Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640–1700 (review)

In Caribbean Exchanges, Susan Dwyer Amussen, an authority on early modern English history, turns her attention to the two most profitable English colonies in the Caribbean, Jamaica and Barbados. Her goal in this ambitious and wide-ranging work is to examine the connections and interactions between England and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. She argues that slavery — especially the social relations associated with the institution and the ideas about race and gender that shaped and were shaped by slavery — affected England as colonists and the English alike confronted (and sometimes avoided) the institution and its implications. Slavery redefined gender and race in both the Caribbean and England. Amussen’s book should inspire others to follow her example and to scrutinize transformations in Europe in light of overseas holdings.

It is fascinating to see the Caribbean through the eyes of an expert in English history and especially in the history of gender. Amussen emphasizes throughout the geographic and cultural distance between the West Indies and England. If a basic division that defined authority and labor in English society was one of gender, in the Caribbean, that marker came to be one of race. English migrants to the West Indies had to learn how to produce sugar, a complicated, technical, and expensive undertaking. And they had to devise new legal codes to regulate enslaved African laborers. Amussen connects these Caribbean shifts toward diminished freedom and race-based hierarchies with simultaneous trends within England toward enhanced liberties.

Amussen draws on a range of sources to illuminate these Caribbean developments. She makes extensive use of the papers of the Helyar family, who settled in Jamaica, and she works very effectively with two of the major sources of the period, Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) and John Taylor’s still unpublished “Multum in Parvo.” While many of these sources are familiar to Caribbeanists, Amussen offers some new interpretations of these materials. Her gendered reading of Ligon, for example, is especially thoughtful. In her final chapter, she draws imaginatively on a range of cultural materials in England —plays, portraits, and ads for runaway servants — in order to explore representations of the Caribbean and of its black and white inhabitants in England.

Amussen’s exclusive focus on the Caribbean’s impact on England is a reasonable research strategy but invites a host of questions. First, race and gender worked themselves out differently in colonies with different demographic patterns (Barbados and Jamaica were migrant societies characterized by overwhelming male majorities and truncated lifespans for Europeans and Africans alike), labor regimes, and cultural groups. Was the Caribbean the most important region for English developments? How can one demonstrate this importance without looking at other areas of activity overseas? If other historians follow Amussen’s admirable lead, we may begin to be able to answer these vital questions. A second concern pertains to geographic and chronological contexts. Amussen’s focus on slavery, race, gender, and sugar after 1640 and only in Barbados and Jamaica has the unfortunate consequence of diminishing other contexts in which the English learned about these crucial features of plantation society, whether in the Caribbean or elsewhere. The English were familiar with enslaved Africans before 1640 in their own settlements, especially in Virginia, Bermuda, and two Caribbean islands: Providence, which had a slave majority, and Tortuga, which the island’s planters abandoned in the face of resistance from enslaved laborers. The English, moreover, had decades of experience at trade, plunder, and some aborted and successful settlements in the Caribbean and on the North and South American mainland before the transition to sugar after 1640. What, if anything, did they learn from these prior experiences that they took with them to Barbados?

Some of Amussen’s most important conclusions appear in her epilogue, where she points to the implications of Caribbean developments for English society in...