Unsettled Houses: The Material Culture of the Missionary Project in Jamaica in the Era of Emancipation

Abstract

This article examines the role of material culture, particularly clothing, houses and furniture, in the lives of nonconformist Protestant missionaries in Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century, in relation both to the lifestyles of the missionaries and their families and their encounters with enslaved people. While these missionaries hoped to improve the lives of the slaves and help them negotiate their transition to freedom, their visions of the material lives to which the formerly enslaved should aspire shows them to have been in some ways as intent as the planter class in denying agency to people of colour and mandating that they conduct their lives in accordance with English ideas regarding class, labour, religion, gender and sexuality.