Sheryllynne Heggerty, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Sheryllynne Heggerty, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023)

On 21 December 1756, the Europa – a modestly-sized merchant ship on a return voyage from Jamaica to Dublin laden with sugar, rum, cotton, coffee, mahogany, and logwood – was taken by Le Machaut, a French privateer, in one minor incident of what was to become the Seven Years War. However, in a stroke of good fortune, two days later the Europa was retaken by Captain Dyer and the crew of the Defiance, and was sailed the short distance to Falmouth to be adjudicated on by the Admiralty’s prize court. Midshipman Andrew Mitchelson, who navigated the Europa to England as prize master, testified that he had searched the ship to find “what papers might then be on board her.” (xii) He had “at Last found hid and Concealed under one of the Guns in the Cabin,” presumably by Captain James Cooke, “A Bagg Containing a Great Number of Letters or Papers, which he immediately took into his Custody.” (xii) These letters, the ship, its crew, and its cargo would all be evidence that would help divide the profits from the Europa among the different claimants. Over two hundred and fifty years later these letters have provided a very different sort of evidence about profit and loss.

The 407 documents from the Europa’s postbag are now part of The National Archive’s (UK) High Court of the Admiralty series of “Prize Papers.” Given the nature of warfare and privateering it is unsurprising that most documents in this wider series are in many languages other than English. These are being worked through by a variety of scholars, most notably the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities’ Prize Papers Project (2018-2037), and are revealing a great deal about ‘the global entanglements of the early modern world’ (https://www.prizepapers.de/the-project/the-prize-papers-collection). The cache from the Europa is, therefore, an extremely rare survival: a set of documents in English – including letters, bills of exchange, bills of lading, sales of enslaved people, prices current, one inventory of the enslaved, and one copy of the Jamaica Courant – produced between September and November 1756 by planters, merchants, attorneys, auctioneers, ships’ captains, shopkeepers, rentiers, clerks, lawyers, artisans, merchant and Royal Navy sailors, and a few women. Together they allow a view into the everyday relationships and transactions of a significant cross-section of Jamaica’s white population in the middle of the 18th century and at the beginning of a war.

In Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times, Sheryllynne Heggarty has made excellent use of this collection. From what is inevitably an assemblage of fragments from multiple people and pens she has woven a compelling picture of Britain’s richest colony at mid century that both confirms much of what is known about that place and time and, at the same time, refracts it through the experiences of a wider range of the island’s residents and sojourners to give a significantly different perspective. It can very usefully be paired with the more quantitative economic and demographic focus of Jack Greene’s Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2016) to sketch out the contours of a thriving and differentiated slave economy. Through the close examination of the Europa’s letters Heggerty is able to introduce a range of characters who would otherwise be unknown: including the small-scale merchant John Crow, the sailor George Farmer, the struggling lawyer George Hampson, and the seamstress Elizabeth Metcalfe. She weaves their stories through the book’s thematic chapters on money making; war and politics; love, family, and friendship; disease and death; and commodity consumption and identity. In doing so the book provides a richly-footnoted engagement between the letters’ content and the secondary literature on 18th-century Jamaica, providing an excellent resource for both research and teaching. Yet the purpose is not merely synthesis. This interpretation of these documents and their authors is in the service of the important argument that Jamaica’s white population was more significantly stratified by socioeconomic status than has been previously recognised, and that these class differences had far-reaching implications for how people lived their lives. In many ways this is an exemplary piece of social history, demonstrating what a new set of sources can reveal about everyday life.

Heggerty is also clear on what these documents ignore or obscure. While the Europa’s letters, and the other documents from the mid-1750s that Heggerty analyses alongside them, are not exclusively reflective of white lives, they have very little to say about both slavery and the enslaved. As she argues, the lack of reflection in the letters on the system of plantation slavery that dominated the island’s economy and made it the powerhouse of the British empire’s Atlantic economy demonstrates how fully slavery had become normalised and legitimated by the 1750s. Indeed, there is a case to be made that for those white people seeking a place and some profit – high or low – within that economy the mid 18th century may have been the high point of slavery’s hegemony. Between the establishment of the plantation system through the sugar revolutions of the 17th century and the upheavals of Tacky’s Revolt (1760) and the beginnings of the abolition movement in Britain, slavery must have begun to look to many of these people as just the way things were.

This cannot, of course, be said of the enslaved. In her final chapter, Heggerty offers what ‘Tales of the Enslaved People’ she can (there is also an eighteen page ‘Memorial’ that names all the enslaved people identified through research for the book). In many ways these tales work through the same thematic categories as the earlier chapters – work, power, consumption, identity, and status (particularly forms of freedom) – and demonstrates both significant differences between the enslaved and the free, Black and white, and within the enslaved population, especially in terms of gender. As with the rest of the book, there is also an attempt to tell this through the lives and losses of individuals found within the documentary record: Primus the mason, Ammoe the carpenter, Cooba the doctoress, and Clarissa who toiled in the canefields. This account, through its necessary ‘perhapses’ and ‘maybes’, provides a differentiated account of the lives of the enslaved at the intersection of these fragmentary sources and the secondary literature from history and archaeology.

Overall, while the many addressees of the letters from the Europa waited in vain for news of the fortunes and troubles of their loved ones, their business ventures, and a colony in time of war, it is fortunate that Captain Cooke had the presence of mind to hide them, and that they eventually fell into such capable hands.

Miles Ogborn

Queen Mary University of London

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.029.