Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor Theodore Koditschek (bio) Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor; pp. xi + 307. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, $104.95, $27.95 paper, £80.00, £20.99 paper. In a world dominated by the competitive logic of free trade, what happens to those groups and places whose diminished profitability consigns them to feelings of abandonment and neglect? Christopher Taylor's Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism gives that question a hefty dose of historical depth. In the eighteenth century, the West Indian sugar colonies had been considered the crown jewel of Britain's mercantilist Empire. Yet, during the nineteenth century, their status radically changed. As slavery was anathematized, and the plantations grew less remunerative, celebrations of success were replaced by anguished handwringing. Once cheaper sources of sugar became available from Brazil and Cuba where (after British emancipation) slavery remained in place, Britain's West Indian colonies increasingly were perceived as embarrassments by a metropolitan public whose attention was turning in other directions. Taylor's interest, however, is in the responses of people in the Caribbean Isles. Taylor begins with Adam Smith and later political economists, whom he portrays as having ushered in the ascendancy of a calculus of self-interest to mainstream metropolitan behavior and thought. Profitable colonies ought to become independent, while unprofitable ones were not worth keeping. In the West Indies, this was perceived as a betrayal of the social contract under which the empire had been forged. In the anonymously published novel Marly (1828) and a series of other texts, the planters offered an alternative vision of plantation protection and social interconnection that drew on nostalgic representations of the mercantilist epoch. But if a social contract could be invoked by the oppressors, it could be refigured by the oppressed in a more compelling way. In chapter 2, Taylor focuses on the loss of protection that emancipation brought to black West Indians exploited under the system of apprenticeship and then left in an unfavorable labor market once the process of emancipation was complete. Through a reading of James Williams's Narrative of Events (1837), Taylor shows how black working people experienced the state of worthlessness to which they were thus consigned. Taylor next traces the mid-century vicissitudes of a planter, Matthew Higgins, who wrapped his demand for a return to protection in the moralizing veneer of defending the freedman. He juxtaposes this against the work of a mixed-race Trinidadian, Michel Philip, whose white father's abandonment inspired novelistic fantasies of revenge. In chapter 4, Taylor follows the career of George Des Sources, another mixed-race Trinidadian, whose disappointment at the refusal of British imperial citizenship motivated him to turn to Hispanic Venezuela, where he induced a group of British West Indian emigrants to establish a utopian socialist colony. Finally, Taylor turns to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican hotelier and nurse who eventually traveled to England and Crimea. There, she applied a nurturant sensibility first cultivated in the West Indies. Because Taylor is a literary scholar, he close reads a wide variety of texts, with the ostensible aim of showing how West Indian literature "emerged as a genre and epistemological alternative to political economy" (9). Yet this book also takes on a less explicit (but far more ambitious) agenda that seeks to reinterpret the entire nineteenth-century West Indian experience though the lens of its inhabitants' perceptions of neglect. Taylor [End Page 331] is an extraordinarily observant reader and intelligent commentator, and he offers gems of insight (occasionally encased in academic jargon) on almost every page. Moreover, he has read widely, including in the vast corpus of books and articles that historians have produced. Nevertheless, he has missed a few significant interventions, and his methodological orientation toward textual exegesis sometimes sends him in one-sided, even doctrinaire directions that a more comprehensive approach to the evidence might have forestalled. Is it really fair to say that the West Indies were neglected by British metropolitans during the nineteenth century? Taylor is far too knowledgeable and sophisticated to make...