22 The New York Review
Speech and Slavery in the West Indies
Fara Dabhoiwala
The Freedom of Speech:
Talk and Slavery in the
Anglo- Caribbean World
by Miles Ogborn.
University of Chicago Press,
309 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper)
Tacky’s Revolt:
The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
by Vincent Brown.
Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press,
320 pp., $35.00
Island on Fire :
The Revolt That Ended
Slavery in the British Empire
by Tom Zoellner.
Harvard University Press,
363 pp., $29.95
In June thousands of people, provoked
by the Black Lives Matter protests
sweeping America, took to the streets
in the United Kingdom to demonstrate
against racism in their own country.
One target of their anger was stat-
ues honoring British men of the sev-
enteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries who prospered by enslaving
and oppressing others, among them
one in Bristol of Edward Colston that
was pulled down and thrown into the
harbor. It’s hardly surprising that many
such monuments exist, for the apathy
of the English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish
toward their historical complicity in
slavery has always been as striking as
their indifference to its enduring legacy.
Compared to the United States, and de-
spite the work of many outstanding Brit-
ish (and non- British) historians,^1 slavery
remains a marginal subject in the pub-
lic imagination, its reality and conse-
quences mentally separated from the
identity and experiences of the nation.
Across the British Isles there are also
numerous public monuments to the
abolition of the slave trade in 1807—
permanent celebrations of national en-
lightenment and redemption (though
in reality, British slave- owning contin-
ued for decades and was phased out
only gradually after 1834). As far as I
know, only a single recent sculpture,
on the quayside of the former slaving
port of Lancaster, simply honors the
millions of victims. It’s as if every me-
morial in postwar Germany primarily
commemorated the liberation of the
death camps and the ousting of the
Nazis, rather than the Holocaust itself.
Slavery was foundational to Britain’s
prosperity and rise to global power.
Throughout the eighteenth century
the empire’s epicenter lay not in North
America, Africa, or India but in a hand-
ful of small sugar- producing Caribbean
islands. The two most important—tiny
Barbados and its larger, distant neigh-
bor Jamaica—were among the most
profitable places on earth. On the eve
of the American Revolution, the nom-
inal wealth of an average white person
was £42 in England and £60 in North
America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200.
Immense fortunes were made there and
poured unceasingly back to Britain.
This gigantic influx of capital funded
the building of countless Palladian
country houses, the transformation of
major cities like London, Bristol, and
Liverpool, and a prodigious increase in
national wealth. Much of the growing
affluence of North American ports like
Boston, New York, and Philadelphia
was likewise based on trade with the
West Indies. Sugar became Britain’s
single largest import, and the craze for
it revolutionized national diets, spend-
ing habits, and social life—not least be-cause of its association with that other
newly fashionable drug, tea. Between
1700 and 1800, English consumption
of sugar skyrocketed from about four
pounds per person per year to almost
twenty, roughly ten times as much as
that of the French.All this abundance, luxury, and so-
cial progress at home derived from the
brutal exploitation of huge numbers
of enslaved African men, women, and
children across the Atlantic (thousands
of whom were brought over to the Brit-
ish Isles as well): by the eighteenth
century, Britons were the world’s pre-
eminent slave traders. As its defend-
ers liked to point out, slavery was not
new. It had been taken for granted in
biblical and classical times, and prac-
ticed by virtually every previous civili-
zation. It was common in Africa itself.
But there had never been anything like
the plantation culture that the British
helped pioneer in the Americas, where
so many slaves were held in proportion
to the population of free people.
And even within this new system of
mass bondage, the West Indian sugar
islands were exceptional. In Virginia,
which had by far the most enslaved peo-
ple of the thirteen mainland colonies,
they made up perhaps 40 percent of all
pre- revolutionary inhabitants: whites
always remained in the majority. Only
in South Carolina and French Louisi-
ana, which were much more sparsely
populated, did the balance ever tip
slightly the other way. In eighteenth-
century Jamaica, by contrast, enslaved
men and women vastly outnumbered
their captors. In some rural parts ofthe island the proportion was as high
as fifteen to one; overall, more than 90
percent of the population was held in
bondage.
As atrocious as the treatment of the
enslaved was in North America, it was
incomparably worse in the Caribbean.
West Indian sugar estates were not just
the largest agricultural businesses in
the world but also the most destructive
of human life. By the mid- eighteenth
century, North American planters no
longer needed to import many cap-
tive Africans, because their existing
slave populations increased through a
natural surplus of births over deaths.In the West Indies, by contrast, men
and women were worked to death so
ruthlessly that this transition to de-
mographic self- sufficiency never took
place. As most plantation slaves sur-
vived only for a few years, very large
numbers of fresh imports were con-
tinually needed to maintain the work-
force—let alone increase it, as the
colonists steadily did. Of the roughly
six and a half million Africans taken
as slaves across the Atlantic by Euro-
peans in the eighteenth century alone,
around 350,000 were sent directly to
the North American mainland. During
the same period, more than two million
were shipped to the British Caribbean.
(A further million or so ended up on
the nearby French islands, primarily
Saint- Domingue—present- day Haiti—
whose demography and economy ran
on similar lines.)^2
These extraordinary circumstances
raise obvious questions about how this
uniquely West Indian brand of slav-
ery was imposed, experienced, and
resisted, day to day, month to month,
year to year. One answer that leaps
out immediately is the sickening de-
gree of extreme violence that Carib-
bean slaveowners routinely inflicted on
their human chattels. In Barbados in1683, an “old Negro Man” was moved
to anger about the bloody flogging of
some other slaves: for his “insolent
words” he was burned at the stake. At
other times, black people were judi-
cially electrocuted, maimed, beaten to
a pulp, decapitated, drawn and quar-
tered, roasted alive over “a Slow fire,”
or publicly starved to death while sus-
pended in iron cages (“gibbeted”).
Beyond such horrific formal pen-
alties lay the lawless universe of ev-
eryday enslavement, in which whites
tortured, killed, raped, and mutilated
black people with complete impunity.
Thomas Thistlewood, an ordinary,
bookish young Englishman who came
to Jamaica in 1750 to seek his fortune,
left a matter- of- fact diary of his three
and a half decades as a rural overseer
and small- time slaveowner. He consid-
ered slaves to be rational human beings
and treated them as individuals. Like
almost all West Indian whites, he also
took for granted that they needed to be
frequently and harshly punished. He
flogged them incessantly and savagely,
rubbing salt, chili peppers, lemon juice,
and urine into the scarified flesh to in-
crease their suffering. At his whim,
any man or woman might be scourged,
branded, chained, dismembered, or ex-
posed naked in the stocks day and night,
covered in treacle and swarmed by bit-
ing flies and mosquitoes. Sometimes he
would then force another slave to def-
ecate into the injured victim’s mouth,
and gag it shut for “4 or 5 hours.” In
his diary are also recorded 3,852 acts
of rape or other forced intercourse
with almost 150 enslaved women.
Other than in the thoroughness of his
record- keeping, he seems to have been
entirely typical—if anything, relatively
restrained—in his behavior.^3White Caribbeans shared the general
European conviction that black people
were inherently inferior. But ironically
their primary justification for perpe-
trating such relentless sexual, mental,
and physical abuse was a deep fear of
their slaves. Driven by their own greed
and maltreatment to import more and
more Africans, the tiny bands of white
islanders were acutely conscious of
being surrounded by a potentially over-
whelming force of hostile captives. In
Jamaica especially, this huge numerical
disparity gave enslaved people much
more autonomy than they ever gained
on the North American mainland.
They lived in large groups, and their
spiritual and cultural practices were
largely free of white oversight. They
fed themselves, and much of the white
population as well, by growing produce
on land given to them to cultivate. As
well as possessing and inheriting such
individual plots, livestock, and goods,
Jamaican slaves often kept and carried
guns, moved around the countryside
unsupervised, and congregated at their
own Sunday markets to trade, drink,
and talk. In addition to a small popula-
tion of free blacks, the island was alsoFires during the Haitian Revolution; engraving by Jean-Baptiste Chapuy, circa 1791WorldHistoryArchive/Alamy(^1) For example, Catherine Hall, Trevor
Burnard, Diana Paton, Olivette Otele,
David Eltis, David Richardson, and the
outstanding collaborative efforts of the
Centre for the Study of the Legacies of
British Slave- ownership at University
College London.
(^2) These are estimates—from the invalu-
able scholarly database slavevoyages
.org—of the numbers who embarked
from Africa, about a million of whom
subsequently perished on the cross-
ing. They specify only the first port of
disembarkation: many enslaved peo-
ple later transported to the North and
South American mainland were also
initially brought to the Caribbean.
(^3) See Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyr-
anny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood
and His Slaves in the Anglo- Jamaican
World (University of North Carolina
Press, 2004).