Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. TREVOR BURNARD, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Abstract

Historians of British Atlantic colonial societies have often puzzled over how immigrant whites made sense of the new social and ecological environment in which they found themselves. In this insightful new study of Jamaican slave society, Trevor Burnard argues that slave-owning whites in Jamaica, bound together by virtue of their skin color, maintained power over their slaves by the application of brutal and tyrannical force. However, white solidarity and terror were never enough to keep slaves "in check." According to Burnard, what kept whites alive was the slaves' reluctant acceptance of their masters' right and ability to force them to do their will.