In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean by Randy M. Browne
  • Nicholas Crawford
Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. By Randy M. Browne. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 288 pp. $45.00).

Randy M. Browne’s Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean opens with the harrowing tale of a dying slave named Harry being shut in a coffin while barely alive in the colony of Berbice (British Guyana). We know of the story only because another slave had lodged a complaint about the incident to an official known as the fiscal (later, the protector of slaves). Browne notes that the records kept by these officials form a “remarkable and little-used archive that distinguishes early nineteenth-century Berbice from other American slave societies” (2). Browne is not the first historian to consult these sources, but he exploits them more fully than any previous scholar in order to reorient our understanding of Atlantic slavery away from paradigms that have privileged “domination and resistance” (101) and toward a deeper understanding of slaves’ everyday “politics of survival” (per Vincent Brown’s 2009 exhortation in the American Historical Review). Surviving Slavery focuses on how slaves, masters, and colonial authorities negotiated the terms of labor, punishment, provisioning, and other quotidian issues. Boasting a rigorous methodology and deep archival research, Browne substantively contributes to an emerging scholarship on the metropolitan-driven reform project intended to “ameliorate” colonial slavery in the nineteenth-century British Caribbean. More broadly, Surviving Slavery yields fresh perspectives on several familiar and more recent themes central to the study of power dynamics within Atlantic slave societies.

While the offices of the fiscal and protector were not unique to Berbice (similar ones existed in Demerara, Trinidad, and St. Lucia), surviving documentation from there is singular in terms of the level of detail contained in enslaved testimonies. As such, the sources offer, in Browne’s words, an opportunity for “viewing slavery through the eyes of enslaved people themselves, or at least over their shoulders” (2). The introduction briefly invokes James Scott’s concept of the “hidden transcripts” of the oppressed as well as the practice of reading primary sources “against the grain,” but Browne does not dwell overmuch on theory and methodology. Rather, he foregrounds careful analyses of dozens of case studies in order to examine how slaves individually and collectively encountered legal and extra-legal systems of power in Berbice. Browne’s readings are often innovative; he excels particularly at teasing out the ways in which slaves [End Page 257] attempted to manipulate colonial officials (not always successfully) to render decisions in their favor.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the unique riverine ecology and Anglo-Dutch legal culture of Berbice. Chapter 2 focuses on two central aspects of amelioration reform: the regulation of masters’ private authority to punish (including prohibitions against the flogging of female slaves); and, the creation of rationalized regimes of slave crime and surveillance. Browne’s research on the connections between colonial and metropolitan penal reforms—such as the introduction of the treadmill and other supposedly “humane” punishments— nicely builds on Diana Paton’s scholarship on the formation of the carceral state in colonial Jamaica. Much of the chapter centers on the surprising frequency with which slaves in Berbice lodged official complaints against masters. Here, Browne demonstrates that slaves themselves, “rather than their supposed protectors, were the most committed to the amelioration of slavery” (56). Nonetheless, he persuasively concludes that by partially substituting masters’ private forms of discipline for state-sanctioned ones, “the law continued to function more as an instrument of planter power than as a force for slaves’ protection” (68).

Chapters 3 and 4 deepen our understanding of intra-slave relations and hierarchies through meticulous studies of drivers and domestic life, respectively. Complicating simplistic portrayals of drivers as sadistic proxies of masters’ power, Browne instead analyzes them as plantation “foreman,” or “go-betweens,” who employed strategies beyond physical coercion in order to maintain tenuous positions of authority such as negotiating with managers on behalf of slaves for “reduced workloads and increased rations” (75). Chapter 4 offers one of the most in-depth looks at the domestic lives of slaves found anywhere in the literature. In the...

pdf

Share