Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference by Jenny Shaw (review)

Shaw’s Everyday life in the Early English Caribbean is a unique and compelling account of Leeward Island life in the seventeenth century. The author succeeds in her ambitious aim to reanimate the lives of marginalized people in the English colonial system and push the narrative of the dominant elite into the background.

This book contributes to the increasing field of literature that deals with the History of the Atlantic World from the perspective of those people who were subjugated, manipulated, and largely erased from the records. It’s strength lies in the author’s skillful rummaging in and inspection of archival evidence from Caribbean, European and American archives in conjunction with an impressive scope of secondary data in fields as diverse as cultural anthropology, politics, archeology, and religion. For the academic reader, Shaw’s bibliography is well supplemented by an extensive set of endnotes with detailed citations and additional commentary relating to colonial practices and terminology. These indexed research materials permit the author not only to expose and question the fragmentary and often contradictory data, but also to reconstruct plausible connections between them.

The book focuses on servants, slaves, and dissenters whose actions and ideology were integral to the formation of colonial practices but whose voices were manipulated or obscured by the judgments of a privileged few. The accomplishment of this author is not only the recognition of these marginalized people, but also the re-animation of their experiences, thought processes, fears, and ambitions in a way that makes them human again. Thus the book is not only a testament to the archival traces of their lives but is also a memorial to their humanity—an aspect of their existence that has been all too often ignored.

The organization of the book in six meaty chapters deals largely with populations of Irish workers and African slaves, both men and women, and how they established group identities on Barbados. Yet the distinctive style of this book permits for the emergence of central ‘characters’—all actual people as evidenced by the demographic data—who the author follows through incredible (yet everyday) experiences of life in a colonial plantation. The author reconstructs experiences such as: their emotional and physical agonies in the middle passage; the indignities of sale and indenture; their allegiances and divisions among diverse populations forced to share living and working spaces; the dangers of the workplace; the deliberate masking of religious rites; their anxieties about an unknown future; and the ambitions of those who sought personal gain in a system that was designed to restrain, manipulate and devastate their desires.

The first chapter serves as an introduction for the reader to a diverse island populated by workers of different religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds whose status caused moral anxiety and political debate in England. In addition to its academic merit, this chapter has unanticipated emotive strength in the presentation of the two central ‘characters’ Pegg (a slave born on the island) and Cornelius Bryan (an Irish servant turned Plantation owner). In chapter two Shaw explains how both the slave and the servant were subject to a process of demographic categorization, along with the rest of the diverse population. Yet such historical data, i.e., the collation of the 1678 census of the Leeward Islands, is vividly presented, down to the smell of Governor William Stapleton “melting vermillion sealing wax into a spoon” as he prepares to return the data to London (44).

Chapter three focuses on the workers’ living spaces, described in one of the few documents that actually records their existence, as villages composed of Irish and African sections. Shaw compares the details in travel journals to what is known of the availability of workers’ food and clothing supplies to provide a peek into the realities of mealtime rations and banter among Irish and African workers in rare periods of...