Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780807855256)

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.

Author: Trevor Burnard
ISBN-10: 0807855251
ISBN-13: 9780807855256
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Language: English
Published: 05/24/2004
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.28h x 5.94w x 0.82d

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 11/18/2004 pg. 43
Choice 01/01/2005 pg. 912