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SLAVERY/DIASPORA STUDIES Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the AngloJamaican World. By Trevor Burnard. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 320. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.
Students of the British West Indian world are very familiar with the subject of Burnard's book, Thomas Thistlewood. Like many young men of his generation, Thistlewood left Europe to better his prospects in the colonial world, taking a job as an overseer on a plantation and working his way up the social ladder to eventually become a small planter of his own. While his was a fairly common story, Thistlewood is unique in having left a massive diary, running to 37 volumes, outlining 36 years of his life in Jamaica, and dating from April 1750 to the time of his death in November 1786. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire is an analysis of Thistlewood's life as represented through his journals; Burnard's stated intention is "to explore what it meant to be a white immigrant in a land characterized by extreme...