Wilkinson’s two-volume treatment of Bermudan historical development, which covers the period from the end of the American Revolution down to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, is largely chronological and lacking in any meaningful analysis. This is particularly noticeable in the way the chapter divisions have been made, since rarely is there any attempt to use a thematic or topical approach. Although the narrative is well written, the language contains archaic usages and terminology largely unfamiliar to the average mid-twentieth-century reader. This is essentially descriptive history with few of the redeeming features that such an approach usually offers and, in the opinion of this reviewer, could easily have been presented in half the number of pages.
Most readers will be overwhelmed by the mass of frequently trivial minutiae and unnecessary detail, both in the body of the text as well as in the extensive annotations given in footnote form that often lack supporting evidence. Furthermore the author repeatedly makes annoying excursions into detailed descriptions of developments in North American, European, and Caribbean history which are at best marginal to what is going on in Bermuda. A mere description of slavery in Jamaica using outdated works does not necessarily explain the character of slave society in Bermuda, particularly when most of the contemporary observers of the local scene he relies on insist the Bermudan example is unique. In this connection, it should also be noted that in discussing the Atlantic slave trade and related events in Jamaica and Haiti, Wilkinson makes no use in his bibliography of recently published works or indeed any of the classic studies made by nonwhite historians of the area such as Dubois, James, Wilhams, and Patterson.
Despite the obvious importance of Bermuda’s colored and black population both before and after emancipation, the author makes only passing reference to their role in the development of the colony, at the same time that no pains are spared to give an infinite amount of detail about the role and interaction of expatriate and resident white families.
The author does provide some interesting information about Bermuda’s early economic dependence on such marginal activities as the Turks Islands salt trade and locally sponsored privateering, and then goes on to show Bermuda Island’s continued importance as a British military and naval outpost in the Atlantic during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War, when clandestine trade with the “enemy” persisted. These activities, it was shown, tended to shore up the otherwise languid insular economy, which throughout most of the period relied mainly on a shaky shipbuilding industry and the production of foodstuffs for the North American market. But for the most part too much emphasis has been placed on those aspects of Bermuda’s history Wilkinson considers important.
In fact the work can be described as more a “genealogical” survey of Bermuda’s leading families and imported administrators, together with a similar overemphasis on Bermuda’s maritime role in the admittedly important rivalries in the Atlantic, North America, and the Caribbean, involving the U.S. and a number of European colonial powers, rather than a balanced and comprehensive history of the colony. It has virtually nothing to say about the Island’s internal social structure and adds little in the opinion of this reviewer to Bermuda’s existing historiography.
