Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 by Trevor Burnard (review)

This is a book that exhilarates. It is also one that will vex many readers. The exhilaration stems from Trevor Burnard’s geographical reach and conceptual ambition. This is a bold, bravura performance that ranges from the Chesapeake to Demerara. As the author insists, before the American Revolution sundered the American South from the Caribbean they formed a single plantation zone. Burnard’s subject is therefore the British plantation world in the round, although Jamaica, the richest spot in eighteenth-century Anglophone America, takes center stage.

This book is billed as a study of planters, merchants, and slaves. Much is said about planters, rather less about merchants, and very little about the enslaved—not as historical actors, at least. A decisive role is reserved for quite another group, one that does not feature in the book’s title: white managers and overseers. The “large integrated plantation” that first appeared in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century presented major organizational problems (p. 1). The difficulty of restraining “traumatized, hostile, and potentially violent African slaves” kept workforces small (p. 27). Scaling up plantation agriculture required supervisors who were thoroughly inured to violence. The timing of plantation growth is therefore explained not by the supply of slaves but by the supply of non-elite whites willing and able to terrorize black captives. Military veterans were ideally suited to the role, for they had themselves experienced the savage discipline of European armies. The foundation of the plantation world in Barbados was thus linked to the civil wars that engulfed the British Isles in the 1640s. The subsequent consolidation of the plantation system on Jamaica and its extension across South Carolina and the Chesapeake are explained by the arrival of a new cohort of thuggish white men, schooled in violence during the cycle of European warfare that began in 1688. Yet the evidence for this connection is, the author concedes, “scanty and inconclusive,” and his attempts to link developments in the plantation world to Europe’s early modern “military revolution” are strained because there is no agreement on what (and when) the military revolution was (pp. 27, 78).

The British plantation world was built on unremitting violence, but, Burnard insists, it worked. It grew by leaps and bounds and made planters stupendously rich. It was a volatile world, but it was not, Burnard maintains, threatened by slave rebellion. On the contrary, the plantation system was secure. There were no internal forces capable of bringing about its overthrow. Indeed, for all the volatility of the plantation world, Burnard portrays it as strangely serene. Planters were anything but anxious. Slave resistance was never likely to succeed, and the slaves knew it. But did they? Eighteenth-century Jamaica was dominated by freshly imported Africans. The plantation system was not for them something adamantine that had stood for generations; it was a freshly discovered enemy, just as it was for their contemporaries in Saint Domingue.

As this critique might suggest, Burnard has little time for slave agency. Historians, he suggests, can take a Hobbesian or a Panglossian view of slave society. Burnard is, with regret, a Hobbesian, seeing “physical grief” and “spiritual terror” at every turn (p. 272). But to counterpose Dr. Pangloss to Hobbes is a false dichotomy. One of the great merits of this book is its insistence that the plantation world was an artificial thing. It did not arise unbidden; it was created. To think that a world that was protean in so many respects offered no contingent possibilities whatsoever to the enslaved is at odds with this underlying premise. Besides, as the worldview of the slaves is scarcely broached, it is a little early to settle on either a Hobbesian or a Panglossian outcome.

Some of Burnard’s most striking observations come in his analysis of the American Revolution. Jamaican planters did not join the revolt against...