Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamican World

“Mind numbing” is a phrase that succinctly and repeatedly describes the brutality of Thomas Thistlewood, whose diaries are the basis of Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire. In this book Trevor Burnard fuses this disturbingly rich source with his encyclopedic understanding of eighteenth-century social, demographic, and economic history to offer an exceedingly grim portrait of Jamaica’s slave society. Thistlewood was an economic migrant from Lincolnshire who arrived on the sugar island during the economic boom of the 1750s. Like virtually all white males willing to risk their health and lives in the tropics, he easily found work as an overseer in the frontier parish of Westmoreland. Burnard traces his subject’s economic progress from a hired employee to independent land- and slave-holder on his Breadnut estate. Thistlewood died in 1786, and thus the diaries provide an eyewitness account of some of the most important events in Jamaican history during the second half of the eighteenth century, including Tackey’s 1760 slave revolt and the destructive hurricanes of the early 1780s. Although Thistlewood never became an island grandee, he quickly gained the admiration of local sugar barons because of his skill in ruling slaves; demonstrating “mastery” over bondsmen, Burnard explains, was the most important quality in wining the respect of the island’s elite.

The book is rich in its details that describe how slaves were lorded over in Jamaica. As with all sugar islands, the community Thistlewood adopted had a disproportionately large number of slaves relative to the white population. At Breadnut cattle pen, Thistlewood managed a workforce that outnumbered him by roughly thirty to one. Because this dangerous imbalance was not atypical in the Caribbean, the island governments rarely, if ever, regulated the master-slave relationship during the mid-eighteenth century. Similarly, local whites rarely criticized one another’s management style (particularly in front of slaves), because maintaining a united front was the most critical component in establishing and preserving white hegemony. Young men like Thistlewood had free rein to treat blacks with impunity, and brutal punishment was commonplace. Thistlewood expressed his domination over the slaves he managed by devising horrific tortures and by regularly raping female slaves.

Whites wielded absolute power over the slaves under their ‘care’ and quickly resorted to the lash, the branding iron, and other punishment tools. Even so-called ‘concessions’ offered to slaves—such as access to provision grounds, the freedom to hunt and fish, and permission to participate in local markets—could be restricted in a very arbitrary fashion. Slaves living under this regime were not only physically scarred, but psychologically damaged. Burnard underscores this twin hardship by noting how some were so mentally defeated by their experience that they no longer showed any feeling of pain or suffering when punished. From Thistlewood’s perspective, the ultimate solution for the chronically disobedient was to sell them off the estate. From the slave’s point of view, the ultimate solution was either to run away or to commit suicide.

While the book’s constant refrain is that physical force was an important component to Jamaica’s society, Burnard argues that white-black relations were much more complicated than simple physical coercion. In this book the Thistlewood diaries are used to great effect in demonstrating how exceptionally strong-willed slaves were able to forge close relations with their master. For example, Burnard devotes his efforts to consider whether Phibba—Thistlewood’s life-long partner—should be considered a collaborator, a victim, or a hero who manipulates the system so that she eventually wins her own freedom. Thistlewood’s male slave companion, Lincoln, played a similar range of roles. It is made clear that slaves who became close to their master gained a number of privileges, but Burnard observes that close proximity resulted in frequent beatings. The absolute authority of whites engendered violent outbursts that were more often than not directed at the nearest black man or woman. Perhaps most controversial, but compelling, is Burnard’s suggestion that the relationships between favored slaves and Thistlewood was in some ways authentic, with a degree of shared affection between master and bondsmen.

Burnard tells us that Thomas Thistlewood spent no time dwelling on justifications for slavery or for his violent behavior. This lack of reflection is a surprise given this particular Englishman’s apparent thirst for enlightenment literature and his own self-assured notions of equality among white men. Thistlewood, we learn, was an avid reader who sacrificed personal economic gain in order to devote himself to his books and to his magnificent garden. These seemingly benign pursuits, we are frequently reminded, were sustained by the work of slaves and Thistlewood’s ability to keep them under tight control. Burnard posits that Thistlewood and other slave masters must have concluded that being non-white was reason enough to exclude slaves from the social compact. The fact that Thistlewood universally turns to phenotype adjectives when identifying non-whites is indeed strong evidence that skin color was considered sufficient cause to place blacks outside the bounds of society.

The Thistlewood diaries have long been used by historians of the Caribbean, but Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire is the most comprehensive treatment of this unusual source. Burnard employs his impressive multidisciplinary skills to reconstruct the lives of this middling slaveholder and his slaves in order to answer key questions regarding how white control was maintained. It was the “mind numbing” violence that forced slaves to accept “the inevitability of their condition” (152), and this “tyranny” was something that naturally grew out of the necessity of “mastery” over the black majority. Because of this chain reaction, Jamaica would neither become a settler society nor develop into an “Albion in the Tropics.” Instead, as Burnard explains, the colony’s social trajectory would increasingly appear to Britons as simply out-of-step with the quickly evolving modern sensibilities of the late eighteenth century.