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, sailed to 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 Jamaica, Thistlewood kept a rich and detailed diary. Now Dr Burnard extensively analyses Thistlewood'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, gentler, sex and sexuality. What has attracted the attention of historians in recent years, including Burnard himself, is not so much the sugar production and plantation management so carefully recorded by Thistlewood as the equally detailed record he maintained of his numerous and some would claim excessive sexual liaisons with enslaved woman of colour. The work appeals to an extremely wide range of readers, including Caribbean historians, colonial historians, historians of the American South, historians of gender, sex and sexuality, as well as social, economic and cultural historians of the eighteenth century.