Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: The Anglo-Jamaican World of Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves, 1750-1786

In 1750, Thomas Thistlewood, the twenty-nine year old son of a Lincolnshire tenant farmer, set sail for Jamaica in the hope of making his name and his fortune. He remained in Jamaica, never returning to England, until his death in 1786, During his time in Jamaica, Thistlewood kept a rich and detailed diary. Now Dr. Burnard extensively analyzes Thistewood’s career as a plantation overseer and his personal relationships. As related by Burnard, and as recorded by Thistlewood in his diary, those relationships reveal some fascinating intersections between social class, race, gender, sex and sexuality. Chronologically, Thistlewood’s diary covers the years that witnessed indisputably the most significant political and military events and development in the eighteenth-century history of Jamaica: the serious slave unrest of the 1760s, the Imperial crisis of the 1760s and early 1770s, the War for American independence and the immediate consequences of that war for Jamaica and Britian’s other Caribbean possessions. It is, however, not so much it time-span as its contents that makes Thistlewood’s diary so compelling. Yet what has attracted the attention of historians in recent years including