Explores the Enlightenment in the brutal slave societies of the colonial French and British Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution.

Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.

"Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans"--

An economic history of the Burton family of Norfolk, and their enslaved workers on the Chiswick sugar estate. While the Atlantic plantation economy covered vast areas of the globe and saw the largest forced movement of people in human history, any global history is the sum of myriad local stories. This book recounts one of them. It is the story of a Norfolk family, the Burtons, who owned the Chiswick sugar estate on the island of Jamaica. The family inherited the estate in 1788 and for fifty-eight years ran it from Norfolk and Suffolk as 'absentee' landlords. Drawing on new archival research in Britain, the United States and Jamaica, this book makes an important intervention to our understanding of key debates in the economic history of plantation slavery: the decline of the planter class, the importance of British abolitionism, the way in which plantations were operated, the mechanics of absentee ownership, and, importantly, the lives of the enslaved people whose exploitation sustained the entire system. Although the story of Chiswick's enslaved workers before the late 1820s is difficult to reconstruct, its traces can be gleaned from the accounting records and letters of the estate's owners. Their story illuminates the economic data and managerial letters and reveals that Chiswick's workers were crucial in shaping the history of the estate. From the 1830s the workers' activity became central, as they responded to emancipation by gradually asserting their rights. In the end, it was the action of the formerly enslaved workers that made the Burtons' continuing ownership of the Chiswick estate economically unviable. While the wider context of abolition made this possible, it was the response of these workers, including strike actions, which decided the fate of the absentee-owned Chiswick sugar estate. RICHARD C. MAGUIRE is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of History, UEA. He is the author of Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 (Boydell Press, 2021).

"Since the 1970s the study of gender issues as they relate to the Caribbean has gone through several reinterpretations. The respectable wife and mother stereotype was replaced by that of the 'powerful matriarch', which was in turn challenged by studies exposing the poverty and vulnerability of women, not only of Afro-Caribbean descent but Indian, white and coloured middle-class women. These reinterpretations signal a departure from the European, American and African feminist scholarship; indeed Caribbean feminists are beginning to accept that perhaps the 'Caribbean woman' does not exist. Caribbean Portraits makes its contribution by focusing on issues of gender ideology and identity. The articles in the collection ask simple but fundamental questions: Who are Caribbean women and who are Caribbean men? How do gender ideologies and stereotypes define them and how in turn do they respond? How are gender identities and relations formed and how do imperialism, capitalism, racism, race and culture affect these identities and relationships? "

The principal objective of this volume is to provide a survey of the development of historical understanding in the region. It also seeks to point to the future, setting out a new agenda and reflecting on the potential of new methods and interpretations.