By: Catherine Hall. Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002. 556 pages. $79.00, cloth. $27.00, paper.)
| Prior to postmodernism and the Google search engine, historians’ predilections dawned gradually on readers who awaited a festschrift or an obituary to match engagements with interpretations. That is no longer the case. Catherine Hall’s book on British preoccupation with Jamaica opens with an autobiographical celebration of multiracial commitment. Born the daughter of a Baptist minister and an aspiring historian mother, Hall married a prominent historian who happened to be Jamaican and thereby became more than casually concerned with Jamaica’s history (p. 3). It is one of the odd beauties of recent approaches to the writing of history that Hall’s level of personal commitment becomes less intrusive by being openly, indeed almost triumphantly, acknowledged. | 1 |
| Hall divides her work on Jamaica and its imaginative impact on Britain into two parts. The first part, entitled “Colony and Metropole,” considers the activities of Baptist missionaries in Jamaica. It is a story of vision and disillusionment. Baptist missionaries had a vision of a patriarchal, polite black society in Jamaica, but that vision conflicted with the view of Jamaican planters who wished to maintain their plantation enterprises. The climactic moment in this arrangement was not emancipation but the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, which divided missionary opinion over the place to be occupied by freedmen and women of Jamaica. More than five hundred eighty people died in the rebellion, six hundred were flogged, and a thousand houses were destroyed. The governor ordered the leader of the rebellion, George William Gordon, executed and the incident prompted revocation of the colony’s semi-independence in favor of a return to status of a crown colony. Dickens, Ruskin, and Carlyle defended the governor’s action. It became to Jamaica both more and less than what the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 had been to India. | 2 |
| The second part of Hall’s work, “Metropolis, Colony and Empire,” shifts the focus of attention from Jamaica to the great midland city of Birmingham. There the discourse of “friend of the Negro” began to shift in the 1850s to discussion dependent upon racial categories of “biological difference,” with nationalism for white males increasingly in the ascendant. Under such circumstances, earlier missionary idealism became less relevant. | 3 |
| Hall resituates narrative in several ways, and thereby redefines historical understanding of imperial politics. She demonstrates that the British imagination from the 1830s to the 1860s can be framed by events more bracing than Reform Acts and by places more and less real than Westminster. Indeed, the period from the emancipation of slaves in 1838 (with “apprenticeship” to follow) to the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865 linked Jamaica and Britain, colony, and metropole. Empire meant not peace of mind, but debate, dramatized in the lives of those who negotiated bounds of gender, race, and culture. Missionaries occupy a prominent place in Hall’s study and raise questions about the preeminence of elite political and literary culture in the nineteenth century. Hall’s arguments place missionary actions, ambitions, and rhetoric at the epicenter of historical development. It poses a problem for historical understanding of Christianity, however, when it is displayed as one among several ideological and discursive options. Its presence, according to Hall’s own evidence, affected even those who lacked an extensive imaginative awareness of it. | 4 |
| Hall traces the ideological fate of Jamaican slavery on either side of emancipation. “Sides” in contemporary debates, whether “plantocracy” or abolitionists, could not understand emancipated Jamaicans—were they “noble peasants” or citizens of the Caribbean? By the 1850s the missionary dream for emancipated Jamaica, so hotly contested in word and deed by missionaries, planters, “native Baptists,” and abolitionist merchants, receded. Real historical personages, located in a “Cast of Characters,” emerge on cue in Hall’s narrative of that transformation. William Knibb plays the role of “muscular” Christian and Edward Barrett represents the “responsible black subject.” Nor can the reader forget Joseph Sturge, the Bristol Quaker abolitionist, or Edward John Eyre, the disgraced—or disgraceful—governor whose response to the Morant Bay rebellion registered the opinions of the galaxy of the British intelligentsia. Anthony Trollope’s views provided a counterpoint to missionary attitudes and undermined the dominance if not the plausibility of their story within the imperial community. Hints of incomprehension on the part of freedmen and women provide signs that Jamaica was bound to become African-America and subtly cancelled the gentle ideals of the missionaries. An apocalypse of black self-awareness, personified by a remarkable unintended consequence of missionary resolve, namely Marcus Garvey, would eventually emerge to recast the imaginative landscape. | 5 |
| Despite being longish and containing phrases that require a second and third scan, this volume, conventional in many of its theoretical categories, is nevertheless innovative in subject matter. The scope, intellectual commitment, and length of this volume provide reminders of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963). Hall’s work is more derivative than Thompson’s was and will be more difficult to teach. One wonders, for example, why historiographical reference points for this study were not multiplied. One yearns for more extensive reference to other realms of empire and mission, namely the South and East Asian portions of the British Empire. Such reference is not merely of comparative value; like the empire, mission work was a series of networks. Awareness that political instability in Baptist churches was nothing new, for example, might have reduced concern about the instability of “orthodox” and “native” churches to something other than the tried truisms of race or culture. | 6 |
| The question of reference points raises the problem of the applicability of this volume for classroom teaching. Its length and assumed level of reference tends toward an audience of graduate students rather than undergraduates, let alone high school students. It is readable, however, and provides a point of entry to a global history that will, through the usual stages of scholarly mediation, influence classroom teaching in modern history courses for years to come. In the interim, instructors may prefer Hall’s own recently published reader, Cultures of Empire (2000), as an alternative. | 7 |
| William Carey CollegeMyron C. Noonkester | |
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