Contemporary Authors

• Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 Routledge (New York, NY), 2002
• Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2004
• The Rutledge History of Slavery Routledge (New York, NY), 2011
• Slavery: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group (New York, NY), 2014
• Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 the University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2015
• (With John Garrigus) The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Dominique and British Jamaica University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2016

1. The plantation machine : Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica LCCN 2016053348 Type of material Book Personal name Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme), author. Main title The plantation machine : Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica / Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. Edition 1st edition. Published/Produced Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016] Projected pub date 1611 Description pages cm ISBN 9780812248296 (hardcover : alk. paper) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The plantation machine : Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica LCCN 2016286064 Type of material Book Personal name Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme), author. Main title The plantation machine : Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica / Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. Published/Produced Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2016] ©2016 Description 350 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780812248296 (hbk.) 0812248295 (hbk.) CALL NUMBER HD1329.C27 B87 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Planters, merchants, and slaves : plantation societies in British America, 1650 - 1820 LCCN 2015001142 Type of material Book Personal name Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme), author. Main title Planters, merchants, and slaves : plantation societies in British America, 1650 - 1820 / Trevor Burnard. Published/Produced Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2015] Description ix, 357 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm ISBN 9780226286105 (cloth : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 024417 CALL NUMBER HD1471.N7 B87 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. Slavery : critical concepts in historical studies LCCN 2013007420 Type of material Book Main title Slavery : critical concepts in historical studies / edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard. Published/Produced London ; New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis group, 2014. Description 4 volumes : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780415500357 (set : alk. paper) 9780415500364 (volume 1 : alk. paper) 9780415500371 (volume 2 : alk. paper) 9780415500388 (volume 3 : alk. paper) 9780415500395 (volume 4 : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER HT861 .S36 2014 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HT861 .S36 2014 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 5. The Routledge history of slavery LCCN 2010017402 Type of material Book Main title The Routledge history of slavery / edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard. Published/Created London ; New York : Routledge, 2011. Description ix, 358 p. ; 26 cm. ISBN 9780415466899 (hardback) 9780203840573 (ebook) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34145 CALL NUMBER HT861 .R68 2011 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HT861 .R68 2011 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 6. Mastery, tyranny, and desire : Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican world LCCN 2003022319 Type of material Book Personal name Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme) Main title Mastery, tyranny, and desire : Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican world / Trevor Burnard. Published/Created Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Description xii, 320 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0807828564 (cloth : alk. paper) 0807855251 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0410/2003022319.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/unc041/2003022319.html Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11615 Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13425 CALL NUMBER HT1096 .B86 2004 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER HT1096 .B86 2004 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 7. Creole gentlemen : the Maryland elite, 1691-1776 LCCN 2001034992 Type of material Book Personal name Burnard, Trevor G. (Trevor Graeme) Main title Creole gentlemen : the Maryland elite, 1691-1776 / Trevor Burnard. Published/Created New York : Routledge, 2002. Description ix, 278 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0415931738 (acid-free paper) 0415931746 (pbk.) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0d8z9-aa Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0651/2001034992-d.html CALL NUMBER F184 .B89 2002 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER F184 .B89 2002 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Trevor Burnard - http://trevorburnard.com/#/

  Trevor Burnard

  Home • About • Books • Publications • Blog • Contact

  Trevor Burnard is a Professor of American History and Head of School in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he has been a faculty member since February 2011. In addition to many articles, book chapters and edited books on the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, Trevor has written two monographs: one on Maryland, called Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite 1690-1776 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) and one on a Jamaican overseer and slave owner who lived between 1721 and 1786 entitled Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). He has published a study of plantation societies in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century British North America and the West Indies in the American Beginnings Series called Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). In June 2016, he published a co-authored comparative study of colonialism and slavery (with John Garrigus of University of Texas at Arlington) called The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

• Trevor Burnard - http://trevorburnard.com/#/about

  Trevor Burnard

  Home • About • Books • Publications • Blog • Contact

  Trevor Burnard has spent many years learning about and writing on the history of the British Atlantic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the history of plantation colonies in North America and the West Indies. He is a social historian, with interests in slavery and the demography of plantation societies in the Americas. He is a Professor of American History and Head of School in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he has been a faculty member since February 2011. Before that he led a peripatetic career, with jobs in five countries throughout the English-speaking world. After undergraduate education at the University of Otago in New Zealand , he had his graduate education at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he worked on a study of wealthy planters and merchants in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maryland. He took his first job at the University of the West Indies at Monain Kingston, aged 25, in 1987. Although he stayed at that institution for just two years, he developed an abiding interest in Jamaican history as a result of frequent visits to the Jamaica Archives in Spanishtown, driving an ancient VW Beetle in the days before the road between Kingston and Spanishtown became clogged with traffic. While at Canterbury he married Deborah Morgan, a librarian and inveterate shopper, whose inimitable fashion sense shames his lack of style. They had two children, Nicholas, now 23 and an IT consultant, and Eleanor, 19, in her second year in Arts at Monash University.

  In January 2000, the Burnard-Morgan family moved to Britain where Trevor took up a position as Reader in American History at the University of Brunel. In 2004, he moved to the University of Sussex, as Professor of American Studies, and in 2007 went to the University of Warwick. These moves meant living in Uxbridge, Rugby and Eastbourne, allowing for an appreciation of the beautiful Warwickshire landscape and the glorious South Downs. In January 2011, they moved again, to Melbourne, where Trevor became Professor of History and the foundational head of the school of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He had previously been head of the departments of Politics, History and American Studies at Brunel between 2001 and 2004, American Studies at Sussex between 2005 and 2007, and head of history at the University of Warwick in 2009-10. Before leaving to Warwick, Trevor a spent a wonderful year as the Archie Davis fellow at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle in North Carolina in 2008-9. The family lived in and enjoyed the many delights of the small college town of Chapel Hill.

  The years in Britain were very productive in regard to scholarship and to international activities relating to early America and the Atlantic World. In addition to many articles, book chapters and edited books on the Caribbean and the Chesapeake, Trevor wrote two monographs: one on Maryland, called Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite 1690-1776 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) and one on a Jamaican overseer and slave owner who lived between 1721 and 1786 entitled Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). He has just published a study of plantation societies in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century British North America and the West Indies in the American Beginnings Series called Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). In June 2016 he will publish a co-authored comparative study of colonialism and slavery (with John Garrigus of University of Texas at Arlington) called The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

  Trevor has been very concerned to develop the field of Atlantic history inside and outside the United States. He has been an active member of the British Group of Early American Historians and the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association. He was one of the founders of the European Early American Studies Association, and hosted in 2008 its third conference in Venice and helped fund its fourth conference in Paris in 2010. He was very involved also in the European Summer Academy in Atlantic History, which started in 2009 in Bayreuth and which has had meetings since in Galway, Hamburg and Lancaster. In 2009 he became one of the four starting chief editors of subject areas in the prize-winning Oxford Online Bibliographies. His subject area of Atlantic History now has over 250 entries on all aspects of Atlantic History. In 2010-11, he ran several workshops, with Mark Knights, in Britain and America on Reintegrating British and American History under a Mellon grant given to the Center for Renaissance Studies at the University of Warwick and the Newberry Library in Chicago. He will eventually write a book on this subject, as well as a book on slave women in early nineteenth century Berbice (British Guiana), for which he received an Australian Research Council Grant in 2011, and a social, demographic and economic history of Kingston, for which he got a Leverhulme Grant several years ago (with Kenneth Morgan of Brunel).

  Trevor remains a committed teacher, even as someone with a heavy administrative load. He has taught subjects in the whole range of American History, many areas of Atlantic history, some courses in British history, subjects in historiography and even a subject in contemporary Latin American International Relations. At the University of Melbourne, he currently coordinates and teaches into a level one subject called Age of Empires; contributes to a foundational Arts subject called Reason; gives lectures in Magic, Reason and New Worlds as well as Piracy; and coordinates and does some teaching in a masters’ subject called Latin America in the World. He does the usual round of professional service and film consulting and is on the editorial board of three journals. One of his proudest moments was being invited back by his former colleagues at the University of the West Indies at Mona to give the 2010 Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture. He was also delighted to spend the months of November and part of December 2015 as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Haute Etudes en Social Sciences in Paris.

  In 2015, he has gone to conferences and given talks at the University of Texas, Yale, The College of the Bahamas, the University of Wollongong, the OIEAHC conference in Chicago, Lancaster University, the University of Sheffield, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Glasgow, the University of Sheffield, and EHESS (Paris). In 2016, he has given lectures and attended conferences at the University of Notre Dame, the Institute of Historical Research in London and two conferences in Paris.

  Awards and Fellowships

  • Visiting Professor, November-December, 2015 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Social Sciences

  • Australian Research Council Award, 2015-17, Slavery in British Guiana in the Age of Abolition, 1804-1834, $138,400

  • Mellon Foundation Grant to Warwick-Newberry Center for Renaissance Studies Collaboration (co-applicant and organizer of one of four workshops) 2009-11 £291,114

  • AHRC Network Grant for Early European American Studies Association, 2008-10 £47,000, 2008-10.

  • Fellowship, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, University of Virginia-Monticello, July 2009.

  • Archie K. Davis Fellowship, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 2008-9 $50,000

  • Leverhulme Award on merchants and merchandising in Kingston, Jamaica, 1745-1780 (with Kenneth Morgan), 2002-4 £66,000

  • Fellowship, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, June-August 2002.

  • Fellowship, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, April-May, 1996.

  • Transformation Fellow, Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, 1986-87

  • Lovejoy Fellowship, The Johns Hopkins University, 1986-87

  • Fulbright Travel Grant, 1983-88

  • Commonwealth Scholarship, 1983

  Education

  • PhD in History at The Johns Hopkins University, 1989

  • M.A. in History, 1986
  The Johns Hopkins University

  • B.A. in History, First Class Honours, 1983
  University of Otago, New Zealand

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  Former Member of Staff: Professor Trevor Burnard
  Former Member of Staff: Professor Trevor Burnard
  Academic Profile
  Professor of History, University of Melbourne, 2011-present
  Professor of the History of the Americas, History and Comparative American Studies, University of Warwick, 2007-11
  Professor of American History and Head of Department, American Studies, University of Sussex, 2004-07
  Reader and Professor, History, Brunel University, 2000-04, Head of Department, Politics, American Studies and History, 2001-04
  Lecturer and Senior Lecturer, History, University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1990-99
  Lecturer, History, University of Waikato, New Zealand, 1989
  Lecturer, History, University of the West Indies at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica, 1987-89
  PhD, History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1988
  MA, History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1985
  BA, History, University of Otago, New Zealand, 1983

  Modules Taught
  The Atlantic World, 1492-1815 (AM214)
  The American Revolution (AM415)

  Selected Publications
  Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (Routledge: New York, 2002)
  Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (University of North Carolina Press and The Press University of the West Indies: Chapel Hill, London and Kingston, 2004).
  "The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655-1788," (with Kenneth Morgan), William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., LVIII (January, 2001), 205-228.
  "E Pluribus Plures: Ethnicities in Early Jamaica," Jamaican Historical Review XXI (2001), 8-22, 56-59.
  "`A Prodigious Mine': The Wealth of Jamaica Before the American Revolution Once Again," Economic History Review, LIV, 3 (August, 2001), 505-23.
  "Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XXXI:3 (Winter, 2001), 325-46.
  "`Rioting in Goatish Embraces: Marriage and Improvement in Early British Jamaica, 1660-1780," The History of the Family, 12, 1 (2007).
  "`Gay and Agreeable Ladies': White Women in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica," Wadabagei, 9, 3 (2006), 27-49
  "The Founding Fathers in Early American Historiography: A View from Abroad," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser. LXII (2005), 745-64.
  "Hearing Slave Voices: The Fiscal's Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo," (with John Lean) Archives 27, no. 106 (2002), 37-50
  "`Passengers Only:' The Extent and Significance of Absenteeism in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," Atlantic Studies, 1, 2 (2004), 178-195.
  "Empire Matters? The historiography of imperialism in early America, 1492-1830," History of European Ideas, 33, 1 (2007), 87-107.
  "Evaluating Gender in Early Jamaica, 1674-1784," The History of the Family, 12, 2 (2007), 81-91.
  “The British Atlantic World,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009).
  “The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Ethnicities in Seventeenth Century Jamaica,” in David Richardson, Suzanne Schwarz and Anthony J. Tibbles, eds., Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2007), 139-64.
  “Where the Boy’s aren’t: Women as Reluctant Migrants but Rational Actors in Early America,” (with Ann Little) in Jay Kleinberg ed., Revisioning Women’s History, (Rutgers University Press, 2007).
  “Freedom, Migration and the Negative Example of the American Revolution: The Changing Status of Unfree Labor in the Second British Empire and the New American Republic,” in Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, December 2004), 295-314.
  "`Do Thou in Gentle Phibia Smile': Scenes from an Interracial Marriage, Jamaica, 1754-1786," in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene C. Hine, eds., Free Women of Color in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2004).
  "`The Grand Mart of the Island': Kingston, Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century and the Question of Urbanisation in Plantation Societies," in Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, eds., A History of Jamaica, From Indigenous Settlement to the Present (University of West Indies Press: Kingston, 2002)
  "Not a Place for Whites? Demographic Failure and Settlement in Comparative Context, Jamaica, 1655-1780," in Kathleen Monteith and Glen Richards, eds., A History of Jamaica, From Indigenous Settlement to the Present (University of West Indies Press: Kingston, 2002).
  "`A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners ...': The Manning Divorce of 1741 and Class, Race, Gender, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," in Verene Shepherd, ed., Working Out Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (St Martin’s Press: London, 2002).

  Research
  I am interested in the history of early British America, including the British West Indies, before ca. 1790 and in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Particular interests include slavery, social history and demography, imperialism, economic and business history, and gender. My work over the last decade has been especially concerned with identity in the New World in the eighteenth century and with how settler societies have been formed, or have failed to form in plantation societies in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake. In addition, I have been concerned with recreating the social and cultural world of slaves and masters in early Jamaica, using in particular the rich diaries of Thomas Thistlewood as a primary source. My current projects are a monograph on early American historiography, a co-authored book comparing mid-eighteenth century Jamaica and Saint Domingue with John Garrigus of the University of Texas, Arlington, the Routledge History of Slavery, co-edited with Gad Heuman, of Warwick, and a social, demographic and economic history of white and black in Jamaica 1655-1780.

  Trevor Burnard

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  email: WarwickHistory@warwick.ac.uk
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  Head of School and Professor of History, University of Melbourne
  ProfileArticlesActivity
  I am interested in the history of early British America, including the British West Indies, before ca. 1790 and in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Particular interests include slavery, social history and demography, imperialism, economic and business history, and gender. My work over the last decade has been especially concerned with identity in the New World in the eighteenth century and with how settler societies have been formed, or have failed to form in plantation societies in the Caribbean and the Chesapeake. In addition, I have been concerned with recreating the social and cultural world of slaves and masters in early Jamaica, using in particular the rich diaries of Thomas Thistlewood as a primary source. My current projects are a monograph on early American historiography, a co-authored book comparing mid-eighteenth century Jamaica and Saint Domingue with John Garrigus of the University of Texas, Arlington, a social, demographic and economic history of white and black in Jamaica 1655-1780, and a historiographical study of the state of early American history in the twenty first century.

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9/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Masters of their universe
Ira Berlin
The Nation.
279.18 (Nov. 29, 2004): p23.
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text: 
LANDON CARTER'S UNEASY KINGDOM: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation.
By Rhys Isaac.
Oxford. 423 pp. $35.
MASTERY, TYRANNY, AND DESIRE: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World.
By Trevor Burnard.
North Carolina. 320 pp. Paper $19.95.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, Africa, Europe and the Americas came together in the Atlantic to create new
economies, new cultures and new societies. At the center of those societies was the plantation, a radically new unit of
production that employed slave labor to grow exotic commodities for sale in distant markets. Atop the plantation
strode a new class, men of enormous wealth and power, who--with good reason--preferred the title "master." For the
next 400 years, they were masters of the universe.
The masters' rule extended to all corners of the Atlantic world. The shadow that their great houses cast over nearby
slave cabins reached as far as the distant metropoles, so that few were untouched by the planters' enormous presence.
During the past three decades historians have unraveled much of the history of what Eugene Genovese once called
"the world the slaveholders made." Of late, historians have focused on the subalterns of the plantation world: slaves,
free people of color, white nonslaveholders and even plantation mistresses. Perhaps spurred by the era of Republican
dominance and a reassertive ruling class, historians have given new attention to the plantocracy.
Of course, there have been numerous studies of the planter class, as well as biographies of individual planters.
However, they have produced little agreement as to its character. The result is a farrago of contradictory ideas, with
visions of seigniorial patriarchs dueling with notions of upward-striving capitalists. On the one hand, planters have
been depicted as perennial hotspurs--hard drinking, fast-living men whose hair-trigger tempers demonstrated little
foresight and generated even less systematic thought. On the other hand, they have been portrayed as cultivated
gentlemen, caring stewards whose hospitality became famous and whose book-lined drawing rooms oozed great
ideas. The planters' residence amid black slaves and their consequent fear of enslavement, according to some
historians, bred a fierce independence that made planters into great apostles of liberty, if only for white men. One
famously wrote that "all men are created equal." Rejecting the idea that slavery was the great leveler, others have
seen planters as hidebound aristocrats, and their commitment to chattel bondage as a prop for traditional hierarchies.
A plethora of new studies of the plantocracy offers an opportunity to revisit these masters of the universe. Two of the
best are Rhys Isaac's Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation and
Trevor Burnard's Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World.
Each offers fresh insights into the character of the plantocracy and its evolution. Because they draw upon two
9/8/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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different slave societies and address men of such different temperaments, they provide an opportunity to think
broadly about the plantocracy.
Carter and Thistlewood presided over slave plantations at the pinnacle of the planters' 400-year reign, the mideighteenth
century. They received--as they expected--the full measure of wealth, privilege and respect due their place.
Indeed, in many ways, they represented the finest attributes of the planter class, its driving ambition, commitment to
human advancement (for whites, at least) and willingness to take responsibility for the world it had created.
Planters believed they represented the best, not merely for themselves but also for those they governed. For the most
part, they were learned men, knowledgeable in letters and science. Carter read deeply in the literature of antiquity--
naturally in the original Greek and Latin--as well as in the new novels of sentiment. He named his home plantation
Sabine Hall and constructed one of the great libraries in colonial America. Thistlewood's taste ran toward science,
although the works of Milton and Pope found their way onto his bookshelf. Both men were devoted to the ideas of
the Enlightenment. As compulsive improvers, they perused agricultural journals for more productive seeds and
bettered their herds with blooded stock. They introduced new techniques to their plantations, reorganizing work
routines in a manner that would make Frederick Taylor proud. As David Brion Davis long ago noted, the plantation
represented not the encrusted sloth of the ancient regime but the sleek efficiency of the nascent capitalist order. Carter
and Thistlewood, each in his own way, were cheerleaders of human progress.
Both men exhibited intelligence, shrewd judgment and, when challenged, admirable courage. Carter condemned the
"Byg Men" who ran Virginia's legislature as their personal fiefdom, refusing to partake in the corruption that passed
for business as usual. Thistlewood, for his part, staked his independence from the great sugar magnates who
dominated Jamaican society. To their dismay, they learned he was not a man with whom they could trifle. If
independence of mind and love of liberty were prized ideals in the eighteenth century--as well as our own--it would
be hard to find better exemplars.
Yet the perversities of slave society bent these otherwise commendable traits into heinous pathologies. Enjoying a
monopoly of violence and knowing their own success rested on a willingness to employ it without compunction, the
planters became twisted personifications of the tyranny they professed to despise. Carter became, at best, a dyspeptic
curmudgeon, obsessed with his failed patriarchy; Thistlewood, a monstrous sociopath. But as Isaac and Burnard
underscore, the real price was paid by the men and women who fell under the planters' rule.
Landon Carter and Thomas Thistlewood shared much as members of the planter class, but it is hard to imagine two
more different individuals. The distinction derived, in large measure, from differences between eighteenth-century
Virginia and Jamaica, but the diverse personalities of men of radically different origins magnified those distinctions.
Landon Carter was born into the immense privilege of Virginia's first families in 1710. The son of Robert "King"
Carter, perhaps the richest man in the colony, he was educated by tutors at home and then, at age 9, sent to study in
London. He returned eight years later to nurse his aged father and, when the old man died, the young Carter inherited
his portion of the family estate. In the years that followed, Landon expanded his patrimony, so that eventually his
domain became a small empire that reached into all corners of the Chesapeake and numbered some 400 slaves.
Like other grandees, Carter married into another prominent Virginia family (the Wormeleys). When his first wife
died, he picked a second from another of Virginia's first families (the Byrds), and when she died he did so yet again
(this time a Beale). As he formed and re-formed his domestic life, Carter entered Virginia politics. Like most of the
gentlemen of his class, Carter despised the hurly-burly of an electoral system that forced him to appeal for the votes
of dirt farmers, whom he held in utter contempt. But he did what was necessary and eventually won a seat in the
Virginia General Assembly. He became an early and strong advocate of colonial rights and a minor figure in the
struggle for American independence. Along the way Carter kept a diary, which Isaac--whose earlier study of
eighteenth-century Virginia won a Pulitzer Prize--suggests might be hailed as a "literary classic," if only it had been a
work of fiction. As history, sadly, it is only another source for the study of the past.
Isaac's praise is perhaps a bit too fulsome, but there is no doubt about the importance of Landon Carter's diary as a
window on the planter class and Carter himself. It reveals a man who saw himself as a link in the long chain of
patriarchy, whose history stretched back to time immemorial. For Carter, as for many members of his class, the
patriarchal ideal justified his place in society, rationalized his actions and gave meaning to his life. As the father of
"his people"--which included his slaves as well as his immediate family--he offered care and protection in return for
deference, obedience and service, even if they had to be extracted by force. Unfortunately for Carter, he arrived at the
pinnacle of patriarchal authority at the moment the ancient order of the ruling fathers was being undermined by the
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forces of modernity, not simply in the world at large but in his own household. Perhaps even more disturbing for
Carter, he half-wittingly joined in the assault, cutting the ground from under his feet. His was, as Isaac declares, an
"uneasy kingdom."
Carter's frustrations were played out in every corner of his domain. Carter considered himself an affectionate
husband, a loving father to his children, a devoted master to his slaves and--when he obtained public office--a dutiful
leader. Yet his efforts were for naught. Carter lived surrounded by unruly ingrates, who continually sabotaged his
attempts to do right by them and himself. Although his various wives seemed to have been silently submissive, his
children constantly challenged his best efforts, disregarding his advice and dismissing his authority. His son would
have no part of his father's disciplined world of work and study, and instead gambled, whored and drank to excess.
Like Carter's daughter, he married against his father's wishes, and when Carter half-heartedly threatened to disinherit
both of them, they and their spouses rebuked him in a most cutting manner. Carter's grandson picked up on his
parents' disdain and mocked his grandfather. When Carter cuffed the disrespectful brat, his daughter-in-law viciously
tongue-lashed the old man.
Carter similarly found that his authority carried little weight with his slaves. Wielding the lash, Carter could force
them to work. The lash was ubiquitous on his plantation. According to Isaac, the Carter diary is a catalogue of
violence reported in the most routine, offhand manner. "They have been severely whipd day by day," reads one
unaffected entry, as Carter hurries to the more important matter of manuring. Still, his "people" stubbornly rejected
his rule. At every opportunity, they challenged him--malingering, breaking tools, plundering the storehouse and then
selling the booty for their own benefit. They took to the woods--in effect, striking--when their labor was needed most.
When the Revolution provided an opening, key members of his enslaved workforce abandoned him for British lines,
making it clear that they too regarded his putative fatherhood as a sham.
For Carter, the traitors to patriarchal rule were everywhere. His inability to bend his "children" to his will left him in
a chronic state of dissatisfaction. The cantankerous patriarch spent endless hours pouring "indignant stories of
disobedience" onto the pages of his diary. Isaac rightly calls it a narrative of subversion.
The ultimate failure of Carter's patriarchal rule came not at the hand of traitors within his household but from his own
hand, and Isaac documents the delicious irony in fine detail. A jealous guardian of his liberties and those of his class,
Carter became an early and ardent defender of American rights against the imposition of Crown tyranny. Slowly he
was drawn into the growing opposition and finally into open rebellion against the monarchy, the very model of
patriarchal rule that he so cherished. Even as he denounced the King and his ministers, he fulminated against the
antimonarchical and regicidal impulse of the emerging republicanism. Landon Carter came to understand that he was
"Sabine Hall's George III."
The parallels between the struggle within Carter's household and those within the British Empire can be easily
overdrawn into a vast psychodrama. But Isaac is too good a historian to detach Carter's predicament from the
material and ideological realities of the revolutionary crisis. In arguing "the symbolic pulling down of patriarchal
monarchy as the keystone of the cosmic arch of public and private authority," Isaac appreciates that patriarchy
withstood that blow and the many that followed. With American independence, the father King was quickly replaced
by the Founding Fathers. Still, Isaac's larger point that the Revolution was a central event in the decline of patriarchy
is incontrovertible.
As Carter's world deteriorated under assault from his children, his slaves and his own antimonarchical politics, he
compensated for his double loss--his own and the King's--by turning the full weight of his patriarchal energies on
Nassaw, his personal attendant and most intimate companion. He "formed now a great project of redeeming Nassaw
from the fires of hell." Isaac's rendition of the struggle between Carter and Nassaw is nothing short of brilliant, for it
demonstrates in close detail the havoc patriarchy wreaked upon its subjects. A man of considerable parts, Nassaw
was a healer of great skill. Carter, who regularly doctored his people, had enormous respect for Nassaw's ability as a
physician, for, in truth, Nassaw was one of the finest surgeons in colonial Virginia. Carter's determination to save
Nassaw from the bottle was more than matched by Nassaw's powerful resolve. The struggle was intense. Carter had
Nassaw "tied Neck & heels all night" and threatened to "send him to some of the islands." Nassaw petitioned, prayed
and promised, but the requisite change was not forthcoming. Again Carter whipped, and Nassaw gave "the solemn
Promise." When Nassaw's pledges came to nothing, Carter--certain that he was "justified both to God and man"--
pressed ever harder. Although Nassaw survived, the old doctor paid an extraordinary price. As Isaac concludes, "the
social and psychological cost ... to Nassaw would never be reckoned."
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Those who lived in the shadow of Thomas Thistlewood also suffered, and the price they paid was far higher than
anything Nassaw and his compatriots endured. Thistlewood's diary is an extraordinary document, not merely because
it reports two of the great events in Jamaican history--Tackey's revolt in 1760 and the great hurricane twenty years
later--but because of its extensive account of the daily life of a middle-sized planter. While it provides none of the
self- conscious moralizing and endless rationalizations that can be found in Carter's journal, it offers concrete
evidence of a planter's behavior and--by extension--beliefs. Burnard, who teaches at England's Brunel University,
employs it brilliantly to penetrate the mind of a man of unfathomable complexity.
Unlike Landon Carter, Thomas Thistlewood was born with no silver spoon. The son of an English tenant farmer, he
received a good education and little else in the Lincolnshire community where he grew to manhood. Unable to
duplicate his father's meager achievement, Thistlewood doubtless would have remained a struggling member of the
struggling class had it not been for the opportunities afforded by the rise of the plantation. Burnard demonstrates how
the growth of slavery was a godsend for ambitious Englishmen of the middling sort. Arriving in Jamaica in 1750 at
age 29, this "foot soldier of imperialism" began his upward climb through the ranks of overseers and petty
slaveholders to become the owner of a small "pen," a Jamaican designation for an estate for raising livestock.
Thistlewood became a significant figure in his corner of Jamaica. He held a commission in the parish constabulary
and was a magistrate of the local court. In time, he ranked in the top fifth of Jamaican planters in wealth.
Thistlewood's extraordinary garden became a showcase for visitors to Jamaica, and his reputation as a horticulturalist
spread beyond the island. While Thistlewood neither enjoyed Carter's extraordinary wealth nor gained his great
eminence, at his death in 1786 he had achieved every bit of the success and recognition he desired.
The differences between Carter and Thistlewood were more than degrees of wealth and status. They reveal the stark
differences between slavery in Jamaica and Virginia and consequent differences between the planters of the islands
and mainland. Within days of Thistlewood's arrival, he witnessed a slaveholder severely whipping a runaway and
then rubbing pepper, salt and lime juice into the open wound. When an unfortunate fugitive died, the planter cut off
his head, stuck it on a pole and burned the body. Two weeks later Thistlewood watched some 300 lashes laid on a
mulatto overseer "for his many crimes and negligences." Another slave was "hang'd upon ye lst tree immediately
([for] drawing his knife upon a White Man) his hand cutt off, Body left unbury'd."
A quick study of planter rule, Thistlewood was soon wielding the whip with the best of Jamaica's plantocracy. Not
content with the conventional mechanisms of terror, he invented his own gruesome tortures, such as the Derby's dose,
in which one slave defecated into the mouth of another, who was then gagged. Thistlewood "Picketted Douglas'
Coobah on a quart bottle neck, till she begged hard," and punished his slaves by forcing them to urinate into one
another's mouths. It did not take long for Thistlewood to become a most inventive sadist.
Thistlewood also learned that his white skin gave him unimpeded access to black women, and he quickly took
advantage of his prerogative. During his first year in Jamaica, he slept with thirteen black women on fifty-nine
occasions, keeping track of who, when, where and how with great precision. In the nearly forty years that followed,
Thistlewood would have sex with 138 women--nearly all of them black slaves--3,852 times, according to his own
obsessive accounting. While he was a man of substantial--although, Burnard insists, not inordinate--sexual appetites,
Thistlewood's sexual predation was not merely a means to satisfy his desires. He employed rape to demonstrate his
absolute dominance by demoralizing his slaves and destabilizing slave society. Although he attempted to prostitute
his victims by sometimes paying them small sums, rejecting Thistlewood's advances was not a realistic option for
these women or those who dared protect them.
Thistlewood ruled by unmediated force, awing slaves with what Burnard calls "fierce, arbitrary, and instantaneous
violence." Beyond their subordination, he cared little about their lives. He evinced no interest in the patriarchal
ideology that drove Landon Carter. Carter's attempt to reform a slave drunkard would be inconceivable on
Thistlewood's pen. While Carter desired to incorporate his slaves into his larger family, Thistlewood simply wrote his
slaves out of the social contract. As Burnard notes, Thistlewood was not a racist of the scientific sort who condemned
black people as biologically inferior. He lived and worked closely with slaves. He knew them as men and women. He
appreciated differences in their abilities and personalities and employed those distinctions for his own purposes.
However, he believed his rule could only be secured by mind-boggling terror.
Burnard exposes the monstrous results of Thistlewood's rule, but he also notes the ironies. Thistlewood's vicious
physical assaults insulated his slaves from the kinds of psychological imposition of Carter's patriarchal regime.
Thistlewood allowed slaves their own family and religious lives to the extent they could establish them within his
regime. His slaves were freed from the kinds of imposition that made Nassaw's life a living hell. Thistlewood's slaves
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enjoyed a measure of independence Nassaw might have envied. Again ironically, while Thistlewood rarely entered
into his slaves' lives, he himself became part of a slave family.
Early in his stay in Jamaica, Thistlewood established a lifelong relationship--some thirty-three years--with his slave
housekeeper, Phibbah, although he continued to force himself upon other women. Together they had a son, and upon
his death he granted Phibbah her freedom. If Thistlewood ever showed affection for another human being, it was for
Phibbah. Phibbah used her relationship with Thistlewood to her own advantage and that of the larger slave
community, but she also appeared to have deep affection for Thistlewood. When they were apart, Thistlewood noted-
-perhaps projecting his own feelings--that she was in "miserable slavery."
The relationship of Phibbah and Thistlewood, like that of Carter and Nassaw, demonstrates the difficulty of
penetrating the mind of the master. Historians--Isaac and Burnard among them--have explained these divergent styles
of mastership from the extraordinary differences of the demography and economy of a sugar island like Jamaica and
a mainland colony like Virginia. Where slave masters lived surrounded by an overwhelming black majority--some 95
percent of the population in Thistlewood's portion of the island--whose numbers were constantly augmented by
newly arrived Africans, planters believed that only raw terror could sustain their rule. In Virginia, a white majority
and an African-American population allowed for other strategies. But Isaac's and Burnard's close reading of the
diaries of Carter and Thistlewood make it evident that there is more involved than these structural differences.
Yet emphasizing Carter's struggle with his fellow physician and intimate companion and Thistlewood's relationship
with his lifelong mistress also has its dangers. While much of the masters' lives is revealed in these telling
relationships (and those of other slaves who lived and worked in close proximity to their owners), Carter and
Thistlewood did not know most of their slaves, perhaps in part because their slaves did not want to be known. As
Burnard emphasizes, slaves might find real rewards in living close to their owners--if only because it saved them
from the harsh, often killing, regimen of field labor--but there were dangers too. Many slaves found it the better part
of wisdom to keep their distance and take their chances in the fields. Most, of course, did not have a choice. These
anonymous men and women shaped the masters' world as much as the Nassaws and the Phibbahs.
Rhys Isaac's penetrating interpretation of Landon Carter and Trevor Burnard's extraordinarily thoughtful rendering of
Thomas Thistlewood suggest how much more is to be learned about those who ruled the universe in the age of the
plantation. The planters' achievement in expanding wealth and creating new polities has been rightly acknowledged;
their legacy of inhumanity remains to be addressed.
Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, is the author, most recently, of Generations of
Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Belknap).
Berlin, Ira
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Berlin, Ira. "Masters of their universe." The Nation, 29 Nov. 2004, p. 23. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA125911749&it=r&asid=a2680ba0bedbffc976c96ff4aa6d91f7.
Accessed 8 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A125911749

Burnard, Trevor. Planters: plantation societies in British America, 1650-1820. Chicago, 2015. 357p index afp ISBN 9780226286105 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780226286242 ebook, contact publisher for price

53-3155

HD1471

CIP

From around 1650 to 1800, the plantation system in the Americas developed as a profitable colonial enterprise. Burnard (Univ. of Melbourne, Australia) examines its internal history during this period and presents it from three contemporaneous perspectives; that of the imperial metropole, which welcomed plantation wealth and colonial settlement; the non-plantation segments of colonial America, which often resisted plantation hegemony; and the enslaved labor that created the plantation wealth. Burnard's synthesis recognizes the distinctive regions of plantation America--the Chesapeake tobacco economy, the Carolina Low Country rice economy, and the Caribbean sugar economy--while also recognizing systemic structural regularities. These included powerful local elites, destructive and violent slave regimes, and wealth that benefited local elites and metropoles but not an entire colony. Burnard especially treats Jamaica, Virginia, and the effects of the American Revolution. He demonstrates that the plantation system was, from an imperial perspective, an economic success, even though its wealth was only a tiny proportion of the metropolitan economy. The author does not intend this demonstration of economic rationality to mitigate the social, demographic, and environmental devastations of the system that have been so well documented. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--R. Berleant-Schiller, University of Connecticut

Berleant-Schiller, R.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Berleant-Schiller, R. "Burnard, Trevor. Planters: plantation societies in British America, 1650-1820." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Mar. 2016, p. 1061. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA445735575&it=r&asid=6f78fbdb5219690ce3e9aae564505c90. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
Thomas W. Krise
Early American Literature. 40.1 (Winter 2005): p202.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 University of North Carolina Press
http://uncpress.unc.edu
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Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World.

TREVOR BURNARD. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 320 pp.

"The main value of this book is to introduce to a modern reader the world of an ordinary white Englishman living in a historically interesting society" (259). Such is Trevor Burnard's modest claim for his engrossing study of the 37-volume--two-million-word--diary that Thomas Thistlewood diligently maintained from 1748 until his death in 1786. For 37 of those years, Thistlewood was, first, a slave plantation overseer and, later, the owner of his own slave "pen," or farm, in Westmoreland parish in far western Jamaica. The diary provides one of the most detailed accounts of the operation of slavery in "one of the most extensive slave societies that ever existed" (7). Burnard's study complements Douglas Hall's work on the diary (In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 17501786, London: Macmillan, 1989) and gives the student of early American and early Caribbean culture a chilling and fascinating picture of the richest British colony in the New World at the very height of its wealth and importance. It is also a key text for the study of African culture in the New World: "No other eighteenth-century diary contains the wealth of material that Thistlewood's diaries offer about Africans and people of African descent." He notes that enslaved Africans "did gain some measure of self-expression within an overall structure of fierce repression, social disruption, and constant uncertainty. They developed a rich cultural life, exemplified by their language, music, and religion" (16).

The name of Thistlewood is perhaps best known because his diaries are as frank about his sexual life as Pepys's or Boswell's. Burnard has analyzed the data thoroughly: "Thistlewood engaged in 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 women in his thirty-seven years in Jamaica" (156). All but two of these partners were enslaved women. Burnard points out that, although Thistlewood's diary suffers from an "extreme lack of self-consciousness" or reflection, it does provide an extraordinarily detailed view of exactly how white Jamaicans exercised their brutal tyranny over the lives and bodies of their slaves (26). Besides a rather full analysis of Thistlewood's sex life, Burnard closely examines the lives of four women with whom Thistlewood had the most intimate and long-lasting relationships. In doing so, he gives his reader an example of how one might try to read between the lines--to overcome the tyranny of a master's point of view--and uncover usable knowledge of the lives and cultures of the Africans upon whom the Jamaican and the British imperial economies depended.

Burnard also provides a close study of several of Thistlewood's male slaves, including his mulatto son, John. Burnard makes a strong case for the value of the diary to the project of fully understanding the nature of American slavery and its influence on the culture not just of the slaves themselves but also white settler society. Burnard's exposition on "white egalitarianism" helps answer Samuel Johnson's famous question, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" By reference to mountains of details, Burnard demonstrates not only that Jamaican whites were even more passionate defenders of their liberties than were their North American cousins but also that the great wealth of Jamaicans helped make their peculiar commitment to individual liberty more influential throughout the English-speaking world. In his excellent introduction to the colonial society into which Thistlewood immigrated from his native Lincolnshire, Burnard shows just how rich Jamaica was:

In 1774, per capita white wealth [in Jamaica] was 2,201
[pounds sterling], with white men having average wealth amounting
to 4,403 [pounds sterling]. By contrast, wealth per free white was
42.1 [pounds sterling] sterling in England and Wales, 60.2
[pounds sterling] in the thirteen colonies, and just 38.2
[pounds sterling] in New England. The average white in Jamaica was
36.6 times as wealthy as the average white in the thirteen colonies,
52.3 times as wealthy as the average white in England and Wales,
and 57.6 times as wealthy as the average white in New England. The
richest Jamaicans had holdings that would have been emulated only
by the wealthiest London merchants and English aristocrats. (15)
Thistlewood's diary details exactly how all this wealth was amassed--and exactly how Jamaica was a land of enormous opportunity for someone like Thistlewood, who was an impecunious second son of a tenant farmer in a remote corner of the North of England. The description of the ways in which Thistlewood managed to manipulate his slaves to ensure his power is well balanced with the descriptions of the ways in which slaves and masters negotiated power. Burnard points out that Jamaica's policy of requiring slaves to produce their own food in provision grounds (a practice not used in the smaller eastern islands) actually helped the whites maintain power in a colony noted for having the greatest disparity between free and slave--a 1 to 9 ratio of whites to blacks. Slaves became dependent upon their masters to protect their property from the depredations of thieves of all colors and statuses.

Burnard notes that Thistlewood was an eyewitness to Tackey's Revolt of 1760, which Burnard describes as "the greatest slave rebellion in the eighteenth-century British Empire" and which, "in terms of its shock to the imperial system" (10) was surpassed only by the American Revolution. He also notes that Tackey's Revolt "would not be equaled until the Jamaican rebellions of 1831: and 1865 and the Indian Mutiny of 1857" (170). Thistlewood's notes on the progress of the rebellion (as well as his account of the aftermath of the devastating hurricane of 1780--the worst on record) vividly show how Jamaican slave society actually worked. Despite his full awareness of the enormous threat to his property and life, Thistlewood armed his own slaves during the revolt to allow them to defend their (and his) property. Burnard notes many examples of masters violating strict laws that attempted to govern the movement and behavior of the great mass of slaves, thus demonstrating how fluid life in a slave society could be, how relatively limited was the white population's control over the everyday lives of the slaves, and how the slaves were able to maintain their own cultural practices and engage in behaviors that opposed the will of their hated masters. Burnard makes a distinction between "slave resistance" and "slave opposition," briefly citing Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. He argues that most behavior by slaves that seemed to resist the power of the masters is better understood to be "opposition" rather than "resistance," since resistance would require reference "outside the system of domination that encloses them" (212). In his close analysis of several individual slaves, Burnard offers examples of different responses to the enslaved condition: everything from accommodation to persistently running away to "impudence" to despondency and suicide. In the chapter devoted to four of Thistlewood's women slaves, Burnard suggests reasons for the low fertility and high mortality among enslaved Jamaicans. He also points out that analyses of slave society demographics should note that white mortality exceeded black mortality throughout the period of slavery in Jamaica (17).

Burnard's account of the details of life in a slave society can be quite literally disgusting. Thistlewood's passionless diary entries detail the utter barbarism of slave masters' conduct, including routinized rape, horrendously severe floggings, and grotesquely creative punishments. Burnard's painstaking counting of such details can make for painful reading. On the other hand, the book provides a wealth of suggestions for ways in which Thistlewood's diary might be used to resolve disputes over such issues as the nature of racism (he notes that Thistlewood never denigrated blacks as a group and differed in important ways from Edward Long's vicious "scientific racism" in his famous 1774 History of Jamaica), the reasons for the failure of slave revolts (he shows in detail how whites' maintenance of their slaves on the brink of ruin made them deeply dependent on their masters for the survival of themselves and their families), and the profitability of the slave system (he draws on his earlier work on sugar colony economics to inform his study of Thistlewood).

Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire should be essential reading for anyone interested in early American history and culture--especially the culture of slave societies and the history of the Caribbean. Trevor Burnard's notes provide a wealth of suggestions for further study (although a bibliography and a more thorough index would make all this treasure more accessible), and his text is full of hints about ways to continue to mine Thomas Thistlewood's valuable if grotesque diary for many years to come.

THOMAS W. KRISE United States Air Force Academy

Krise, Thomas W.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Krise, Thomas W. "Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World." Early American Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2005, p. 202+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA129812470&it=r&asid=47675ee02cc8d15db9959c6ac86b665f. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776
S. Max Edelson
Journal of Social History. 38.3 (Spring 2005): p823.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
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Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776. By Trevor Burnard (New York: Routledge, 2002. ix plus 278 pp. $23.95).

This lucid, superbly argued study of "the lives of moderately well off gentleman at the edges of the Atlantic plantation world" reconstructs the social and material contexts that anchored the identities and framed the behaviors of Maryland's elite (p. vii). Culling 461 individuals from a sample of more than 6,400 estate inventories, Burnard certified membership in Maryland's elite for those who died with more than 650. He leaves no documentary stone unturned in scrutinizing these privileged 461. By the close of the colonial period they became more planters than merchants, more native born than immigrant, and more content to enjoy the accomplishments of their fathers than to expand their command over land and slaves or risk inherited capital on volatile commercial ventures. As this elite stabilized in the early eighteenth century, its members tended to look to one another as they married, lent and borrowed money, and presided over Maryland society as governing officials. Elite society formed a loose circle of affinity in which "shared common values" of class position drew like to like but from which few white aspirants were rigorously excluded. In their wills, they eschewed the "conscious empire building" of some of their counterparts in Virginia and instead spread their wealth among sons and daughters, following a "family policy" whose goal was to "broaden rather than deepen their lineage" (p. 163). Maintaining the next generation's access to productive property allowed its members to sustain material lives that were genteel but rarely lavish. Burnard thus puts these 461 exemplar elites in circulation with their society and finds them to be relentlessly local in their sensibilities and interested primarily in perpetuating their comfortable status.

This portrait of continuity and provincialism, whose key points Burnard establishes through exhaustive statistical work, supports incisive critiques of prevailing claims about class, sensibility, and behavior in the colonial Chesapeake. Historians have taken Jefferson's declaration that Chesapeake planters "'were a species of capital annexed to certain mercantile houses in London'" at face value. But Jefferson, in both his extravagance and the extent of his indebtedness, was extraordinary. Only one in five elite Marylanders contracted debts during their lifetimes that forced the selling of land or slaves. About the same proportion owed money to British creditors, preferring to extend credit to fellow elites as an important sideline to planting and become debtors to those they knew and trusted. Planters' obsession with the "destructive moral impact of debt" on the eve of the American Revolution was therefore less a matter of translating widespread experience with economic dependence into a political grievance that it was an ideological position from the outset, one that targeted London merchants as symbols of metropolitan privilege compared to the neglected interests of American colonists (pp. 61-2).

Burnard challenges another staple of the historiography by claiming that the high mortality rates of the seventeenth century did not improve during the eighteenth. Far from imperiling the elite's ability to sustain family fortunes and status, the ongoing early deaths of patriarchs resolved a tension within elite society, allowing for the generational turnover of modest amounts of heritable wealth without much conflict between fathers and children. The interpretive weight that historians have placed on an easing demographic crisis in the Chesapeake that does not appear to have taken place leads Burnard to a trenchant point about interpreting the pace of social change. Suspicious of historians who amplify scant evidence to show sweeping challenges to and reassertions of patriarchal rule, Burnard finds that "family life remained essentially the same through the colonial period" (p. 128).

Making a case for stasis over change does not slight attempts to give meaning to social practice, but rather places new emphasis on one particular moment of social construction: the point at which members of Maryland's nascent elite (and, by extension, elites in each of the colonies with the exception of fractious New York) ceased to compete actively for authority and cemented their status through reproduction. The changes that distinguished members of the European-born elite from their native-born offspring constituted a critical watershed that Burnard analyzes through the concept of creolization. As any historian who has made recent casual use of the term within earshot of anthropologists will know, the use of creolization to describe intercultural exchange beyond the experiences of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean has come under intense critical scrutiny. Burnard steers clear of the pitfalls of this appropriation and instead focuses on a basic cultural divide perceived by inhabitants of the Anglo-American world on both sides of the Atlantic that was thought to separate those native to Britain from those born and raised in the American colonies. Bound by an editorial convention that should probably change in its wake, Creole Gentlemen capitalizes the term "Creole" as if it were an unshakable ethnic affiliation. Throughout the book, however, Burnard makes better use of it as a descriptive attribute of identity much like "settler" or "planter," one of several points of reference around which wealthy Marylanders defined themselves.

As much as those born in Maryland bore distinctive social profiles and possessed economic sensibilities that reflected a creole mentalite, the "development of provincial consciousness" was a cultural reckoning that took place in a transatlantic setting rather than something bred in the bone. Burnard shows that although British criticism of native-born colonials stung the pride of those who aspired to gentility, creoles were prepared by their social experiences to defend their provincial society. As determined as they were to shake the stigma of being born and raised "abroad," provincialism was a status that Maryland elites share with most British subjects in Europe and America. By suggesting that creoles bypassed "simple imitation" and engaged in a process of "creative selection and adaptation of the metropolitan forms most suited to colonial existence," Burnard has laid the groundwork for a resolution of this paradox of colonial identity, without fully developing the significance of his approach (p. 217). He suggests that some members of this elite were "attempting to create an indigenous culture with local meanings" but leaves his subjects hovering some-where over the Atlantic "best by cultural contradictions" and "deeply ambivalent about both the parent culture and its colonial variants" (pp. 226, 212). On the whole, this fine work of scholarship demonstrates how effectively empirical methods can be put into the service of explaining the complexities of identity formation in colonial British America.

S. Max Edelson

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Edelson, S. Max

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Edelson, S. Max. "Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776." Journal of Social History, vol. 38, no. 3, 2005, p. 823+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA132292663&it=r&asid=4be7422a539e114fc56b5860995a0d08. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820
Chris Evans
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p902.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820. By Trevor Burnard. American Beginnings, 1500-1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. x, 357. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-28610-5.)

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 the British, not because they were fearful of slave rebellion, but because Loyalism suited them well. Having an influential voice at Westminster, white West Indians saw no need to join their continental cousins. In that, Burnard suggests, they were mistaken. Had they joined the Revolution, they would have enjoyed the protections that the U.S. Constitution granted to slaveholders in the South. By staying loyal, West Indian slaveholders became vulnerable to abolitionist campaigns in Britain. Had they joined the Carolinians in 1776, Burnard suggests, the Caribbean system of slavery would have survived the 1830s, and, we must presume, American slavery would have perhaps survived the 1860s.

A short review cannot do justice to all the themes of this arresting and provocative work. Readers will find much to applaud and much to take issue with. No one will feel their time has been wasted by reading Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820.

CHRIS EVANS

University of South Wales

Evans, Chris

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Evans, Chris. "Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 4, 2016, p. 902+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA470867665&it=r&asid=45570b0ec32505861958972737478cf8. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

Burnard, Trevor. The plantation machine: Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica
R. Berleant-Schiller
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 54.5 (Jan. 2017): p763.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Burnard, Trevor. The plantation machine: Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica, by Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus. Pennsylvania, 2016. 348p Index afp ISBN 9780812248296 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780812293012 ebook, $45.00

Eighteenth-century Jamaica was an economic center of the British Empire, as was Saint-Dominique of the French Empire. Both island colonies were plantation societies; that is, their internal economy, slave labor regimes, land use, and social structure were all functional elements necessitated by the capitalized monocrop production of a tropical world commodity, principally sugar but also coffee. In this comparative history of the two colonies, the authors argue that the material and structural conditions of the "plantation machine" in each outweighed their religious, legal, linguistic, and other cultural differences, as well as differences in metropolitan trade policy. This argument is familiar, and indeed has been demonstrated for many areas within the Atlantic plantation region and--most relevant to this study of the Greater Antilles--for the Lesser Antillean islands in the 17th century. What is new here is the collaboration of well-known specialists on each island, the comparative perspective on a familiar plantation theme, and discussion of differences. Especially notable are the chapters on the effects of the American Revolution and of the Seven Years' War, including the rise of a new kind of racist social organization. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.--R. Berleant-Schiller, University of Connecticut

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Berleant-Schiller, R. "Burnard, Trevor. The plantation machine: Atlantic capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 2017, p. 763+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485989029&it=r&asid=279fe0b62fdb30678b0d7b1053a6dfc2. Accessed 11 Sept. 2017.

Berlin, Ira. "Masters of their universe." The Nation, 29 Nov. 2004, p. 23. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA125911749&it=r. Accessed 8 Sept. 2017.

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