Caribbean England: Re-Imagining Late Stuart England from the West Indies

Most discussions of the impact of the empire on Britain focus on the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But a close examination of the process of colonial settlement in the Caribbean suggests the major social changes that were necessary to establish sugar plantations and slave societies were returned to England as social and cultural resources that contribute to the shape of social transformation. Two particularly significant developments were first, the transformation of law to protect slaveowners property in humans with violent punishments and second, the organization of work by race, particularly  the lack of a clear distinction between the work of slave men and women. The first provided models for legal changes that provided increasingly absolute models of property ownership in the early eighteenth century. The second contributed to both changing attitudes to the work of women, and to women’s sexuality. Together the developments in England’s Caribbean colonies contributed to a silent definition of Englishness as white. This paper will explore some of the ways English historiography could enrich its understanding of the p rocdess of historical change by further attention to issues of law, work and sexuality as they played out in the colonies.