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Book Review
| Susan Dwyer Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp 320. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-8078-3165-6); $22.50 paper (ISBN 978-0-8078-5854-7).
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| Land and sea might suggest different ways in which to imagine English society prior to colonial settlement of the Americas. As Shakespeare's "blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England," so characterized in "King Richard II," Act 2 scene 1, sea is a barrier. "England" can be projected as a custom-bounded domain in which the waning of servile labor, broad participation in legal institutions across social ranks, and a political discourse of liberties guaranteed by the common law and Magna Carta undergird the exceptional situation of the freeborn English man. His patriarchal birthright to be distinguished from slaves echoes in the first sentence of Locke's Two Treatises on Government: "Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that 'tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it." As bridge, sea might well bring to mind somewhat different, less insular historical actors: mobile enclaves of high-risk adventurers, international merchants and seamen whose journeys across accepted social and moral frontiers make a turbulent mix of such distinctions. War could become inseparable from trade, property seem so entangled with plunder, and contract so defined by transaction that slavery might as well be regarded as foundation rather than antithesis of freedom. Caribbean Exchanges presses against the conventions of my admittedly stylized contrast. |
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Susan Dwyer Amussen explores seventeenth-century English slavery as a dual trans-Atlantic institution, in which the ambiguities of a society with slaves in England were linked to but distinct from quickly emerging plantation slave regimes in England's Caribbean colonies. She seeks to portray both "the English character of this story, and its impact on people in both England and the Caribbean," without "eras[ing] differences between societies on both sides of the Atlantic," insisting that "the histories of colony and metropole need to be placed in one analytic frame, as separate histories that are deeply intertwined" (11). |
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Amussen thus argues that social and cultural exchanges between the "English Caribbean" and "Caribbean England" were fundamentally asymmetrical (5). Four chapters illustrate how Caribbean slavery transformed English travelers' sensibilities and self-identities no less than English commerce, modes of labor organization, and law. Travelers to Barbados and Jamaica used the "strangeness" of these emerging sugar islands in part to fashion new self-identities as European and as white. Planters conceived new terms of commerce, as murderous levels of labor exploitation in plantation sugar production promised returns on investment so rapid that they stood to offset the higher market costs of slave labor "if slaves lived more than a year or two" (92). In response to the dynamics of sugar production, island slave codes overturned the highly gendered laws and customs of an English patriarchal order that had "organized labor and social relations simultaneously" (123). By 1661, laws made no gendered distinctions in the work obligations of slave women and slave men, eliminated "any traces of paternalism & mutual obligation," and thereby defined slaves as "a qualitatively different sort of people than servants" (130, 132). Careful to distinguish underlying patterns in slaves' collective resistance in Barbados and Jamaica, Amussen nonetheless insists that public acceptance of spectacles of beheading, burning alive, and breaking on the wheel need to be understood as "one of the most profound changes wrought in and by English men in the West Indies" (175). England and her Caribbean colonies became fundamentally dissimilar social orders whose differences precluded meaningful communication and effective colonial administration. |
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If law was central to the emergence of racially distinctive systems of justice in Barbados and Jamaica, slavery's legal nonrecognition in seventeenth-century England does not seem to have diminished the institution's utility. Amussen imaginatively compares gendered and class dimensions of the visual codes of representation in some seventy portraits of English aristocrats and gentry with rhetorical structures of representations of slavery in staged dramas, Dissenters' printed tract literature, and newspapers. "In contrast to the dramatic depictions of the colonies, most of which kept slaves firmly offstage," she observes, "these paintings placed slaves clearly in view" (196). Her comparisons between portraiture and newspaper ads for runaway slaves and servants suggest that visual codes of depiction, which seem to have become increasingly systematic as England's black population slowly increased in size during the 1600s, cohered before a systematic language of racial difference developed. Elite portraiture captured slaves as embodied fulfillment of an owner's desire. Noble women in particular glowed with luminescent whiteness. Although a brief epilogue that interprets eighteenth-century factory organization and criminal law as "relatively straightforward echoes of Caribbean practice" is not persuasive, historians of the colonial Americas and Europe alike can fruitfully ponder how slavery linked an increasingly integrated and fragmented colonial world (231). Her analysis opens new windows onto the historical production of racial ideology across dissimilar social systems. |
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| Julie Saville
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| University of Chicago |
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