White Fury

The slaveholder continues to play an important role in historical studies of Britons in the Caribbean during the long eighteenth century; among the topics of greatest interest is the slaveholders' simultaneous defense of slavery and liberty.This scholarship will, nonetheless, continue to stir debate over whether it has reckoned sufficiently with the agency of the people who were enslaved.Christer Petley's White Fury joins these histories of slaveholding British migrants and their colonial-born progeny, also known as Creoles, who were increasingly shaped by an Atlantic world system that one could recognize by its numerous transnational exchanges.Petley tells us the story of Simon Taylor, who was born in British Jamaica in 1740 and died there in 1813 as he was on the way to repatriating to Britain.He discusses Taylor's disillusionments over several of the eighteenth century's historic events.Tacky's Revolt, for example, was an uprising of the enslaved in 1760 Jamaica, which threatened to topple White rule in the colony.In addition, independence in North America and revolutions in France and Haiti had adverse effects on slaveholders in the British colonies of the Caribbean.Enlightenment sensibilities and the abolition of the slave trade by the British in 1807 and the United States in 1808 also provoked Taylor's fury.As Petley notes, Taylor was White Jamaica's preeminent slaveholder, sugar planter, and planting attorney-a manager for metropolitan Britons enjoying the immense financial support provided by sugar and slavery.Taylor managed the Golden Grove sugar estate for Arcedeckne Chaloner, who had been his friend at Eton College.This Tudor-era boys' school was partly responsible for making Taylor a calculating slaveholder who countered the narrative of a maladjusted Creole elite.Taylor joined several generations of ornamented colonists who adhered to Britain's racial commerce in sugar and slavery.He won his first election for the colonial legislature, the House of Assembly, in 1763.Winning the seat for Kingston, the commercial capital, was followed by representation of the parish of St. Thomas in eastern Jamaica from 1784 until his death in 1813.For almost his entire adult life, Taylor was a politician as well as a parish magistrate and sugar mogul, using the branches of government to enhance his commercial interests.Taylor's Lyssons sugar estate was located in eastern Jamaica, but in 1804, John Williams, a free colored (mixed-race) Methodist minister, accused Taylor of discussing the sale of his cherished estate to pay fellow magistrates to sentence him.This story is not relayed in White Fury but it complements Petley's discussion of the ferocity of the planters' suppression of the Black freedom struggle

Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Estate · Genealogy · Historiography · Political science · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law