:Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo‐Jamaican World

Scholars of colonial Jamaica, and of American slavery, know Thomas Thistlewood as a notoriously cruel slave master. The diaries that Thistlewood kept throughout his thirty-six years on the island are some of the most important documents for plantation life in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thistlewood carefully recorded his daily exercise of power over slaves with methods that often employed extreme force. Using Thistlewood's diary as his chief source, Trevor Burnard has written a careful study of the social, intellectual, and cultural worlds of a “brutal slave owner, an occasional rapist, and torturer” (p. 7). But the resulting book is far more important than that. With Thistlewood as his prism, Burnard has also drawn a vivid and penetrating portrait of late eighteenth-century Jamaica. In his examination of Thistlewood, Burnard also raises larger, troubling questions about the link between modernity and moral progress. Thistlewood's life was a success story. The second son of an English tenant farmer, he had few prospects at home. Like others of his class, Thistlewood looked to the empire to make his fortune. After a voyage to India on a merchant ship proved disappointing, Thistlewood (then twenty-nine years old) sailed to Jamaica in 1750. A free white man in a society comprised overwhelmingly of black slaves, Thistlewood, despite his humble background, was a welcome guest in planters' homes. He was offered employment as an overseer on several plantations. Accepting one such job, Thistlewood became a member of the island's master class, a position he maintained for the rest of his life. At his death in 1786, Thistlewood owned thirty-four people. His entire estate was assessed at twenty-four hundred pounds, which while only slightly above average for white Jamaicans, exceeded the typical Englishman's estate by more than fifty fold.