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Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World

Amazon.com Price:  $30.60 (as of 01/05/2019 23:12 PST- Details)

Description

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, Britain’s largest and most valuable slave-owning colony, relied on a brutal system of slave management to deal with its tenuous social order. Trevor Burnard provides unparalleled insight into Jamaica’s vibrant but harsh African and European cultures with a comprehensive examination of the atypical diary of plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood.

Thistlewood’s diary, kept over the course of forty years, describes in graphic detail how white rule over slaves was once predicated at the infliction of terror at the bodies and minds of slaves. Thistlewood treated his slaves cruelly even whilst he relied on them for his livelihood. In conjunction with careful notes on sugar production, Thistlewood maintained detailed records of a sexual life that fully expressed the society’s rampant sexual exploitation of slaves. In Burnard’s hands, Thistlewood’s diary reveals an ideal deal not only in regards to the man and his slaves but also in regards to the structure and enforcement of power, changing understandings of human rights and freedom, and connections among social class, race, and gender, in addition to sex and sexuality, within the plantation system.

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