In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (review)

During the seven decades after the 1684 revocation of the Somers Island Company’s charter, Bermuda became largely invisible within the British imperial structure. Under company governance, Bermudians grew tobacco and shipped it to England where the metropolitan government taxed it. Royalization afforded colonists the liberty to abandon tobacco cultivation and pursue diverse and mutually reinforcing maritime trades, few of them subject to imperial enumeration or taxation and thus to imperial scrutiny. Given Bermuda’s small size—only twenty square miles of territory—and its isolation—situated 600 miles east of the Carolinas, the nearest land—taking to the sea for a livelihood made good sense for its inhabitants.

In the Eye of All Trade restores not just the island’s residents to visibility but also a vast arc of the western Atlantic from Tortuga to Newfoundland, and the many harbors, creeks, capes, and inlets where Bermudians traded, cut timber, harvested turtles, or picked up cargo. Jarvis delicately situates the details of Bermudian history within this Atlantic sweep, thereby crafting a book that is finely calibrated—a cross between an intimate study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bermuda and a panoramic vision of a complex, dynamic, and often messy and contentious Atlantic world. To achieve a near panoptic sweep, Jarvis utilized diverse methodological and theoretical tools of the last half-century of scholarship. He analyzed governmental records and settlement patterns, reconstituted families and commercial networks, and teased out intercultural relations from labor contracts and the privileges accorded slaves, recognizing that people found economic survival, if not prosperity, in the mundane commodities of the Atlantic trades. In many ways, Jarvis (unlike a succession of imperial officials) absorbed a Bermudian sensibility, reasoning that riches might be hidden in plain sight.

Sections of In the Eye of All Trade, at least, should be required reading for Atlantic scholars. The chapter about “working the Atlantic commons”—producing salt in the Caribbean, cutting timber on the Yucatan and Miskito coasts, diving for salvage from shipwrecks, and hunting turtles off the Caymans—is an excellent analysis of how marginal peoples acquired some control of their labor in the volatile interstices of imperial sovereignties and legal regimes. Jarvis’ narrative reconstruction of the superb craftsmanship in Bermudian schooners, renowned for speed and maneuverability, is an eloquent encomium to the innovations of hundreds of nameless shipwrights, joiners, sailmakers, and skippers who embedded beauty and safety into the mundane needs of transport. Many readers might be surprised to find that Jarvis’ renowned article about Bermudian slavery is not reproduced as a chapter.¹ Rather, he weaves his analysis of slavery throughout the book, reinforcing the idea that slavery and peoples of African descent were warp and woof of the fabric of Bermudian society.

Scholars in many disciplines will consult In the Eye of All Trade for Jarvis’ interpretation of myriad topics. But his overall argument is that many Atlantic developments occurred not under imperial purview but through the “self organization” and initiatives of countless people (180). The Atlantic world with its “permeable and blurry maritime boundaries” defied imperial regulation, especially when people operated in small vessels and engaged in unregulated trades, as did most Bermudians (462). Jarvis’ theme of self-organization, pursued also by Hancock in his work on Madeira and its wine trade, will keep scholars busily debating for decades.²