Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain's largest and most valuable
slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to
maintain its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled
insight into Jamaica's vibrant but harsh African and European cultures
with a comprehensive examination of the extraordinary diary of
plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood.
Thistlewood's diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in
graphic detail how white rule over slaves was predicated on the
infliction of terror on the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood
treated his slaves cruelly even while he relied on them for his
livelihood. Along with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood
maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the
society's rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard's hands,
Thistlewood's diary reveals a great deal not only about the man and his
slaves but also about the structure and enforcement of power, changing
understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social
class, race, and gender, as well as sex and sexuality, in the plantation
system.