As English colonists in the Caribbean quickly became large-scale slaveholders, they established new organizations of labor, new uses of authority, new laws, and new modes of violence, punishment, and repression in order to manage slaves. Concentrating on Barbados and Jamaica, England's two most important colonies, Amussen looks at cultural exports that affected the development of race, gender, labor, and class as categories of legal and social identity in England. She demonstrates that the cultural changes necessary for settling the Caribbean became an important, though uncounted, colonial export.
Amussen has written a wide-ranging and fascinating account of that transformation.
—Carla Gardina Pestana, Miami University
