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Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776. Natalie A. Zacek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xi + 293 pp. (Cloth US$ 90.00)
Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 is a significant scholarly study of Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, and St Kitts in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As her title suggests, Natalie Zacek focuses on the white minority in the Leewards, which comprised about 7,000 people by 1776 when slaves and free blacks in those islands numbered 100,000. She argues that, contrary to the common emphasis on the debauched, unstable, wasteful, philistine white society of the early British Caribbean, one can establish a more positive case for the creation of a successful, functioning white society in the British Leewards before the American Revolution. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources including governors' correspondence, legal records, census data, and numerous contemporary descriptions of one or all of the Leewards, she produces a portrait of a sustainable white society. Thus she challenges the notion that these colonies were white social failures.
Though it is sometimes difficult...