Encomium for April Shelford's A Caribbean Enlightenment

It is all there in the title: this is a book about the eighteenth-century Caribbean and it is about the Enlightenment.To my mind, the greatness of this book lies in the way in which it sheds new light on both topics.It also shows that Caribbean history and the history of the Enlightenment can illuminate one another.To begin with the Enlightenment: the book starts off by proposing a new way of thinking about what 'the Enlightenment' was.And it insists that the Enlightenment was real, and was a lived experience of eighteenth-century people, contra J.C.D. Clark, who has recently argued that the Enlightenment didn't exist in the 18th century and had to wait another century for historians to give it a name. 1 Just as Samuel Johnson refuted George Berkeley's immaterialism by kicking a large stone and saying 'I refute it thus!',Shelford refutes historiographic nominalists like Clark by writing a book all about the 'enlightened' activities of 18th-century people and refutes him thus.She sees the Enlightenment as characterised by three things, all of them starting with an 'A'.Shelford's three As are: attitude, approach, and activities.Attitudes included a sense of intellectual rights and responsibilities -an assertion of the right to think for oneself (and to improve oneself through knowledge and the quest for new understandings) as well as the responsibility to strive for improvement 'personal and social, moral and physical' (3).Approaches included curiosity above all (perhaps thus an offshoot of an earlier renaissance valorization and appreciation for curiosity) and an assumption that the world around us is 'intelligible' (i.e., understandable) -not necessarily rational, but intelligible either through reason or through empathy (feeling; sensibility).And activities included all of the things that Shelford's subjects did: collecting, networking, reading, writing, experimenting, conversing, observing, publishing, socializing, and organizing.All told, we are left with a perspective on the Enlightenment as a lived experience.Enlightenment wasn't a set of prescribed beliefs or an ideological program: it was a way of life.And it was a way of life that people in the colonial Caribbean experienced.This is important because the Caribbean had been considered for quite some time to be on the margins of the European eighteenth century and especially marginal to the Enlightenment.Who was the Caribbean Voltaire, Hume or Rousseau?One might ask.But a reader of Shelford's book will quickly realize that this is une question mal posée.We should not seek Enlightenment in the works of great men, or great intellectuals, but rather in the actions of otherwise ordinary individuals.There may not have been a 'Caribbean Voltaire', but there was, she informs us, an enslaved person named 'Voltaire' in eighteenth-century Jamaica.Of course, the eighteenth-century Caribbean was far from an ordinary environment, as eighteenth-century scholars have increasingly recognized in the twenty-first century.The Caribbean was, above all, a slave society.By this, historians mean that the entire social order of the Caribbean was dominated by the fact that the vast majority of the people who lived there were enslaved.The wealth generated by enslaved labour was substantial, and it is increasingly recognized that the grandeur of the age of Enlightenment depended upon the work of people who were forced to do it, and who gained little credit for their efforts.Arguments that were once seen

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