Documenting Life “Beyond the Line”

Almost forty years ago, Jack Greene wrote a lengthy review essay highlighting the “sudden efflorescence of scholarship” that had recently appeared on the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Caribbean. Reviewing six new books by Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, Richard Dunn, Orlando Paterson, Richard Sheridan (author of two books), and Michael Craton and James Walvin in the American Historical Review, Greene argued that “we are now on the verge of achieving a more systematic and thorough understanding of the economic and social development of the Caribbean colonies than we have for any other segment of the early modern British overseas empire—including perhaps New England.”¹ Greene may have been a bit optimistic in his assessment, both because New England historiography continued to develop apace and because it took some time for scholars to build upon the foundations laid down by Dunn, Sheridan and the others. Indeed, the work of these scholars remained standard reading on graduate syllabuses for the next several decades, and they remain foundational for all who work on the British Caribbean. Nevertheless, the books reviewed by Greene helped reshape and broaden the geographic boundaries of colonial British America, the fruits of which have become especially apparent in the past two decades. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, an ever-increasing number of books and articles have appeared that focus on the British islands.² A rough calculation of the articles published since the 1960s in The William and Mary Quarterly, the field’s leading journal, underscores this development: whereas in each of the decades between 1960 and 2000, the Quarterly published between five and nine articles concerning the Caribbean, the first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the publication of twenty articles, and the 2010s have already had eighteen articles appear (some of which, it should be noted, concern Spanish, Dutch and French colonies in the region, a sign of a different kind of boundary broadening). Together, this new scholarship provides an increasingly sophisticated picture of the social, political, economic and cultural history of the islands in the roughly two centuries before the American Revolution. If the 1970s marked one explosion in scholarship, the first decades or so of the new millennium appear to be another such moment.

This four-volume collection of documents related to the early English Caribbean edited by Carla Pestana and Sharon Salinger thus arrives at an exciting period in Caribbean scholarship, and marks perhaps another milestone in its historiographic development. Numerous document collections aimed at scholars and students exist for colonial British America generally, but many have little or no material related to the islands. Those that do tend to reprint a few standard sources (excerpts from Richard Ligon’s seventeenth-century account of Barbados appear frequently).³ As far as I can tell, the Pestana and Salinger collection is the first to focus exclusively on England’s island colonies. The editors deserve recognition for this contribution alone, but additional praise is warranted for the fine job they have done. Pestana and Salinger have pulled together a diverse and interesting group of materials and provide clear and helpful introductions, extensive notes, and a good index to help guide readers looking for particular topics or places. The notes are especially useful, as they provide short summaries of historical people and places referenced in the texts, define contemporary usage of various words and legal terms, translate Latin phrases and, most helpfully, document modern names of the various plants and animals mentioned in many of the texts. Although the collection includes only printed materials, and thus most, if not all, the documents are accessible via Early English Books Online (EEBO) or other databases, the editorial apparatus—the introductory material for each individual text and the notes—make these volumes worth having in libraries and on bookshelves.

The four volumes begin with material published in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, well before the English established their first permanent colony at St Christopher in 1624, but a period in which the English...