Writing West Indian Histories (review)

Writing West Indian Histories. By B. W. Higman (London, Macmillan Heinemann, 1999) 289 pp. $14.95

Higman is best known for his Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), a massive demographic, environmental, economic, and social profile of slavery in the English-speaking Caribbean. His current work, a compact history of historical writing in the English-speaking West Indies, marks a departure from Higman's earlier exhaustive analysis, with its complete arsenal of social science techniques and heavy reliance on quantification. Indeed, it appears that Higman's historiography questions the exclusive reliance on "scientific history," at least in the treatment of Caribbean history. In the first line of his preface, he writes that he is looking particularly at "the complex interaction between popular and professional understandings of the past" (x).

The first half of Higman's book is a straightforward account of professional and amateur historians and their histories. Higman begins with Bryan Edwards and Edward Long, the British polymaths of the late eighteenth century, followed in the nineteenth century by a half-dozen "white stream" and a dozen "black stream" polymaths--all men and all educated and formed by "the British imperial enterprise." Then follow the Americans, the most important of whom were Frank J. Pitman and Lowell Joseph Ragatz, professional historians who wrote about the plantation system and the fall of the plantation class. Higman identifies eleven British academic historians who included the West Indies in the broader framework of British imperial history, most of them contributors to J. H. Rose et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1929- ). The best known was Richard Pares, whose War and Trade in the West Indies, 1739-1763 (Oxford, 1936) was based on the metropolitan archives of Britain and France.

For Higman, 1938 marked a first watershed in the course of West Indian history writing. The first West Indian was awarded a Ph.D. in history--Eric Williams (eventually prime minister of Trinidad [1962-1981]), whose Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944) stimulated lively debate on the role of slavery in the formation of capital for the British Industrial Revolution. Williams also argued that the abolition of slavery was motivated by economic interests rather than humanitarian convictions.

The second watershed was the creation of the University College of the West Indies in 1949. Four West Indian professional historians formed the permanent core of the history department at University College: Elsa Vesta Goveia from Guyana, Fitzroy Augier from St. Lucia, Douglas Hall from Jamaica, and Keith Laurence from Trinidad. (All but Goveia were teaching and writing there in the early 1990s when I was a visiting scholar at the University of the West Indies.)

In the second half of the book, Higman departs from the history of history writing to explore perspectives, metaphors, and models that have shaped British Caribbean history. He touches on nostalgia for empire, golden ages of sugar and island paradise, the rise and fall of the planter class, Curtin's "Two Jamaicas," environmental determinisms, Marxist or Darwinian "struggle," and a very speculative suggestion about the relation of circles and triangles to African iconography. ¹

Higman seems torn by a series of conflicting approaches to the writing of Caribbean history. Professional history, he feels, has been too often a conservative force propping up old models. Archival sources, especially in Britain, are Anglocentric and elitist; most doctorates in Caribbean history are still granted by foreign universities; determinisms--Marxist, Annaliste, biological--have left little room for the event and the hero.

Higman is especially ambivalent about the heroes of slave revolts. He charts the increased emphasis on resistance leaders in recent histories and yet seems to endorse Michael Craton's warning that historians should not glamorize "the struggling masses" (219). Higman would call upon writers like V. S. (Vidiadhar Surajprasad) Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and George Lamming to enrich Caribbean history by offering more imaginative approaches, while he clings to the "scientific side" for authenticity and the conviction...