Neville Hall died in an auto accident in 1986. At the time of his death, he was working on a three-volume history of the Danish West Indies. Barry Higman, best known for his studies of nineteenth-century Jamaica and other British Caribbean slave societies, has here reconstructed Hall’s work. Seven of this book’s 12 chapters have already been published as articles. Higman has stitched the remaining 5 chapters together by following the same general outline that Hall had been using. As might be surmised from these unusual and tragic circumstances, the resulting book is uneven.
Higman’s editing is rather conservative. He has added several paragraphs throughout the book when problems with clarity arose; he has also cleaned up the bibliographic citations and endnotes. He has thereby preserved intact the author’s style and content (p. xx). Because Hall apparently wrote neither an introduction nor a conclusion, however, and because Higman chose not to exercise his editorial prerogatives here, this volume lacks a strong interpretative argument.
To be sure, there is a wealth of information in this volume on the Danish West Indian experience. The book’s first three chapters deal with “white” society. They contain a narrative political history of Denmark’s modest Caribbean presence, an overview of Danish attitudes toward slavery, and a discussion of Scandinavian slave law, particularly as it operated in the tropics.
The next three chapters deal much more directly with rural and urban slaves. Hall’s descriptions are based largely on European sources; his familiarity with the Danish archives has served him well. Nevertheless, these chapters will probably be remembered more for their lack of texture than for their thorough use of sources in distant repositories. Works like Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974) and several of the essays in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd’s Caribbean Slave Society and Economy (1991) have shown how to reconstruct the history of slavery from the bottom up. Hall’s book tells a great deal about how the Europeans perceived slavery, but it does not tell much about how slaves perceived their own position.
Chapter 7 deals with resistance to slavery in the form of maritime marronage, while chapters 8 through 10 explore the role of freedmen in the islands. These people, who were really “neither slave nor free” and neither “white nor black,” were tremendously important in Caribbean life. As Hall pointed out, “white society gave freedmen an economic interest in slaves to defend and thus ensured that they would not likely seek alliances with those very slaves in order to destroy an institution from which they profited. In the long term, the policy paid rich dividends” (p. 143).
The book’s last two chapters are an exploration of abolition and emancipation. They take a broad Atlantic approach by examining how the changes that reformist Danes demanded for the Danish peasantry affected Caribbean blacks in Danish colonies. Like the moral reformers in Britain in the early nineteenth century, those in Denmark pressed for improved access to religion and education for those less fortunate. It was only logical that the Caribbean outpost would be included in such moral crusades.
Hall maintained that “slavery’s ultimate collapse arose from the slaves’ own revolutionary confrontation of their oppressors” (p. 6). Had either the editor or the author done more to develop this argument over the course of the book, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies might have been far richer. As it stands now, it resembles more a collection of essays than a monograph.
