The approach to reading of Robert Long, brother of Edward Long, who authored The History of Jamaica (1774), was very different from Thomas Thistlewood’s, the subject of the preceding chapter. Yet Robert explored the same themes – race and slavery, religion – in his unpublished “Miscellaneous Reflections.” Like Thistlewood’s commonplace books, his reflections show that eighteenth-century readers were hardly passive vessels waiting to be filled with enlightened ideas. Their divergent readings of the widely influential Montesquieu prove that Caribbean colonists could read selectively, critically, sometimes opportunistically, even perversely. Robert’s manuscript notes also reveal an impatient and opinionated reader obsessed with the social dictates of “politeness.” Unlike Thistlewood, he primarily relied on his own experience as a planter to manage the enslaved workers on his Lucky Valley Estate, which also shaped his judgments of their intellectual and moral capacities. Like Thistlewood, he was critical of Christian orthodoxy, anxious for the fate of his soul in the face of divine justice, and restlessly sought personal transcendence.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

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.

Part III, “Tristram Shandy in the Tropics: or, Reading Enlightenment in Jamaica,” begins with vignettes that demonstrate how acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for British people of the metropole and North America and that they did so for similar reasons. Part III thus addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and early American Enlightenment studies. As in Parts I and II, Part III shows the continuity in a colonial context of metropolitan intellectual practices and their adaptation by colonists to suit their needs, interests, and purposes. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that explores what publications colonists secured and how they did so. It then delves into the meaning of reading for two Jamaicans, the ex-overseer Thomas Thistlewood and the planter Robert Long, by focusing on two themes: race and slavery, and religion. While the practices of these two readers cannot be generalized to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment through reading and suggest how their reading was informed by personal experience, social status, intellectual, and even spiritual aspirations.