Jamaica in the Age of Revolution by Trevor Burnard (review)

During recent decades our understanding of colonial British America has been transformed. Whatever our terminology or conceptual apparatus—perhaps Atlantic World, "vast early America" or global history—the thirteen mainland colonies that would eventually become the United States are now understood as existing with and dependent upon much larger histories and contexts. Trevor Burnard has done as much as if not more than any other historian to privilege the British Caribbean in this new history, demonstrating the enormous significance of these colonies in the histories of Great Britain and North America. For decades he has placed Jamaica at the centre of this narrative, and in some ways this book is the culmination of his efforts to persuade British and American historians of the significance of this one island, despite its loss in imperial stature from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

By reassessing the American Revolutionary period from a Jamaican perspective Burnard introduces a new chronology and a new context for our understanding of this era. He bookends this study with two pivotal events, Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, and the massacre on the Jamaica-bound slave ship the Zong in 1781 (and the ensuing court case of 1783). This was the period when Jamaica was at its most profitable for planters and the Crown, and in Burnard's telling it was not British policies of taxation or troop deployment that affected Jamaica as they did the mainland colonies. Slaveproduced wealth was the sine qua non of Jamaica, shaping every decision and policy of the island's governing elite.

Historians have been increasingly concerned with the place and significance of race and slavery in the history of the American Revolution and Founding, as demonstrated by the furor over the New York Times' 1619 Project. It is no surprise that slavery was central to Jamaica during the later eighteenth century, and here and in his previous work Burnard demonstrates the success and wealth of the Jamaican plantocracy during this period rose in direct relation to the brutalization and exploitation of enslaved Africans. If Jamaica was a jewel in Britain's crown then we need to think of it as a blood diamond. But what is new here is the chronology and what it represents. Burnard argues that Jamaican Whites responded to the threat embodied in Tacky's Revolt not by improving the condition of the enslaved, but rather by working bondspeople harder than ever, importing more and more people from Africa, and consolidating Jamaica's brutally racist society by demoting and excluding free People of Colour from the benefits of White society and citizenship. White Jamaicans appeared to believe that Tacky's Revolt had demonstrated that their system was sufficiently strong to withstand the threat of slave rebellion, and that brutal and savage violence was the way to keep this system strong and powerful.

Burnard demonstrates that British commercial and governmental interests remained committed to and supportive of the Jamaican plantocracy during these years, fully cognizant of its absolute dependence on the brutalization of the enslaved. This is an important point, for it runs counter to the supposed British opposition to slavery which—according to American Patriots in the 1770s and historians in the present, helped unite North Americans in revolution. Jamaica demonstrates, Burnard shows, that Britain during the 1770s was most decidedly pro-slavery. Some recent work on the American Revolution align with Burnard here, such as Robert G. Parkinson's The Common Cause: Creating race and nation in the American Revolution (2016), in which Parkinson argues that the notion of British anti-slavery was more of a contrivance of Patriots in search of inter-colonial unity than it was an actual British policy.

Thus, throughout the years of the American War Britain remained firmly committed to Jamaica and the slave system upon which it depended. This began changing, Burnard suggests, in the year the war ended when the Zong case created a cause célèbre and helped create huge British popular support for abolitionism. Ever...