Burnard does an excellent job of analyzing the life of Thomas Thistlewood from his diaries, which are long on facts but scant on any analysis. Thistlewood was your sort of typical Jamaican slave overseer and owner, though he may have been overeager to "rape" the slaves under his charge. That and, unlike white Jamaicans of his time and station, he was attuned to the Enlightenment and a voracious reader for a colonial backwater (though Burnard makes clear that Jamaica was, with the possible exception of India, the jewel in the Crown of the British Empire). Why would a man in touch with Enlightenment ideals on one hand, a fierce proponent of Jamaica's white egalitarianism, hold countless black slaves "in miserable slavery"? Burnard believes that Thistlewood quickly bought into the idea that blacks were of a race different than whites, and thus deserving of slavery.

Burnard writes well, and the subject matter is interesting enough to keep the reader's attention, though he repeats himself a bit too much. The parts about Thistlewood's intellectual and gentlemanly pursuits was very interesting to me. A good book, get it. ( )