March 2012


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The priest who preached slavery

“Lindsay believed in polygenesis, the view that God created the several ‘races’ of mankind separately, making them different at the moment of the Creation.”

By Professor Bridget Brereton

Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729-1788
Barry Higman (Kingston: UWI Press, 2011)

For a research-oriented university like UWI, its major scholars – people whose work is internationally recognized as cutting-edge – help to make and sustain its reputation in the academic world. In my own discipline, history, they don’t come more eminent, or more prolific, than Barry Higman.

Higman is Australian, and in 1967, a young history graduate, he won a Commonwealth Scholarship and took the unusual, even brave, decision to take it up at the Mona Campus of UWI. He stayed there for nearly 30 years. He was one of the early UWI PhDs, then a member of the Mona Department of History, becoming an innovative and excellent head of that department and Professor of History.

Though he took up a prestigious appointment at Australia’s leading university in 1996, Higman remained deeply engaged in research and writing on Jamaican and Caribbean history, and (as a UWI Emeritus Professor) in the work of the regional university. He’s the single author of 12 scholarly books, 10 of them on Jamaican or Caribbean history. He’s the internationally recognised authority on the demographic history of British Caribbean slavery, and on the Jamaican plantation economy during the era of slavery (roughly the 1680s to the 1830s).

Proslavery Priest, his latest book – published by our own UWI Press – is not at all typical of his work. Higman is essentially an economic and demographic historian, and these varieties of history are generally what we call ‘structural’ – concerned with economic and social structures, broad groups of people and significant trends, prone to deal with statistics and figures and their analysis. His work has been mostly concerned with material life (production, crops, plantation regimes, food) rather than with ideas or individual lives.

The biographical approach to the past is almost the polar opposite to this kind of history. It deals with one named individual, not broad classes; it follows one person’s life, not general trends; it is usually narrative in style rather than analytical. So this is a departure for Higman, his first biography. But as he makes clear in the book’s preface, he is interested less in his subject’s life, more in what his published and unpublished writings on many different subjects tell us about his mental universe. It’s a ‘life and writings’ rather than a ‘life and times’ kind of biography.

John Lindsay, born in Scotland in 1729, travelled widely in the ‘Atlantic world’ – the interconnected world of Britain and Western Europe, North America, the Caribbean and West Africa. His travels included a voyage on a British Navy ship to West Africa, about which he published an account. He came to Jamaica as an Anglican priest in 1759, and remained there until his death in 1788 (except for a few trips back to Britain). He married into the Jamaican plantocracy and was involved in the management of plantations and enslaved people, as well as serving as parish priest in several places, including Spanish Town, then the island’s capital.

Lindsay wrote a great deal, though he published only two books, and his extensive unpublished manuscripts have fortunately survived. Higman has used these writings to explore Lindsay’s intellectual universe, as a window to the worldview of eighteenth-century planters and others who lived with slavery as a fact of life and sought to justify it on various theological, philosophical and practical grounds.

How could a Christian priest be proslavery? Easily: Lindsay wasn’t a missionary, he ministered almost entirely to the white Jamaican population, and he lived in the island at the height of its prosperity as a plantation and slave economy. He himself owned estates and enslaved people. He died (1788) just before the British antislavery movement really got under way.

In his earlier book about his trip to Senegal in 1758-59, Lindsay was surprisingly open-minded – and indeed respectful – about the African men and women he encountered. But by the time he wrote the long manuscript left unpublished at his death, his views had hardened. Much of this work is in effect a theological justification for the perpetual enslavement of Africans.]

Lindsay believed in polygenesis, the view that God created the several ‘races’ of mankind separately, making them different at the moment of the Creation. This, of course, conflicted with the Biblical story in the Book of Genesis, as well as the present scientific view of the evolution of modern human beings. But it suited Lindsay’s purpose, for polygenesis implied that God had created some races as inherently inferior to others, fitted by God to be slaves to the superior ones. It justified, in theological and philosophical terms, a hierarchical world, in which some ‘races’ were enslaved, some were free and dominant – and all by divine will.

Lindsay did propose reforms in the slave system as practised in Jamaica in the 1780s, including manumission for ‘deserving’ slaves, and limited schooling and religious instruction for these persons. But his major contribution was to help to create theological and pseudo-scientific racism at its origin – it was really to flourish in the nineteenth century, long after his death. As Higman puts it, he ‘erected intellectual systems consciously designed to justify wrong’.

But Lindsay had other intellectual interests. Like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by Jamaica’s flora and fauna. He was one of a small group of British men who saw Jamaica at the time as ‘an exotic place at the forefront of scientific observation’. He wrote extensively on the plants and animals of the island, illustrating his writings (which were never published) with often exquisite drawings, some beautifully coloured. (Many are reproduced in the book in full-colour plates). He was a talented artist and a keen observer, though not a major scientist.

This is a superbly researched, meticulously referenced and well written book on an interesting man and a crucial time in the history of Jamaica and of Caribbean slavery. Higman has done it again!

Bridget Brereton is Emerita Professor of History and author of the 2010 “From Imperial College to the University of The West Indies.”