Christer Petley. White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution.

Abstract

White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution is a biographical study of Simon Taylor, one of the richest sugar planters to have ever lived in the British Caribbean. Christer Petley uses hundreds of Taylor’s surviving letters to understand the world of Jamaican slavery though the eyes of a powerful planter who experienced some of the most important transformations in Atlantic history, including the American and Haitian Revolutions, the British antislavery movement, and the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. The first half of White Fury charts Taylor’s “rise to prominence and wealth” as a Jamaican planter in the mid-eighteenth century (14). Taylor was born into a wealthy merchant family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1739, just as the Jamaican plantation system was taking off. After spending his teenage years in England, where he attended Eton College, Taylor returned to Jamaica in 1760, determined to build on an inheritance “that made him as rich as almost any other white Jamaican of his time” (27). Petley is particularly good at tracing Taylor’s rise as a major sugar planter, which required not only vast sums of money to invest but also a willingness to gamble. A sugar plantation was “the riskiest and most expensive branch of British capitalism during the eighteenth century,” and the problems Taylor faced, from hurricanes and droughts to crop disease and massive indebtedness, often consumed him with anxiety (75). Nevertheless, by the 1780s Taylor had created a massive fortune built on sugar and slavery, fashioning himself into one of the most powerful and respected West Indian creoles.