Edward Long’s history of Jamaica, blood lineage, and racial inheritance in the British Atlantic World, 1697–1825

Abstract

This thesis examines the publications of British slaveowner, Edward Long. Long’s writing was part of a larger Enlightenment drive to define the borders of humankind in the early modern period. His polemics are at the core of this study, but I also center Black and interracial communities’ navigation of eighteenth-century Jamaican race laws. I illustrate how blood fractions and racialized inheritance shaped the slave-owning society of Jamaica and Long’s ideology of difference. Chapter One follows John Williams, Francis Williams, and William Golding – three Black and interracial slaveowners who petitioned legislative bodies for additional legal privileges. Chapter Two examines the evolution of Long’s racial thinking in his published and unpublished works. Chapter Three considers how Long’s work intersected with the British abolitionist movement by investigating print media and private correspondence. I close with an analysis of a civil rights petition by Jamaica’s free people of colour – indicating that the struggle for legal rights was ongoing throughout the eighteenth century.