Caribbean Exchanges

Susan Dwyer Amussen. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Although the bulk of this monograph concerns life in the Caribbean--specifically the English island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica--it is ultimately a work of English history. Amussen studies the ways in which English encounters with Caribbean slavery altered and shaped subsequent legal and cultural conceptions of liberty, race, and gender.

Slavery was not widely practiced in England prior to the colonial era, and so therefore neither English law nor English custom accounted for the institution when English colonists and adventurers in the Caribbean began turning to African slave labor in order to meet labor needs in the new colonies. The institution of plantation slavery had already been developed by other European powers, from whom the English acquired both the template for turning slave labor into wealth through the production of cash crops (sugar, in this case), and often the slaves themselves. Yet at the same time, these colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen, and tried to align both their notions of social hierarchy and English "liberties" with the challenge of managing slave labor and exercising control over the slave population.

It was not an easy, nor an obvious, process. Amussen admits that it is still a mystery as to why the English adopted slave labor; this book outlines the process but cannot answer the mystery as to why it happened. Traditional English forms of labor relations were based on mutual regard and reciprocity; the aggressively profit-oriented form of industrial capitalism which developed in the sugar islands undermined those bonds, even as wealthy planters tried to maintain the paternalist facade.

But ultimately, the slave society which developed began to cleave along lines of race and gender--the latter informing the former as Black men were denied the freedom and self-determination of masculine identity even as Black women were denied the emerging standards of femininity which became to be exclusively identified with White women. The trope of the delicate, upper-class white women who was desired by the dark-skinned 'other' enters into the Anglo world here.

Amussen goes on to argue that this experience with slavery would inform and shape the industrial Britain's attitude towards the growing factory working class. But her story also has much to say about the early Atlantic world, as her Caribbean slave holders are in ongoing communication with the broader Atlantic world as well as the mother country.