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Jamie Gemmell, The Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica and the Territories thereon depending from the First Discovery of the Island by Christopher Columbus, to the Year 1746, by James Knight, ed. Jack P. Greene, The English Historical Review, Volume 138, Issue 592, June 2023, Pages 669–671, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cead015
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James Knight’s Natural, Moral, and Political History of Jamaica, written during the 1740s, was never published and survives as a set of manuscripts held by the British Library. The manuscripts have been, largely, neglected by scholars and so Jack P. Greene’s edition is welcome. Greene’s thorough introduction and extensive footnotes—accompanied by a set of carefully selected images (edited by Taylor Stoermer) and a useful historiographical essay (written by Trevor Burnard)—help to contextualise this sometimes unwieldy manuscript and will encourage more research on early eighteenth-century Jamaica and the wider Atlantic World.
The specific neglect of Knight’s manuscripts reflects a broader neglect of early eighteenth-century Jamaica. As Burnard points out, scholars ‘have concentrated on Jamaican history after 1770’, despite the crucial importance of Jamaica to the British Empire during an earlier period (p. 645). The edition follows the structure of Knight’s manuscripts and is divided into two volumes. The first is a narrative history of the island, from its initial European ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in the late fifteenth century to the War of Jenkins’ Ear in the mid-eighteenth century. The second is a chorography of Jamaica, covering the island’s geography, climate, inhabitants, governance, flora, fauna and position in the Atlantic system. Both volumes are highly detailed and, like the later histories of Edward Long and Bryan Edwards, will provide a gateway to further sustained historical study of British Jamaica.
