Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean

Randy M. Browne offers the most comprehensive account of the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants in Berbice, part of present-day Guyana, after this colony transitioned from Dutch to British rule. In this relatively little-studied society, slavery rose exponentially before the 1807 British prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade. Thereafter, Berbice experienced policies of “amelioration” of slavery typical of the British Caribbean. What sets Berbice and Demerara apart from the rest of the British Americas was the figure of the fiscal, a legacy of the Dutch legal system that continued under British rule. This fiscal heard complaints of slaves against masters and other enslaved people as well. A body of written slave complaints and protests, exceptional for the British Caribbean and underutilized by historians of the British Americas, constitutes the core of Browne's evidence, alongside more common documents emerging from the amelioration policies. Inspired by Vincent Brown's “politics of survival,” this book places surviving slavery, rather than seeking freedom, as central for the experience of Africans and their descendants by examining how enslaved men and women employed legal claims to pursue strategies of survival under some of the most horrid living conditions in the Americas (p. 4).After an outline of Berbice during the beginnings of British rule, chapter 2 emphasizes that judicial complaints by enslaved people were generated because of the excesses of masters and slave drivers, which surpassed the everyday limits of violence, rather than by the daily abuse that characterized slavery. Slave drivers, one of the most common subjects of these complaints, are the focus of the third chapter, as they, mostly enslaved people themselves, appear profusely in these records. Chapter 4 examines marital discord files and presents the slave family both as a source of resilience and as a result of power struggles. Chapter 5, on the Obeah religious practice, shows a slave driver as an Obeah leader seeking to “bring things on the estate to order” for his community and thus seeking collective survival (p. 135). Chapter 6 reveals the moral economy of survival emerging from these petitions. Slaves conceived customary rights meant to assure their subsistence, which included basic necessities like allowances of clothing and food, slaves' independent property, and the right to engage in market relations. The epilogue places the argument of this book in comparative hemispheric terms and rightfully identifies as a striking anomaly the US “Southern slaveowners' ability to prevent enslaved people from using the law to seek redress,” which historians should explain rather than take for granted (p. 193).Scholars from and of the Spanish Americas have long been writing about slave litigants, even before Frank Tannenbaum, given that lawyers focusing on slave petitioners and freedom wrote some of the first books on slavery in these countries. From Havana to Buenos Aires and from Mexico to Peru, US Latin Americanist historians have examined the relationship between the actions of enslaved men and women, the practices of colonial lawyers and notaries, and the legal and philosophical framework of freedom, with new additions by Bianca Premo, Michelle McKinley, and Rachel Sarah O'Toole, among others. The same could be said about the study of the significance of slaves' independent economy, particularly in the Brazilian historiography, accessible in English. The overwhelming literature on slavery in the Anglo-Americas seemingly makes it almost heroic to engage significantly as well with the historiography for Spanish America and Brazil on these issues. Given that this is a journal of Latin American history, this reviewer feels it necessary to make this point. To be fair, the book gestures to comparisons in the introduction and epilogue and peppers throughout remarks about how the Dutch and the English adopted the legal office of the fiscal from Spanish law and its application in the Americas.Different from most of the Spanish Americas, in 1820s Berbice the new regulations of amelioration of slavery were implemented by the new office of the protector of slaves in the context of the debates about abolishing slavery in the British Caribbean. Browne correctly points out the importance of the implementation of new slave laws in the British Caribbean regulating master-slave relationships as one of the first steps leading to the prospect of abolition.While the narrative of the book is exquisite and very well structured, some quantification about these slave complaints would assist readers in understanding the volume of such complaints as well as whether the amount of slave litigation and litigants fluctuated over time and, if so, how such fluctuation related to politics. This would help readers also evaluate whether, as the author claims, the documents on amelioration in Berbice “are the single largest archive of first-person testimony from and about enslaved people in the Americas” (p. 5). However, this does not negatively affect the presentation of Browne's excellent central argument on the strategies of survival employed by enslaved men and women

Atlantic slave trade · Economic history · Ethnology · Political science · Politics · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law

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