Reflections

Abstract

In my recent history of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the case study of Patrick Browne’s The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (1756, 1789) focuses on bibliography and technology to illuminate a story of remediation. The case study was silent, however, on how this book was imbricated in the system of Atlantic enslavement and colonialism. My Reflections essay attempts to redress this erasure by recognizing that the field of eighteenth-century studies is entangled within the legacies of global colonialism and by drawing on anti-racist and decolonial reading strategies. This essay intersects with postcolonial and decolonial approaches to digital humanities, book history, and the archives of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic. It traces the routes across time and place of two book copies, connecting biography, provenance, archives, the violent histories of place and geography, the neo-colonial conditions of digital publishing and technology, and the contexts of power and privilege of my own situation as a white scholar.