Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism. By CatherineHall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024. 495 p. £35.00 (hb). ISBN 978‐1‐009‐09885‐4.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: s Lucky Valley explores the life and personality of Edward Long, a planter and colonial official in eighteenth-century Jamaica.She borrows her title from Long's estate of the same name.Edward Long provides Halland her readerswith a fruitful case study for examining the rise of racial capitalism in the Caribbean.Lucky Valley is divided into three sections, reflecting the three most prominent stages in the journey of most wealthy Englishmen sent to the Caribbean and the colonial processes they enacted upon arrival.The first section describes Long's earlier days in England, the second examines key components of plantation life in Jamaica and its place in colonial society, and the third considers the appropriation of the island and its colonial apparatus by the planters, furthering the racial divide and cementing the privileged position of planters within Jamaican society.Drawing on Long's three volume work, History of Jamaica (1774), Hall offers a detailed analysis of Long's notions of non-Whiteness and barbarity, explaining how these ideas developed from Long's earlier days in England through to his later life as a Jamaican planter.Though Lucky Valley does not offer an extensive analysis on the multidimensional nature of Jamaican economy, it remains a stellar scholarly work on Long and his influence on Jamaica's apparatus.The first section of Lucky Valley, set during Long's early life in England, explores the type of education undertaken by young members of the landed gentry as preparation for a political career in England, or for their journeys to the colonies where they would act as inheritors of a family estate.As a member of one of the founding families of English Jamaica, Long's case was a typical one.According to Hall, Long's presence in both the metropole and the colonies led to the rise of a dual sense of belonging, in which he acted both as an Englishman and a colonial paragon in Jamaica.Hall argues that men like Long significantly contributed to the transformation of Jamaica from a peripheral territory to an essential component of the British Atlantic system, through their focus on racial dominance and on the augmentation of the colony's production capacity.Subsequent sections shift their focus to Jamaican plantation society, with Hall explaining how the different components of a sugar colonylike the merchant house, the trade in enslaved Africans, the importance of gendered roles in marriage, and property relationsmade up the fabric of racial capitalism.Hall stresses the importance of the plantation and the merchant house as key aspects of Jamaican economic and social life.She then addresses Long's early years in Jamaica, focussing on the cultural shock he and other young gentlemen experienced when transitioning from England to a society built upon slavery.However, this shock did not last, and she argues that when writing his History Long was actively lobbying for his fellow Englishmen to settle in Jamaica.Such a move required capital, but the investment would soon pay off.Hall argues that the ultimate goal shared by Long and other prominent planter families was the concentration of property within the extended family, which would facilitate land acquisition in England.Hall's analysis of the History focusses on Long's role in enhancing his family's fortune through various means, included the marriages of his cousins and bequests to widows and illegitimate children.She argues that the reason behind these practices, unorthodox for the time, was the belief that Jamaica's White population must grow if the plantation complex was to flourish.This notion was reinforced by the planters' attempts to solidify the enslaved establishment, setting clear racial boundaries and managing any rebellious tendencies.According to Hall, Long was a key proponent of transforming Jamaica into a tropical home for Englishmen.She pays significant attention to his writings about the island's resources and how their apparent abundance could be a springboard for White people to secure the wealth and opportunities that they could not achieve in Europe.Hall stresses the clear hierarchy that Long envisioned for this tropical England, which aligned with the notions underpinning the management of Caribbean sugar colonies more generally.
Author: Christos Giannatos
Institution: University of Reading
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4409766239