Synopses & Reviews
Set along both the physical and social margins of the British Empire in the second half of the seventeenth century,
Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean explores the construction of difference through the everyday life of colonial subjects. Jenny Shaw examines how marginalized colonial subjectsandmdash;Irish and Africansandmdash;contributed to these processes. By emphasizing their everyday experiences Shaw makes clear that each group persisted in its own cultural practices; Irish and Africans also worked withinandmdash;and challengedandmdash;the limits of the colonial regime. Shawandrsquo;s research demonstrates the extent to which hierarchies were in flux in the early modern Caribbean, allowing even an outcast servant to rise to the position of island planter, and underscores the fallacy that racial categories of black and white were the sole arbiters of difference in the early English Caribbean.
The everyday lives of Irish and Africans are obscured by sources constructed by elites. Through her research, Jenny Shaw overcomes the constraints such sources impose by pushing methodological boundaries to fill in the gaps, silences, and absences that dominate the historical record. By examining legal statutes, census material, plantation records, travel narratives, depositions, interrogations, and official colonial correspondence, as much for what they omit as for what they include, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean uncovers perspectives that would otherwise remain obscured. This book encourages readers to rethink the boundaries of historical research and writing and to think more expansively about questions of race and difference in English slave societies.
Review
andldquo;Jenny Shawandrsquo;s nuanced study illuminates how divisions originating in Europeandmdash; especially those that distinguished Irish Catholic servants from their English Protestant mastersandmdash;shaped colonial society and ultimately the hierarchies of race that came to be the most important markers of difference. Shaw profitably lingers over the early period, when the early English Caribbean was in the process of becoming, and as a result she demonstrates that race and colonialism were negotiated, not preordained.andrdquo;andmdash;Carla Gardina Pestana, author of Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World
Review
andldquo;A nuanced and fascinating account of how Irish Catholics shaped the emergence of racial hierarchy in the English Caribbean. With meticulous attention to the constraints and possibilities of everyday life, Shaw explores the way that early settlers marked and ranked social difference, finding that status distinctions were surprisingly malleable, even in a society overwhelmingly organized by slavery and race. Offering close readings of fresh sources, this is both an important study and an impressive feat of the informed imagination.andrdquo;andmdash;Vincent Brown, author of The Reaperandrsquo;s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
Review
andldquo;While good historians have always investigated how their sources were created, preserved, and invoked, Shaw moves her post-modern approach a step further to explore how andlsquo;probing archival spaces and fissuresandrsquo; can move andlsquo;marginalized historical actors closer to the center of the historical narrative.andrsquo;andrdquo; andmdash;Linda L. Sturtz, Journal of Historical Geography
Review
andquot;Shaw works comfortably within the framework of social history and she also makes an explicit call for more attention to recovering the lives of those rendered invisible, to reading the silences of the archive, and to writing history aided by disciplined imagination.andquot; andmdash;Helena M. Wall, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Review
andldquo;[The book]is a thoughtful and imaginative study which anyone trying to comprehend the experiences of slave yards and indentured barracks should find illuminating. . . . Shawandrsquo;s Everyday Life is a fascinating study that specialists in West Indian and neighboring fields will find thought provoking and instructors can assign to students as an introduction to a slaveholding social system.andrdquo;andmdash;James Robertson, Florida Historical Quarterly
About the Author
Jenny Shaw is an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.