning of "the region's heterogeneous slave societies" (xiv). Considerably expanded from their earlier reader (Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, 1991), the resulting hefty (4 _ pound) tome is a highly useful text, introducing students to many of the central debates in Caribbean historiography, and shedding light (albeit unevenly) on the Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Danish, and African Caribbean.	1
Divided into seventeen topical sections, the reader surveys the history of Caribbean slavery, from pre-Columbian European forays into Africa to post-Emancipation Cuba, including such topics as: Native American encounters; plantation and staple crop development; imperial trade; the varieties of slave labor and culture; racial and gender orders; internal slave economies; disease and demography; resistance, rebellion and abolitionist movements; and the Haitian Revolution. The influence of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944) in shaping the field and the reading selections is readily apparent in three of the text's sections and other articles that intermingle with important essays by Franklin Knight, C. L. R. James, Selwyn Carrington, Barry Higman, Neville Hall, Elsa Goveia, Michael Craton, John Thornton, and Seymour Drescher (the editors also included twelve of their own works). The sections addressing the varying experiences of white, colored, and black women over time and space, the feminization of field labor, the reproductive, economic, and resistance activities of enslaved women, and the workings of internal slave economies are particularly strong and welcome. The regretful lack of an index forces readers to hunt for needles in a voluminous haystack and greatly hinders easy use of the reader, but there are numerous potential classroom assignments to be had in asking students to compare aspects of Caribbean slavery using the essays and articles presented.	2
Despite its more than 1,100 pages (potentially overwhelming and certainly challenging for undergraduates), the reader is uneven in its coverage, and is still far from comprehensive. More than a quarter of the selections focus on the British islands, but there is a distinct bias toward Barbados and Jamaica (the editors' specialties). The Spanish Caribbean receives attention at the dawn and twilight of the period of slavery but gets little coverage in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The eight selections on the French islands provide reasonable temporal coverage, but the important but woefully neglected Dutch West Indies are slighted with just three articles. In the interest of policing truth in advertising, I would also dispute the editors' invocation of a geographically comprehensive Atlantic World in their title. Caribbean historians have always been deeply aware of connections to Africa and Europe from whence slaves came and sugar and other staples went (more so than historians of colonial North America), but connections within the Americas are virtually absent within the reader. Although the Haitian Revolution quite rightly gets its own section in the reader, the American Revolution, Latin America's wars for independence, and their impact on Caribbean history do not. Commerce between North America and the Caribbean is addressed only in passing. Missing are works by Willem Klooster, Richard Dunn, Jack Greene, and others have tangibly linked Caribbean history with Dutch Brazil and the North American Lower South through migration and developmental precedent. Their omission misleadingly leaves Caribbean colonies and their slave systems disconnected from their American neighbors and presents, at best, a misshapen and asymmetrical Atlantic World sphere of interaction to readers. Shortcomings pertaining to inclusiveness aside, Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World does succeed in its aim to impart the variety and complexity of slave experiences over five centuries in a region distinctive for its ethnically diverse and international character. It largely falls to instructors to help students chart a course through the vast array of selections presented, but Shepherd and Beckles provide deep waters for exploration.	3
The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg   Michael Jarvis

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