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Reviews of Books
Jon Sensbach, University of Florida
| 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. 320 pages. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
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Thomas Thistlewood: plantation manager and stockyard owner in eighteenth-century Jamaica, horticulturist, botanist, collector of scientific books—pleasant enough fellow, if a bit crotchety. He was also, according to Trevor Burnard, "a brutal slave owner, an occasional rapist and torturer, and a believer in the inherent inferiority of Africans" (7). Change occasional to serial, and the description is about right. How to evaluate the life of a man whose favorite form of punishment was to force one slave to defecate in the mouth of another, then fasten it shut for five hours? |
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Burnard does his best to explain and humanize, though not to excuse, the monstrous. Working primarily from the thirty-seven volumes of a diary Thistlewood kept from 1750 to 1786, which Burnard estimates totals 2 million words, offers a fascinating, if often gruesome, portrait of a Jamaican society held together by the small white population's tyranny over the enslaved majority. Thistlewood was no more or less sadistic than other managers and owners of slaves, yet he wrote it all down. Every punishment and torture he ever administered, every sexual conquest he forced on captive women, every outrage committed in the name of white security and self-gratification, he recorded in excruciating detail. His diary may be the most thorough surviving documentation of the relentless violence permeating slave society in the colonial Anglo-American world. Burnard's study of the life and times of one perpetrator in this assault helps readers understand how such apparently exceptional cruelty could become so ordinary. |
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Master, Tyranny, and Desire seeks to "explore what it meant to be a white immigrant in a land characterized by extreme differences of wealth between the richest and the poorest members" (7). Though Thistlewood's diary is filled with information about black Jamaicans, Burnard unapologetically fixes his gaze on the author because readers "need to know more about the foot soldiers of imperialism, especially the men involved at the most intimate level with slaves and slavery in the eighteenth-century British Empire" (7). Did any foot soldier implicate himself in the grisly machinery of empire more thoroughly than Thistlewood? |
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Jamaica was easily Britain's most profitable colony in the eighteenth century, and some of the wealthiest citizens of the empire belonged to its upper tier of sugar planters. Thistlewood was not of that class. Born in Lincolnshire in 1721, the son of a tenant farmer, he realized his prospects were scant, emigrated to Jamaica in 1750, and found work as manager of a cattle ranch, or pen, in Westmoreland Parish, in the southwestern corner of the island. Immersed in a black world, often going months without seeing a white face, Thistlewood concluded that he could survive only through fear and violence. He gained a reputation among planters as a tough and efficient manager, a rarity in that setting. As they competed for his services, Thistlewood switched managerial jobs several times before finally acquiring his own stockyard and slave workforce years later. He never owned more than thirty-four slaves and at his death in 1786 he had achieved a so-called competency, but not wealth. |
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