Edward Long’s History of Jamaica was published in 1774 and has been in print ever since. It was a text designed to legitimate slavery as central to Britain’s wealth and power and to encourage new white settlers to come to the island. A judgment by Lord Mansfield had persuaded the slave-owners that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ‘property’ in enslaved men and women. New legitimations were necessary and Long’s encyclopaedic History, encompassing population, politics, the economy, law, and the topography and natural history of the island, was structured around a defence of slavery and natural difference. Long’s History continues to be read by numerous scholars interested in racial difference and in eighteenth-century Britain and its relation to the Caribbean. But it has never been fully contextualized either in his family history or in his place in the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment man, Long was determined to represent plantation slavery as a civilizing process for barbarous Africans. Nor has the History been thought about in terms of its relevance to the present. Key concepts utilized in the analysis of his work are introduced, including racial capitalism, racialization, reproduction and disavowal.

The surgeon-apothecary Anthony Robinson (d. 1768) self-consciously continued the work of Hans Sloane, Patrick Browne, and Mark Catesby while covering more physical ground in Jamaica than any naturalist before him. His unpublished manuscript notes provide important insights into the daily challenges of a naturalist at work in the West Indies. Enthusiastically embracing Linnaean taxonomy, he struggled to make sense of Jamaican nature by collating information from published sources, his own observations, and those of local informants. He established a network of collaborators across the island, some of whom he befriended. His intellectual friendships with Thomas Thistlewood and Robert Long (brother of Edward, the author of the influential History of Jamaica [1774]) reveal the benefits of such relationships for White male colonists: They satisfied curiosity and emotional needs, and they cultivated disciplined, “virtuous” identities that further distanced them from the enslaved while asserting their worth against metropolitan disdain.