Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729-1788

B.W. Higman, Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729-1788. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2011. vii + 334 pp.REVIEWED BY NATALIE ZACEKMORE THAN A GENERATION AGO, Gordon Lewis asserted that planters of West Indies were the most crudely philistine of all dominant classes in history of Western slavery, statement which has received surprisingly few challenges in intervening years. In last decade, however, scholars such as Trevor Burnard, Philip Morgan and April Shelford have contradicted this image of Caribbean plantocracy as inhabiting an intellectual vacuum. In ProsUvery Priest, Barry Higman, pre-eminent social and demographic historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Jamaica, has contributed to this emerging reassessment of extent to which plantation society could coexist with life of mind. Simultaneously, Higman's study complements recent work of, amongst others, Srividhya Swaminathan and Christer Petley on subject of proslavery ideology in era of abolition, burgeoning historiography which has worked to avoid Whiggish teleologies of inevitable triumph of antislavery impulse.As Higman's subtitle emphasises, he locates his protagonist, Scots clergyman John Lindsay, within fluid boundaries of eighteenth-century Atlantic world, limning him as one of a few [people] who struggled to make sense of this world and left behind evidence of their attempts to comprehend what they encountered (i). Lindsay's life story certainly qualifies for membership of this oceanic world; born and educated in Lowland Scotland, he made nearly dozen Atlantic crossings in his lifetime, travelling first to Newfoundland, then to Virginia and into mid-Atlantic backcountry, and then, as Royal Navy chaplain, sailing to Senegal, after which he settled in Jamaica, where he lived from 1759 until his death in 1788. As an inhabitant of this time and these places, Lindsay experienced last gasp of Jacobite rebellion, exigencies of Seven Years' War, rise of Enlightenment ideas regarding religion, governance and human and emergence of Britain as West's leading imperial and maritime power.Although Higman states in his preface that this monograph is intended to be and writings' rather than 'life and times' (xiv) of Lindsay, his study is primarily chronological narrative of Lindsay's peripatetic life, stopping at several junctures to discuss Lindsay's varied literary productions, including his picaresque novel Memoirs of Sir Thomas Hughson and Mr Joseph Williams (1757), his account of his Voyage to Coast of Africa (1759), and numerous unpublished writings he produced during his thirty years' sojourn in Jamaica. For readers of this journal, it is probably these latter items that will be of greatest interest, as Higman's discussion of Lindsay's African travelogue is surprisingly limited in its insights into development of latter's ideas about legitimacy of Atlantic slave trade, and while he makes valiant efforts to argue for cultural and literary importance of Memoirs, his lengthy exegesis of this labyrinthine text adds relatively little to his intellectual portrait of its author.Within three years of his arrival in Jamaica, as an Anglican clergyman, Lindsay had firmly established his alignment with creole elite (117) through his marriage to daughter of local planter. Although it is clear from Higman's analyses of number of Lindsay's extant sermons that latter took his clerical duties seriously, his lifestyle was fairly leisured one, allowing him to devote much of his energy to study of Jamaica's tropical fauna and flora. The liveliest and most illuminating chapter of ProsUvery Priest not only discusses Lindsay's studies, particularly his unpublished and profusely illustrated Elegancies of (completed in 1770), but places him within context of his intellectual contemporaries, who knew Jamaica not only as source of great wealth through sugar and slavery but also as home of an exotic tropical world which had contributed fundamentally to study of nature, and in which these scholarly colonists felt neither marginal nor isolated (150) in relation to metropolitan scientific circles. …

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