An apologist for the plantations of Jamaica
LUCKY VALLEY Edward Long and the history of racial capitalism
CATHERINE HALL 350pp. Cambridge University Press. £35 (US $44.99).
THERE WAS MANY a striking figure within the West India Interest, the lobby group that sought to preserve and promote the British Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alexander McDonnell was a sophisticated economic thinker and a celebrated chess champion; the banker Alexander Baring poured money into sugar plantations; the journalist William Cobbett allied himself with the slaveholders against the telescopic philanthropy of British abolitionists; and there were political patrons of various stripes and loyalty, among them Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington and the young William Gladstone.
Standing above them all, however, as something like the godfather of the British pro-slavery cause, was the Cornish-born planter and author Edward Long, whose Jamaican plantation, Lucky Valley, informs the title of this new study by the eminent historian Catherine Hall. Descended from the Commonwealth soldiers who had seized Jamaica from the Spanish, Long first left Britain in the 1750s to seek his fortune in the island’s canefields. He served briefly in the colony’s administration, surviving the terror of Tacky’s Revolt, but retired in the late 1760s to England, where, as one of the newly minted “sugar barons”, he observed the growth of nascent abolitionism with alarm.
Although Lord Mansfield’s 1772 judgment in the Somerset case did not abolish slavery in England – indeed, Mansfield was at pains to emphasize that his reasoning was limited to the re-enslavement and deportation of a person – it raised a spectre of abolition that would terrify West Indian slaveholders for the next sixty years, and it was the spur to Long’s most notorious work, the three-volume History of Jamaica (1774).
As Hall relates, there was not much history in Long’s book, and whatever there was served largely to arrogate the credit for Jamaican development to his ancestors. Rather, the History had two main functions: to promote the colony as an opportunity ripe for further British investment; and to justify the brutal enslavement of several hundred thousand Africans on its plantations, farms and wharves.
It is the latter of these functions for which the book is most notorious. Whereas most slaveholders of the early nineteenth century followed intellectual currents and subscribed to monogenesis – the idea that all “races” of humankind, no matter how “civilized”, came from the same Creation – Long was perhaps the foremost British proponent of polygenesis, which held that certain races were separate species and intractably inferior.
For Long there was almost nothing to separate “the Negroe
