Telling Slavery: Archives of Life and Death, Surveillance and Control

Abstract

RICHARD S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations is a richly rewarding history of slavery on Jamaica and the North American mainland. This singular reconstruction of plantation life in three widely disparate settings—Virginia, the western plains of Jamaica, and Alabama— embracing some two thousand enslaved people is the winning product of a patient, meticulous, decades-long mining of the inventories of two prominent slaveholding families. From the vast and rich archival records of the Barham family of England, owners of Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica, and the Tayloe family, owners of Mount Airy plantation in Virginia and two plantations in Alabama, together with the papers of the Moravian Church, the Jamaica Archives, Colonial Office records, census records, and other documents, Dunn reconstructs an extraordinary story of slave family linkages and the everyday burdens of life, work, and death that challenged the lives of enslaved people. This story takes place across seven decades and amid epoch-making changes in the Atlantic world as the rising demand for sugar transformed the demographics of the slave trade and slavery in the Caribbean and the growing demand for cotton transformed slavery in the United States and fueled the establishment of a new plantation regime in the Old Southwest. The principal arguments of this work will be familiar to most scholars of slavery. In comparison to those in mainland North America, slaves in the sugar colonies of the Caribbean endured far more abysmal living conditions and significantly higher mortality rates. In both worlds, gender played a huge role in work assignments and thus access to spaces of autonomy. And, as Ira Berlin has notably observed, differences in the nature of the crop shaped demography, slaves’ life chances, and marriage,