David Lambert. White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. viii + 245 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84131-3.
Reviewed by Alan Lester (Department of Geography, University of Sussex)
Published on H-HistGeog (May, 2006)
Geography, Slavery and Identity
This monograph is theoretically stimulating and empirically rich. It is about the ways in which debates over the future of slavery came to redefine white creole identities in Barbados between the 1780s and 1830s. Lambert has chosen for his study an island that provides comparisons and illuminating contrasts with Jamaica--the place that is often, rather lazily, taken as the model for broader Caribbean history. He has also selected a temporal span that is particularly significant, since the debates conducted between metropolitan and colonial Britons in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries raised fundamental questions about human nature, the morality of colonial relations and the character of British identity that would reverberate throughout, and after, the modern colonial period.
Although it probes deeply into Barbados's colonial relations, this is no narrow island story. Lambert tracks the contested negotiation of colonial identities back and forth between Barbados itself, other Caribbean sites and Britain. While he focuses largely on the discussions between elite white creoles and their metropolitan counterparts, he also strives to appreciate the interventions of subaltern whites ("redlegs"), free "colored" people and enslaved black people, which destabilised and redefined these "white discussions." His is one of the few accounts of colonial discourse and identity construction that I have come across that brings together a trans-imperial, networked analysis of colonial culture and a consideration of the interplay between colonial and subaltern expression and performance. The methodology that he deploys to accomplish this should have a wide appeal among an expanding group of historical geographers interested in the social and cultural relations of colonialism at multiple sites.
The notion of the synecdoche is central to Lambert's mode of analysis. He notes how creole colonial discourse itself hinged on the employment of the synecdoche. For instance, he shows that in the early 1830s, with the abolition of slavery on the cards, a case of alleged rape of a white woman by an enslaved black man came to stand for the complex of perils posed by emancipation. But his own methodology also turns on the synecdoche. He uses discussions of specific incidents, episodes and events throughout the book to seek a way into the broader, shifting, structural composition of Barbadian society.
In particular, the episodes that Lambert's analysis coheres around serve to highlight two overarching discourses of white creole identity that converged and diverged contingently. The first of these was a white supremacist discourse. This tended to embrace poorer whites and major slave-owners in a common antipathy to free and enslaved "non-whites." But such racial differentiation served as only one axis of identification. The second discourse was a paternalistic one centred on the legitimacy of slave-ownership, which Lambert calls the "planter ideal." Here, the overarching distinction was one of status rather than race, between the free and the enslaved. Not only did this allow for a common interest between elite whites and free coloreds who owned slaves, but it could also serve to marginalise poorer whites who owned no slaves. Throughout the book, the tensions between these discourses, or modes of identification, the ways that each of them could configure both loyalty and opposition to metropolitan Britain, and the ambivalences and ambiguities to which they gave rise, are identified with great precision and skill. The two discourses provide an anchor that prevents the line of argument drifting too far away from the composition of creole culture and identity that lies at the heart of a wide-ranging book.
After an introduction that sets out the key episodes around which the analysis revolves and the main focus of each chapter, the first substantive chapter discusses and cleverly interweaves the literatures on whiteness (from both white and black perspectives), postcolonial theory, Atlantic world studies and slavery. These disparate bodies of work are brought together around a discussion of the concept of creolization. Chapter 2 is the first to identify a particular episode as a way into debates over Barbadian identities. It examines the attempt made by the British immigrant, Joshua Steele, to introduce ameliorative measures among his own slaves and promote such measures among other slaveowners. Steele advocated that enlightened planters replace the local relations of slavery with something akin to those between a Saxon landowner and his bondsmen under the ancient copyhold system. As an apparent agent of reformist, metropolitan antislavery pressure, Steele was confronted with considerable opposition from more conservative planters. Since his interventions threatened racial and status-based hierarchies, this opposition was expressed in terms of both white supremacism and the planter ideal.
While chapter 2 explores an instance in which these two dominant discourses of creole identity came together in opposition to "outside" interference, chapter 3 delves into the tensions between them. It examines the efforts of John Poyer to reify white supremacism, if necessary at the expense of the planter ideal. Poyer's project was to "uplift" the island's poor whites, hoisting them into the ranks of an elite that would be more clearly racially defined. This would mean marginalizing the island's free colored population, which currently shared the redlegs' liminal status. Opposition to Poyer's schemes came from planters for whom racial affinity was less significant than the distinction between free and unfree, but it also came from free coloreds themselves, and Lambert shows how significant their representations were in forestalling the creation of a more rigid racial hierarchy. More broadly, the chapter's thrust is to demonstrate how "liminality raised questions in and about Barbadian society" (p. 103), and this is an objective that is executed impressively.
Chapter 4 focuses on the repercussions of the 1816 rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the island's history. As Lambert explains, this was a particularly "intense moment of identity-formation, in which different forms of white colonial identity were articulated, enacted, disturbed and challenged" (p. 7). The chapter examines the causes of the rebellion as they were represented by the planter authorities in Barbados, by antislavery activists and, as far as the sources allow, by the rebels themselves. Each set of representations posited different kinds of connection between Barbados and Britain. As might be expected, planter representations blamed the revolt on the dangerous meddling of naive metropolitan reformers and antislavery activists. Whites also blamed local Methodist missionaries who were supposedly these metropolitan activists' local agents. (Chapter 5 explores anti-Methodism among creole whites more closely.) Antislavery reformers themselves were careful to protect the movement from charges of promoting violent rebellion, but they nevertheless blamed the revolt on the brutality of the system of slavery, rejecting Barbadian planters' claims that they were less brutal than other Caribbean slaveowners.
Perhaps most interesting in this chapter, and certainly most novel, however, is Lambert's attempt to analyze the relations between Britain and Barbados that were posited by the rebels themselves. This is achieved in part by interrogating the iconography of the flags that the insurrectionists carried into battle. With their pictures of "mixed race" couples, of British naval vessels intervening to help the rebels against their oppressive and "un-English" Barbadian masters, and their references to the successful slave revolt in Haiti, these flags and other surviving fragments of the rebels' representations deliberately provoked white fears of interracial sexual relations, questioned white Barbadians' loudly proclaimed identity with Englishness and marginalized the importance of white reformers in their own struggles against slavery. Lambert's analysis of white people's reaction to these representations allows him to attest that "enslaved people played a crucial role in the creolisation of white colonial identities" (p. 109).
The question of the white communities' identity with Englishness is raised again in Chapter 5, where the persecution of the island's Methodist ministers (especially William Shrewsbury) is examined. Here, the ambivalence raised by white attempts to display loyalty to Britain and yet reject a seemingly dominant British humanitarianism is the main subject. Upper-class planters decried assaults on the Methodist mission since they seemed to prove the humanitarian claim that Barbados was an "aberrant" space, departing in fundamental respects from metropolitan norms, but many lower class white supremacists saw the rooting out of Wesleyansim as the only way of challenging abolitionism while remaining loyal to more longstanding notions of proper British behavior. This chapter is also notable for its attempt to show how proslavery activists (in this case James M'Queen) generated a geographical imagination of empire that was the converse of the humanitarian vision that has attracted more scholarly attention. Both sides drew on comparisons between the West and East Indies, the humanitarians in order to contrast West Indian brutality with the East India Company's more enlightened form of colonial governance (despite the Company's aversion to missionary interference with Indians); and the proslavery activists to contrast their characterization of Barbados as "Little England" with Orientalist tropes of a degraded East.
In the final chapter, the focus is on white creole attempts to discursively manage the end of slavery. On the one hand, the planter ideal was emphasized (and here it is re-examined through the script of a popular stage play) in order to legitimate Barbados's planters by contrasting their benevolence with the brutality of the planters of other islands. Such legitimation would also enable the planters to press the British government for greater compensation for the emancipation of their slaves. On the other hand, the chaos caused by the 1831 Great Hurricane and the case, already mentioned, of an enslaved black man accused of the rape of a white woman, came to stand for all the terrors that emancipation posed. These included not only the sexual danger of rampant black masculinity, but also domestic defilement and loss of home. Like studies of other slave societies before and after abolition, Lambert's emphasizes that white colonial culture became more racially supremacist in outlook as the status distinctions upheld by slavery were removed. But, in common with his approach throughout the book, he makes this point through the innovative use of various media such as the stage play, and through a fine analysis of particular incidents, which serve to illuminate a more general discursive train.
An epilogue neatly reminds the reader of the two overarching discourses through which white creole identities were expressed and contested, tracking these discourses' relations with each other and with loyal and oppositional stances towards Britain, and noting how they were manifested in each episode recounted in the book.
I struggled to find much to criticize in this book. There is a very occasional lapse into a kind of homogenization of "the metropole," entailing an unintended implication that the antislavery agenda was a singularly metropolitan innovation. In some cases, Lambert writes of an implicitly unified "metropolitan identity" or uses "metropolitan intervention" as a synonym for reformist or antislavery intervention. For example, Joshua Steele comes to stand for a dominant and uncontested metropolitan vision of reform, as opposed to a local colonial one. Certainly, many colonists who resented reformist pressure from the Colonial Office made this same association. But, of course (and Lambert himself indicates this at numerous points elsewhere in the book), "metropolitan" projects, discourses and practices were just as heterogeneous, as contested and as unstable as were those among white creoles. They were also themselves constructed through trans-imperial trajectories, in the case of antislavery, between reformers in Britain and missionaries and Quakers across the Atlantic, rather than being forged within the metropole alone, simply to be cast outwards to the colonial "periphery." As Lambert himself states, "the emergence of a division between a 'slave world' aberration and a 'free world' norm should not be seen as merely another instance of a generalised pattern in the articulation of essentialised differences between metropolitan and colonial space" (p. 11).
The occasional lapse that I have mentioned, however, by no means constitutes a fundamental flaw with Lambert's analysis. Rather, it is the product of a stylistic shorthand through which political and discursive distinctions are sometimes, expediently, collapsed into territorial ones. In general, this book demonstrates that the trajectories defining specific colonial and imperial subject positions traversed sites in Britain and its colonies, rendering the geographies of colonial identity more complex, intermeshed and intricately networked than any simple metropolitan-colonial divide could suggest. I found the book inspirational. Its close analysis of a range of media of debate, including the performative and the non-textual, its exploration of particular episodes as a way of illuminating broader processes of identity formation, and its integration of subaltern and elite discourse analysis, are particularly enlightening. I have no doubt that other historical geographers, students of the Caribbean and scholars of colonial relations will also find this monograph an important repository of ideas as well as an interesting tale in its own right.
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Citation:
Alan Lester. Review of Lambert, David, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition.
H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11739
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