At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood

Abstract

Reviewed by: At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood Christian J. Koot At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject. By Jacob Selwood. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022. 252 pages. Cloth, ebook. In 1707, Jeronimy Clifford, a former Suriname plantation owner, produced an extraordinary appeal for compensation from the English government. Including transcriptions of original documents and Clifford's own interpretations of them, this two-volume manuscript traces the travails of one of many early modern individuals who moved between empires. Only a child when the Dutch conquered English Suriname in 1667, Clifford came of age as an Englishman living in a Dutch colony. As a foreigner, his efforts to maintain his English subjecthood ultimately left him vulnerable to Dutch authorities. By 1691, he was imprisoned, and after his release, he fled the colony, abandoning his property. In At Kingdom's Edge, Jacob Selwood uses Clifford and his petition to examine how "an array of extralegal factors" including warfare, disease, and the social and economic makeup of colonies "shaped subjecthood" (2)—that is, the bond between an individual and their monarch, and the rights and privileges that followed. In this tightly focused study of Clifford, Selwood argues that English subjecthood was constructed not by metropolitan legal discourse and treaty language but instead through daily life at the imperial periphery. In relating the early colonial history of Suriname and Clifford's role in it, Selwood demonstrates that, beginning in the initial days of colonization, the difficulty and deadliness of Suriname's environment meant English settlers adhered to expansive ideas of subjecthood that deviated from metropolitan norms. Barbadian sugar magnates looking to expand and smaller planters looking for cheaper land founded Suriname in the 1650s. When Clifford's family arrived there a decade later, sugar had transformed the colony and more than three thousand enslaved workers were laboring on roughly five hundred plantations. Mortality was high, as those of both European and African ancestry struggled to adapt to the disease environment. Ideas about English subjecthood in Suriname were shaped by local concerns about both the establishment of a slave society and the realities of high mortality. Following the example of their close neighbors on Barbados, the English denied subjecthood to the enslaved to enforce the boundaries of a slave society, even as they departed from English practice and welcomed Sephardic Jews, a decision prompted by the high mortality rate. Their willingness to recognize the subjecthood of Sephardic Jews and to offer religious toleration was tied to the precarious nature of settlement, which prompted [End Page 423] governors to innovate. As Selwood argues, "The result was a peculiarly broad articulation of English subjecthood" (41). When the Dutch conquered Suriname, Clifford's family made the same decision as many Euro-settlers around the Atlantic in this period: they remained under foreign rule so as to best protect their local economic interests. The Dutch conquerors extended generous terms to the English who remained, allowing them to retain their property and dispose of it as they wished. Within a decade, however, most English families had departed, leaving Clifford and roughly fourteen other English residents to grapple with how to maintain their Englishness in a Dutch colony. At first Clifford prospered. As Suriname became more stable and economically successful under Dutch rule, he and his family accrued wealth, and he married advantageously to become the owner of reputedly the "finest" (148) plantation in Suriname.1 Over time, though, consolidating Dutch rule made Clifford and his claims to English subjecthood increasingly precarious. These claims came to a head in a property dispute with his wife, Dorothy Matson, regarding ownership of the plantation, Corcabo, that she brought to their marriage. The dispute over Corcabo was shaped by questions about whether Matson was Dutch or English, as well as if she and Clifford had gotten married in England. Under the English legal concept of coverture, Clifford claimed Corcabo for himself, but Matson resisted, citing the Dutch practice of "joint ownership of marital assets" (165). As Selwood shows, the legal battle that followed, though on its surface about property, was really about subjecthood. Clifford argued...