Readers, like me, of popular and semi-popular history currently have a choice of two main genres both to be found on Waterstone tables. One genre creates a gripping narrative set in a slice of history narrowly circumscribed as to time and place and with a cast of characters some of whom remain throughout and offer what we call human interest. Of those I have read recently I single out Patrick Bishop’s Paris The Shame and the Glory , which covers the period 1940 – 44, and Adam Lebor’s The Last Days of Budapest set at the end of World War Two. Both are highly readable and, as far as I can tell, very well researched.
The second genre offers grand narratives spanning long
periods of time across wide geographical areas. Such are Zeinab Badawi’s An
African History of Africa, previously reviewed here, and the book now
under review. A common peril of the latter genre is that what is offered is a set
of thumbnail sketches which don’t provide narrative drive but become illustrations of some grand theory which is deployed to hold the whole thing
together and which may or may not succeed in its aim.
As an A level History student over sixty years ago I was
told to read Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History
(1931) partly with the intention that it would teach me to eschew all grand
narratives to which theories like Marxism might tempt me; a couple of decades
later it was Jean Francois Lyotard’s turn in The Postmodern Condition
(1979) to warn me off. Plumb had good conservative credentials and Lyotard good
leftist ones.
Imaobong Umoren’s book is more nuanced than its packaging
but she does try to nail down all her material as illustrative of a grand
theory that all of the history which has linked the Caribbean to Britain has
been shaped, and is still shaped, by the commitment of the colonial power and
local elites, white or sometimes non-white, to maintaining what she calls a
racial-caste hierarchy. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Nothing
really changes is not a terribly convincing grand narrative, especially if the
goal posts – what it actually means - keep being moved. I can imagine that a
dedicated Marxist analysis which kept a narrow focus on capital and labour
relations might stand up rather better, able to show that through time there is more than
one way of creating continuous extractive relationships. But then the Marxist analysis
would miss the cultural things on which Umoren has very relevant things to
report – I found what she has to tell us about the Caribbean and the First
World War, for example, very interesting.
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Until the arrival of the telegraph and the typewriter in the
second half of the nineteenth century, contact between the imperial centre and
the Caribbean colonial periphery and vice versa was only possible by personal
visits or hand-written letters sent by sea and arriving after excruciating
delays: the young missionary John Smith, sentenced to death for his alleged
part in a slave rebellion (Umoren, pp 134-6), died in an unhealthy Demerara
prison in 1824 just before the reprieve from London reached the colony. A small
detail which Umoren doesn’t use: the authorities obliged his widow to bury his
body at night in an unmarked grave for fear of renewed unrest. That is why Guyana now has a John Smith
Memorial Church rather than a tended grave.
Of the letters sent, very many thousands probably survive and probably
most of them not in archives. They were written from Britain by absentee
owners, family relatives, bankers sending balance sheets, lawyers, import and
export houses reporting arrivals and departures of goods by sea, and by
missionary societies. In the other direction, there are letters from resident
estate owners and the agents of absentee owners, from family members, from
attorneys, from merchant houses, and from missionaries. There are letters from
non-white writers, but they are rare. For a historian, these letters count as
primary sources.
Over the past couple of years I have been collecting and
transcribing unarchived letters on a small scale and am often surprised by things I
read and things I discover when I research background on the internet. I also
get to understand things which at first are puzzling. For example, if you use
UCLs indispensable on-line slavery compensation database you will notice a
significant amount of compensation going to trustees rather than simple owners.
One reason for this is high mortality rates among those who went out from
Britain to the Caribbean. Jane Austen’s father the Reverend George Austen was
sought out as a trustee by a man who had been his student at Cambridge and who
was going out to Antigua to the Nibbs family plantation. Having a trustee
meant that you had in place someone to manage your post-mortem affairs if you
succumbed to disease before you had made your fortune and retired but might,
for example, have children below the age of majority. The Nibbs family is
researchable and even before the abolition of slavery their business in Antigua
appears to have failed with the Nibbs estate passing to the historically
significant Martin family: it was an ameliorist Martin who in the late 18th
century published a manual arguing for allocating provision grounds
(allotments) to slaves There is evidence
of Nibbs family members still in Antigua in the late Victorian period; one was
an auctioneer. They probably thought of Antigua as their home.
My feeling is that a better overall understanding of
British-Caribbean relations might be got by taking slices of the entire story:
Antigua is a small island which was colonised early and declined economically
relatively early. But there is a big tale to be told about it which continues
into the 20th century with plenty of local nuances: the
Chairman of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration in the 1960s was the
philosopher Professor Michael Dummett of slave-trade beneficiary All Souls; the
vice-chairman was Rolston Williams who worked on the shop floor in the Morris
car factory out at Cowley and was a Windrush arrival from Antigua where ( if my
recollection is correct) he had been a journalist.
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Umoren doesn’t really evaluate the significance and legacy of the Christianisation of African slaves in the Caribbean and when she moves to the twentieth century she has nothing to say about the role of the many churches catering to both local and diaspora black communities. Any motorist driving through Brixton on a Sunday could not have failed to notice the throngs of black women in their Sunday best heading to church. In contrast, Umoren does give lots of space to thumbnails of the numerous and often ephemeral small groups which proliferated in the 1960s to 1980s with cumbersome names and unmemorable acronyms and which spent a lot of time falling out with each other. But they are easily accessible to historians through archival holdings; the Bodleian Library, for example, has recently created an online index for twenty boxes of stuff I donated to them and which included quite a lot of Black Power and general anti-racist material.
https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/bodreader/documents/media/pateman_collection.pdf
But I kept some photographs for myself, as souvenirs:
Umoren passes lightly (p 338) over complaints of sexism in the various political groupings. An obvious starting point is the notorious remark of Stokely Carmichael "The only position for women [in the movement] is prone” which dates from 1964. The internet has all that you need to know, but I can’t get a single result for the answering call, “Stoke me, Stokely”. Whether I heard it used or just heard it as an answering joke, I can't recall. (Maybe it was a line in the 1967 musical Hair which came to London in 1968).
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