https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5930-2132
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Katie Donington, Sheryllynne Haggerty. Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 361–362, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae513
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Sheryllynne Haggerty’s Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times begins with the story of the Europa, which in 1756 was on its way home from Jamaica to Dublin with its hold filled with slave-produced commodities. Before it could reach the port, the vessel was seized by a French privateer, only to be retaken days later by the English crew of the Defiance. This unusual changing of hands meant the Europa was sailed to Falmouth to be adjudicated by the Admiralty’s prize court. The ship was searched, and a postal bag was found hidden under one of the guns. The 407 assorted letters, bills, and other communications eventually became part of the Prize Papers of the High Court of the Admiralty and were preserved at the National Archives.
It is this cache of documents that forms the basis of this unique social history of Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century. Shifting the historiographical focus away from the planter-merchant elites whose well-kept archives have allowed detailed biographies to be written, Haggerty examines the relatively neglected middling and poorer sections of society. Her work complements quantitative demographic research by Barry Higman and Jack P. Greene on Jamaica in the 1750s. Using the Europa’s postal bag as her starting point, she introduces a world of characters into whose lives we might only glimpse, but who would otherwise have remained absent from the historical narrative. The letters give voice to the experiences of merchant’s clerk John Jackson, aspiring carpenter Ewbank Ogle, mother Ann Graham, seamstress Elizabeth Metcalf, mixed-heritage “housekeeper” Mary Rose, and enslaved distillery worker Quaco. From these relatively fleeting archival encounters, Haggerty weaves together a fascinating account of the lives of ordinary people as they stood at the precipice of a global conflict in the guise of the Seven Years’ War, and internal turmoil with the outbreak of Tacky’s Revolt.
