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Diana Paton, Jack P. Greene. Settler Jamaica in the 1750s: A Social Portrait., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 271–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.271
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In Settler Jamaica in the 1750s, Jack P. Greene brings to fruition decades of work with quantitative data to provide an empirically rich portrait of the free population of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica. His study reveals a society as variegated as were Britain’s mainland North American colonies of the period. Not simply a sugar monoculture, Jamaica was an economically complex society in which the production of coffee, livestock, and food provisions coexisted with sugar production, and which contained two substantial, and competing, urban centers, Kingston and Spanish Town. Greene modestly emphasizes that the book refines and adds detail to the conclusions of recent studies of the same period. It is true that in different ways the work of Kamau Brathwaite, Verene Shepherd, and Trevor Burnard has already established the importance of resident slaveowners, the production of crops other than sugar, and the development of a complex Jamaican institutional and political culture. Nevertheless, Settler Jamaica in the 1750s substantially develops our understanding of an under-studied period in Jamaican history. The value of the book is grounded in its strong evidentiary base of quantitative sources, but the book comes to life in its epilogue, which analyzes the critical context for understanding the production of those sources.
