White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (review)

Lambert works at the intersection of historical geography and cultural studies in order to examine social and cultural changes in Barbados between 1780 and the 1830s. This time span being known as the "age of abolition" and the "age of revolution," he chose an important period of transition. But is the tiny colony of Barbados an important place in which to examine the culture, identity, and politics of "whiteness"? The answer, as Lambert shows superbly, is emphatically positive. Barbados, small as it is, was one of the first sugar colonies in the Caribbean in which slavery became pervasive, and the Caribbean was for two centuries the "principal fulcrum" of the emerging Atlantic World and world-system (23). Barbados, far from being peripheral, was at the center of modern colonialism and slavery. The discourses and debates concerning slavery and whiteness that occurred there in the period that Lambert considers are crucial to our understanding of the modern world.

Lambert correctly insists that whiteness is not a racial identity so much as a political one that involves claims and assumptions of superiority that bolster a structure of power relations. Understanding the "problem of slavery," or the process of "enslaving," as it was attacked and defended by free and enslaved people of various complexions and locations, is therefore crucial for understanding the place of whiteness in our world. The struggle over racial representation and identity is about power and privilege, and part of the privileging of whiteness "is its apparent invisibility to critical inquiry" (16). Making its origins visible is an important contribution not only to Caribbean studies but also to intellectual history.

Lambert focuses his inquiry on selected key people and episodes, including Joshua Steele, an English planter who criticized slavery after he arrived in Barbados in 1780; John Poyer, a middle-class Barbadian and author of the History of Barbados (1808); the slave rebellion of 1816; the anti-Methodist agitation in the 1820s; and the struggle in the 1830s to shape a "free" society after legal emancipation. In each episode and period, Lambert shows how "political and cultural practice are . . . bound up with the fashioning of a new form of white colonial identity on the threshold of emancipation that was more racially supremacist in outlook" (9). He demonstrates that in many contexts, the "articulation of white colonial identities was . . . contested" as part of the broader process of cultural creolization, a process that involved Blacks and Whites as well as their offspring (211).

Lambert's use of documents and his interpretation of events are imaginative, and his arguments are coherent and clearly expressed. The only problem with this excellent book concerns Lambert's conceptualization of the "geography" of slavery in Chapter 1. Lambert, following Davis and others, conceives of the "slave world" and the "free world" as a dichotomy, which not only diminishes the roles of free people in the former and enslaved people in the latter but also implies that they are separate worlds, when, in fact, they are interconnected parts of the same world. ¹ The "spatialisation" (his word) of slavery and colonialism is misleading because even when some parts are spatially separated they are always socially, economically, politically, and culturally interconnected. The unity and persistence of social relationships that existed in far-reaching networks are crucial to understanding the nature and consequences of slavery and colonialism, and anti-slavery and anti-colonialism. To some extent, Lambert's view of slavery as "a geographical problem," though reflecting the view of many protagonists at the time, may hinder our understanding (11). Despite this issue of conceptualization, however, Lambert's data and interpretations frequently reinforce the interrelatedness of these historical networks, revealing some of the key social origins of our modern racialized culture. His book is important and...