Scotland and the Caribbean, c. 1740-1833: Atlantic Archipelagos by Michael Morris (review)

On a recent visit to Jamaica, the current British Prime Minister called for the Caribbean nation to ‘move on’ from the ‘painful legacy’ of slavery, carefully emphasising Britain’s role in abolition, and avoiding any concessions of culpability or reference to reparations. In a culture of denial and ‘willed amnesia’ at the level of the British state, Michael Morris’s excellent book is especially timely in its recognition of the vast, and enduring, significance of slavery to British imperial prosperity and national cohesion, and to the contemporary Atlantic world. Scotland and the Caribbean: Atlantic Archipelagos is part of a growing field dedicated to examining the cultural connectedness of Scotland and the Caribbean, attending to what Carla Sassi has diagnosed as the ‘collective amnesia’ of Scotland around that relationship, and working through the wider implications of such connections for colonial history and contemporary Britain.

This detailed work of cultural history focuses on Scottish-Caribbean cultural encounters in the century bracketed by a symbolic point of incipient Scottish ‘sojourning’ in the West Indies in 1740, and the year of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. The ‘Atlantic Archipelagos’ of the title refers to an elaboration of Markman Ellis’s idea of an ‘archipelagic poetics,’ applying the archipelagic paradigm not only to the Caribbean context but to Scottish writers contributing to a key moment of British nation-building. Morris refines work on pastoral and georgic forms in the period by examining the specific role the Caribbean plays for writers attempting to bridge the violence and vicissitudes of the preceding century in Scotland, to a ‘New Augustan’ British imperial culture and plantation economics, through meticulously historicised readings of James Thomson, James Grainger, and James Ramsay. This idea of such forms mediating political, economic and social transitions also recurs in relation to slavery, ‘improvement,’ abolition and emancipation. Mediation also features in the chapter on Robert Burns, which invokes Pierre Nora to argue for the poet as a lieu de mémoire of Scottish-Caribbean relations, interrogating the pastoral of the ‘national bard’ against the foment of pro-slavery and abolitionist sentiments in the late eighteenth century. The critique of Burns’s ‘free labour ideology’ fits within the book’s wider attention to labour conditions, particularly the function of slavery and its cultural mediations in establishing conditions for capitalist production, which constitutes a rich anthracite seam of Marxist thought running throughout.

Morris’s incisive criticism is complemented by a broad range of resources, which include archival records, visual arts, performance texts, even barometers of contemporary sentiment in the form of message boards and online polls. The book benefits greatly from this expansive range, which supplements both the historical and literary-critical elements of the work. Eschewing the relative safety of strict disciplinary parameters in favour of a mode of cultural history works well, in part because plenty of space is dedicated to establishing a theoretical framework, and also because the thesis is cleanly realised and digressions are relatively rare. The particular methodology of the book also demands a resolution of the tension between the productive national orientation of Scottish cultural studies and the generative transnational frameworks which have been applied to the Atlantic: the archipelagic, Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Linebaugh and Rediker’s ‘Revolutionary Atlantic’, and Wallersteinian world systems theory. That resolution is generally achieved, balancing Scottish national specificity with transnational contingencies, and a healthy scepticism towards exceptionalist arguments, seen for example in a subtle correction to Alexander Murdoch. Echoing Morris’s own call for an antagonistic politics to catalyse social change, a more antagonistic endorsement of the national as a critical paradigm might have been a worthwhile inclusion amongst the other ‘theoretical orientations’ on display here, set in the present context of British constitutional consternation. That may well lie outside the book’s purview, especially considering the foregrounding of the transnational. However, the book certainly provides for those with a more explicitly national orientation, such as the historicising of black Scotland in the...