Trevor Burnard

Slave naming patterns : Onomastics and the taxonomy of race in eighteenth-century Jamaica

An analysis ofthe naming patterns of Jamaican slaves in the mid-eighteenth century shows that whites considered blacks to be entirely different from themselves. The taxonomic differences between European naming practices and slave naming practices were both considerable and onomastically significant. Slaves could be recognized by their names as much as by their color. Slaves reacted to such naming practices by rejecting their slave names upon gaining their freedom, though they adopted methods of bricolage common to other aspects of Afro-Caribbean expressive culture.

Montpelier, Jamaica : a plantation community in slavery and freedom, 1739-1912

This volume examines Montpelier Jamaica, a plantation community, in slavery and freedom from 1739-1912.

'Rioting in goatish embraces': marriage and improvement in early British Jamaica

Marriages were relatively infrequent among the white population of early British Jamaica. This article examines the ideological implications of the failure of whites to marry with sufficient regularity to ensure that white population increase would allow Jamaica to become a settler society on the British North American model. It looks, in particular, at the tendency of whites to live in irregular unions, either with other whites or with black or brown concubines, and the effect that such arrangements had on perceptions of white Jamaicans as especially immoral. It connects these views with other discourses on settler societies in which improvement and frequent marriage were linked.

Planters, merchants, and slaves : plantation societies in British America, 1650-1820

As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men-men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because-to speak bluntly-it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy.

'Passengers only:' The extent and significance of absenteeism in eighteenth century Jamaica

Contemporaries and modern historians see absenteeism as a defining feature of British colonisation in the West Indies. Moreover, they have imbued absenteeism with a host of negative meanings, suggesting that it was the principal reason why West Indian colonies did not develop into settler societies as in British North America. Looking at Jamaica, this article examines the extent of absenteeism in the mid-eighteenth century and concludes that it was not as considerable as it has been presented in the literature. In addition, it assesses the long-term significance of the phenomenon and questions whether absenteeism was especially socially and politically deleterious.

Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina A New Look at Comparative Urbanization in Plantation Colonial British America

Customarily, studies of urbanization in early British America have concentrated on its northern mainland seaports. This article moves beyond a thirteen colonies perspective to define and explore a Greater Caribbean urban world, with Charleston, South Carolina, at its most northerly point. In particular, the authors’ comparison of the internal dynamic of Charleston and Kingston, Jamaica, reveals an urban world that was no more dominated by the demands of the plantation sector than the northern seaports were beholden to their agricultural interiors. Significantly, however, these rich internal urban economies relied on, and were profoundly shaped by, the institution of slavery. In light of these findings, the authors thus characterize this Greater Caribbean urban zone as constituting one strand of urbanization in a larger British Atlantic world that experienced an overall expansion and diversification of the urban form across the early modern period. Most specifically, Charleston and Kingston achieved a growth rate and an economic complexity comparable to other English-speaking towns through their embrace of enslaved people and their labor.

CARIBBEAN SLAVERY, BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF VENEREAL DISEASE

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike

Powerless Masters: The Curious Decline of Jamaican Sugar Planters in the Foundational Period of British Abolitionism

This essay focuses on the competing identities that came to be associated with British West Indians during the foundational period of British abolitionism. The essay evaluates the competing images of the West Indian planter class, paying particular attention to how place and time influenced political, cultural and racial perceptions of British planters in the Caribbean. The article addresses the impact that a rising tide of abolitionism in Britain had on perceptions of West Indian planters, and contends that planters became relatively powerless to define their own image in the face of growing abolitionist attacks on slavery.

Empire matters? The historiography of imperialism in early America, 1492–1830

Scholarship on European imperialism in the Americas has become increasingly prominent in the historiography of early America after a long period when the subject was hardly discussed. Historians have come to see that local experience in the Americas needs to be placed in a wider, comparative Atlantic context. They have realised that what united most peoples’ experiences in the Americas was that they lived as colonial subjects within colonies that were part of imperial polities. This article examines recent writings on European empires in the Americas, relating imperial history to related developments in fields such as Atlantic history. It suggests that renewed attention to imperialism allows historians to discuss in a fruitful fashion the relationship between power and authority in the formation of colonial societies and draws attention to the continuing importance of metropolitan influence in the articulation of colonial identities.

Evaluating gender in early Jamaica, 1674–1784

Gender was nearly as important as race in defining social relationships in early Jamaica. Gender was important because of Jamaicas peculiar demography. Its populationwas a predominantly male, migrant-dominated populationwith few children and even fewer old people. It suffered horrific mortality, making it impossible to reproduce populations by natural means. Its demographical characteristics contributed to the development of a particular form of patriarchy espoused by the dominant group in society, white male slaveholders. These men were hyper-masculine and enjoyed a culture in which the power of white men to satisfy their pleasures was unbounded (Burnard, 2004, pp. 83–4, 91–2). White men were free from the restraints usually put upon people in hierarchical societies. Jamaica resembled what was even more fully imagined in neighbouring Saint Domingue: it was a libertine colony where whites fashioned new identities outside of the bounds of traditional authority, morality and social and sexual codes (Garraway, 2005).White men were tyrants of excess, devoted, as their arch-opponent, the abolitionist and ex-West Indian James Ramsaywrote, to “the kingdom of I”. Theywere libertines who were as devoted to having sex with black women, pliant or otherwise, as they were to making money. White male dominance over dependants was exerted through sexual power and the exploitation of institutionalised authority. Their sexual assertiveness means that if one is