Book Reviews -Bridget Brereton, Emilia Viotti Da Costa, Crowns of glory, tears of blood: The Demerara slave rebellion of 1823. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xix + 378 pp. -Grant D. Jones, Assad Shoman, 13 Chapters of a history of Belize. Belize city: Angelus, 1994. xviii + 344 pp. -Donald Wood, K.O. Laurence, Tobago in wartime 1793-1815. Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1995. viii + 280 pp. -Trevor Burnard, Howard A. Fergus, Montserrat: History of a Caribbean colony. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994. x + 294 pp. -John L. Offner, Joseph Smith, The Spanish-American War: Conflict in the Caribbean and the Pacific, 1895-1902. London: Longman, 1994. ix + 262 pp. -Louis Allaire, John M. Weeks ,Ancient Caribbean. New York: Garland, 1994. lxxi + 325 pp., Peter J. Ferbel (eds) -Aaron Segal, Hilbourne A. Watson, The Caribbean in the global political economy. Boulder CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994. ix + 261 pp. -Aaron Segal, Anthony P. Maingot, The United States and the Caribbean. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1994. xi + 260 pp. -Bill Maurer, Helen I. Safa, The myth of the male breadwinner: Women and industrialization in the Caribbean. Boulder CO: Westview, 1995. xvi + 208 pp. -Peter Meel, Edward M. Dew, The trouble in Suriname, 1975-1993. Westport CT: Praeger, 1994. xv + 243 pp. -Henry Wells, Jorge Heine, The last Cacique: Leadership and politics in a Puerto Rican city. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. ix + 310 pp. -Susan Eckstein, Jorge F. Pérez-López, Cuba at a crossroads: Politics and economics after the fourth party congress. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. xviii + 282 pp. -David A.B. Murray, Marvin Leiner, Sexual politics in Cuba: Machismo, homosexuality, and AIDS. Boulder CO: Westview, 1994. xv + 184 pp. -Kevin A. Yelvington, Selwyn Ryan ,Sharks and sardines: Blacks in business in Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Institute of social and economic studies, University of the West Indies, 1992. xiv + 217 pp., Lou Anne Barclay (eds) -Catherine Levesque, Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch world: The evolution of racial imagery in a modern society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. xix + 327 pp. -Dennis J. Gayle, Frank Fonda Taylor, To hell with paradise': A history of the Jamaican tourist industry. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. ix + 239 pp. -John P. Homiak, Frank Jan van Dijk, Jahmaica: Rastafari and Jamaican society, 1930-1990. Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:47:08AM via free access Utrecht: ISOR, 1993. 483 pp. -Peter Mason, Arthur MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, scientist, antiquary, founding Father of the British Museum. London: British Museum Press, 1994. -Philip Morgan, James Walvin, The life and times of Henry Clarke of Jamaica, 1828-1907. London: Frank Cass, 1994. xvi + 155 pp. -Werner Zips, E. Kofi Agorsah, Maroon heritage: Archaeological, ethnographic and historical perspectives. Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994. xx + 210 pp. -Michael Hoenisch, Werner Zips, Schwarze Rebellen: Afrikanisch-karibischer Freiheitskampf in Jamaica. Vienna Promedia, 1993. 301 pp. -Elizabeth McAlister, Paul Farmer, The uses of Haiti. Monroe ME: Common Courage Press, 1994. 432 pp. -Robert Lawless, James Ridgeway, The Haiti files: Decoding the crisis. Washington DC: Essential Books, 1994. 243 pp. -Bernadette Cailler, Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xii + 202 pp. -Peter Hulme, Veronica Marie Gregg, Jean Rhys's historical imagination: Reading and writing the Creole. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. xi + 228 pp. -Silvia Kouwenberg, Francis Byrne ,Focus and grammatical relations in Creole languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xvi + 329 pp., Donald Winford (eds) -John H. McWhorter, Ingo Plag, Sentential complementation in Sranan: On the formation of an English-based Creole language. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993. ix + 174 pp. -Percy C. Hintzen, Madan M. Gopal, Politics, race, and youth in Guyana. San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992. xvi + 289 pp. -W.C.J. Koot, Hans van Hulst ,Pan i rèspèt: Criminaliteit van geïmmigreerde Curacaose jongeren. Utrecht: OKU. 1994. 226 pp., Jeanette Bos (eds) -Han Jordaan, Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, Een zweem van weemoed: Verhalen uit de Antilliaanse slaventijd. Curacao: Caribbean Publishing, 1993. 175 pp. -Han Jordaan, Ingvar Kristensen, Plantage Savonet: Verleden en toekomst. Curacao: STINAPA, 1993, 73 pp. -Gerrit Noort, Hesdie Stuart Zamuel, Johannes King: Profeet en apostel in het Surinaamse bosland. Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1994. vi + 241 pp. In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 70 (1996), no: 3/4, Leiden, 309-381 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:47:08AM via free access Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:47:08AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823. EMILIA VIOTTI DA COSTA. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xix + 378 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00) BRIDGET BRERETON Department of History The University of the West Indies St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago In August 1823, the east coast of the British mainland colony of Demerara (now part of Guyana) was convulsed by a major slave rebellion, involving between 9,000 and 12,000 slaves and about sixty plantations. It was one of the three "late" Anglo-Caribbean slave uprisings, and along with the rebellions in Barbados in 1816 and in Jamaica in 1831-32, it significantly affected the course of the abolition debate in Britain, accelerating the eventual passage of the Act of Emancipation in 1833. Emilia Viotti da Costa has given us an excellent full-length study of the Demerara uprising, which is likely to be recognized as the definitive work on the topic. As she points out, the documentation on the events in Demerara in 1823 is abundant: missionary diaries and correspondence, the papers and publi- cations of the London Missionary Society (LMS), records of the Colonial Office in London and the colonial government in Georgetown (including the rich papers of the Fiscals, who served in theory as Protectors of the Slaves in Demerara), letters and journals of those participating in the re- pression, voluminous trial records, Parliamentary inquiries and Blue Books, and colonial newspapers (of which Demerara, a colony with about 2,500 whites in 1823, had three). This abundance of source materials has made possible a richly detailed study, not only of the rebellion, but of the whole Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:47:08AM via free access 310 New West lndian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 70 no. 3 &4 (1996) world inhabited by slaves, planters, officials, and missionaries at the time. It has also led the author to a mild degree of verbal overkill, such as the lengthy description of John Smith's voyage out to Guyana, or the entire paragraph devoted to his problems with his horse and chaise; some judi- cious editing, this reviewer feit, would have produced a shorter book, and perhaps a better one. Yet the detailed narration and analysis, the thick de- scription, add up to a powerful if lengthy reconstruction of a tragic story. Viotti da Costa intends to teil that story from multiple points of view: those of the slaves (to the extent that the sources permit), the planters and their agents, and the missionaries, especially John Wray and John Smith, the two LMS ministers who worked in Demerara between 1808 and 1823. She refuses to see the slaves as "passive victims" of cruelty and oppres- sion from their owners, as the missionaries often did, or as gullible children manipulated for sinister ends by anti-slavery preachers, as the planters claimed to. She weaves them into her analysis as fully conscious agents, developing an ideology of "rights" to be fiercely defended, and well aware of shifts in the balance of power in their favor during the years after 1808, including the arrival of the LMS men. Chapter 2 provides an ex- cellent analysis of the situation of the Demerara slaves in the two decades before 1823. Since the colony definitively entered the British empire in 1803, massive capital investment, expansion of commodity production, and a post-1808 shift from cotton and coffee to sugar (still incomplete on the east coast in 1823), coinciding with the end of slave imports from Africa in 1806, had all led to a deterioration in the slaves' lives. The managers re- quired longer hours and a faster pace of work, they gave less time for provision cultivation and fewer allowances of food, "privileges" were cut back, supervision was made more intense, and sales and family separations became more frequent. All this amounted to a serious encroachment of the slaves' "rights." Demerara slaves protested vigorously (at times with suc- cess) against these encroachments, to managers and owners, "attorneys" and the Fiscals; for, as Viotti da Costa puts it, "while masters dreamt of total power and blind obedience, slaves perceived slavery as a system of reciprocal obligations." And the "rights" were expanded whenever cir- cumstances changed and the balance of power shifted: the arrival of the missionaries allowed them to publicly claim the "right" to have Sundays off and to attend chapel on Sundays and on weekday nights. Despite the limitations of the sources, Viotti da Costa is able to unravel the ideologies of the Demerara slaves in the last decades of slavery. The documentation is far fuller, of course, on the ideologies of the LMS mis- sionaries, and Chapters 3 and 4 explore the mental world of Wray and Smith, as well as that of their superiors in England. The tensions in the Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 11:47:08AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS 311 missionary discourse in a slave society - equality before God and brother- hood of all believers versus submission to masters - are brilliantly dis- sected, as is the wide gap between the intent of the message preached by Wray and Smith and its reception by the slaves.