A renowned historian offers novel perspectives on slavery and
abolition in eighteenth-century Jamaica
Between the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the onset of the
French Revolution in 1789, Jamaica was the richest and most important
colony in British America. White Jamaican slaveowners presided over a
highly productive economic system, a precursor to the modern factory in
its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of
capital investment and ouput. Planters, supported by a dynamic merchant
class in Kingston, created a plantation system in which short-term
profit maximization was the main aim. Their slave system worked because
the planters who ran it were extremely powerful.
In Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, Trevor Burnard analyzes the men
and women who gained so much from the labor of enslaved people in
Jamaica to expose the ways in which power was wielded in a period when
the powerful were unconstrained by custom, law, or, for the most part,
public approbation or disapproval. Burnard finds that the unremitting
war by the powerful against the poor and powerless, evident in the
day-to-day struggles slaves had with masters, is a crucial context for
grasping what enslaved people had to endure.
Examining such events as Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 (the largest slave
revolt in the Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution), the Somerset
decision of 1772, and the murder case of the Zong in 1783 in an
Atlantic context, Burnard reveals Jamiaca to be a brutally effective and
exploitative society that was highly adaptable to new economic and
political circumstances, even when placed under great stress, as during
the American Revolution. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution demonstrates
the importance of Jamaican planters and merchants to British imperial
thinking at a time when slavery was unchallenged.