2025/05/01 by Simon P. Newman · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #Canadian Identity and History #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1215/15476715-11609789
openalex publication_date 2025/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
In the Legacies of British Slavery project, Catherine Hall transformed the history of slavery in modern Britian, revealing that slave ownership permeated all ranks of British society, and demonstrating how Britons benefited from the labor of enslaved people. The Legacies project has played a key role in driving a reckoning with slavery in institutions such as universities, the National Trust, the Church of England, and even banks and financial institutions, which over the past decade have all recognized the significant role of slavery in their own histories. Lucky Valley takes that work forward by focusing on Edward Long and his History of Jamaica (1774), the single most significant defense of racial slavery as an institution based on what Long described as a natural racial hierarchy. Lucky Valley is a milestone work and a remarkable achievement. Hall’s interrogation of the context and foundations of Long’s work illuminates how slavery shaped the lives of Black and White people both then and now and is a clarion call for action to remediate the inequalities and injustices that slavery has created.It is all but impossible to write about British slavery in the eighteenth century without quoting Edward Long, using his extensive descriptions of Caribbean slave society and his justifications of racial slavery. Born in Cornwall and trained as a lawyer, Long went to Jamaica following the death of his father in 1757; there he assumed control of the family’s Lucky Valley plantation. Long was soon embedded in the Jamaican White elite (Hall follows Long’s text in capitalizing White), serving as the governor’s private secretary, marrying into the wealthy Beckford family, and becoming speaker of the Jamaican assembly. After twelve years he returned to England, where he lived well on the profits earned by the enslaved people he owned, while publishing numerous newspaper articles and pamphlets based on his experiences in Jamaica. Writing with the authority of a successful owner of a sugar estate, Long emerged as one of the most significant commentators on all aspects of life and society in Jamaica, and the British Caribbean more broadly. His three-volume History of Jamaica, or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of that Island (1774) is filled with information about all aspects of Jamaican life and society, including the history of English settler society and the laws and institutions they created, as well as the crops grown on the island and their significance for Britain. But interspersed with this material is a great deal of opinionated commentary in which Long justified slavery by casting Africans and their descendants as inferior to Whites. The History of Jamaica is, as Hall recognizes, the definitive account of the Jamaican political economy and society, and its relation to Britain, all written from the perspective of a fundamentally racist enslaver and plantation owner.For Hall, “Long’s writing shows how racialization was institutionalized in Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century and a set of ideas about race transmitted to England” (24). This is a compelling study of how race and racism were constructed by a man who grew up in England knowing his nationality, class, and gender, who then in Jamaica learned the extent to which Whiteness brought power. Hall illuminates how Long learned about the purchase and utilization of land and enslaved labor in Jamaica, and how he then justified this system of racial capitalism to British readers. Long sought to make the production of sugar as comprehensible and as normal as the growing of wheat in England, thereby encouraging other Britons to settle in Jamaica while those who remained in the metropole might dismiss the growing disquiet about the transatlantic slave trade. While he related the skill and knowledge required of a successful sugar estate owner, Long said very little about the lives of the enslaved. During his eleven-year management of Lucky Valley, sugar and rum production more than doubled, and such productivity no doubt rested on a brutal disciplinary regime. Long sought to demonstrate that the labor system and its people were essential to the bringing of great wealth to Britain. The omission of detailed descriptions of the enslaved and their lives was essential in order to render slavery socially acceptable, and Long presented slavery in terms of political economy, explaining the mechanics of plantation organization and management, and then the mercantile and economic processes involved in shipping and selling the products of enslaved labor in the metropole.This book does not illuminate the actual lives and experiences of Jamaica’s enslaved population, for that was not Long’s focus. Rather, Hall stands back and shows us the intellectual edifices constructed by men like Long in order to make racial slavery work, and to then explain and justify it to their fellow Britons. This is an important and accomplished work, painstakingly demonstrating the context and arguments of the single most important defense of slavery published in eighteenth-century Britain. Hall’s assessment of Long’s ideas about race in the book’s final chapter makes particularly compelling reading, exploring how racism and its intellectual underpinnings took shape in the mind of one man, and in British society as a whole. Hall is an accomplished historian who has advanced our understanding of the place and significance of slavery in British history. Hall’s own family history links her to Jamaica and slavery, and, more significantly, she has firsthand experience of Britain’s complicated late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century racial history. Long wrote his History with a clear purpose in mind, to influence British government and society in favor of slavery and the plantation system. As she acknowledges in her epilogue, Hall too has written history with a purpose: to show how a man could display sympathy, empathy, and compassion for his family and friends while simultaneously constructing a rationale for denying those attributes and benefits to the people he owned. This belief system was a house of cards, a fragile and wholly artificial edifice, and as Hall demonstrates, we must understand how it was built in order to complete the work of tearing it down.