numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.
Carey applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650-1807, and reported the following:
The Unnatural Trade asks how late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as a “dread perversion” of nature, charting that process across a century and a half of writing about African and Caribbean environments and people by British colonists and, later, abolitionists. In a book of around 220 pages, it should come as no surprise that page 99 describes an author and a moment around halfway through that process. The page is one of ten discussing the notorious historian and racial theorist Edward Long (1734–1813) and his infamous History of Jamaica, which was published in three volumes in 1774 and which compares Black people with orangutans. I go on to discuss those disturbing passages, for which Long has been dubbed “the father of English racism,” but on page 99 I show how in the History of Jamaica he moves from a highly aestheticized account of the Jamaican environment and its natural wonders to a more pragmatic call for its exploitation. Long’s parish tours, I argue, “reveal him an author with a keen eye for detail, a genuine appreciation of wildlife, landforms, and meteorology.” He is eager to emphasize the economic benefit of properly conducted natural history and he calls for more funding for top-quality scientific research into the Jamaican environment—while slamming amateur naturalists who he condemns as “the despicable tribe of insect-hunters, and collectors of gimcracks” who have brought the science of natural history into “contempt and ridicule.” Proper naturalists, he argues, understand that God has created Jamaica for the benefit of colonists and may “instruct us in the means by which our health may be preserved, our life prolonged, our agriculture improved, manufactures enlarged and multiplied, commerce and trade extended, and the public enriched.” For Long, I conclude, “the Caribbean environment is a resource supplied by God for the benefit of the British people and economy and natural history a tool in its exploitation.”Learn more about the book and author at Brycchan Carey's website.
Reading page 99 in isolation would certainly give a reader an insight into some of the key themes of the book. It offers a reading of an important piece of environmental literature that was written in the service of the Caribbean plantocracy and it shows how one writer could use his Christian faith, his belief in European supremacy, and his desire for economic expansion to justify colonial expansion and exploitation. It also shows how natural history and agricultural writing are deeply entwined with colonial discourses in this period. But unlike much of the rest of the book, page 99 has little to say about enslaved people and nothing about the slave trade. It also discusses the writing of one who was an unambiguous advocate for plantation slavery and a notorious racist. Many of the earlier 98 pages of the book assess the writing of naturalists who were instead ambivalent about enslavement, or who at least questioned its humanity. Many of the following 123 pages discuss those like Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, and Thomas Clarkson who worked actively to abolish the slave trade, and implicitly enslavement itself. In this case, the Page 99 Test is partially successful in that it foregrounds the role of natural history in the history of colonial resource exploitation, but it is less successful in showing the part played by naturalists in recording the brutal realities of the slave trade and plantation slavery, and not at all successful in showing how abolitionists seized upon and deployed that literature.
I hope someone who read page 99 of The Unnatural Trade would be intrigued enough by its glimpse into this complex literature to go back to page 1 and read the book through. The book as a whole tells the story of the part played by environmental writing in the development of British attitudes toward the slave trade and colonial slavery in which colonists increasingly presented slavery as an unalterable part of the natural order, but abolitionists, and increasingly the British public, saw it instead as a “dread perversion” of nature that needed to end. The book guides the reader through the writings of colonists and slave traders, explorers and scientists, enslaved people and abolitionists, poets and novelists, across a century and half, and concludes by showing the influence this writing would have on the next century of resource imperialism in the nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa.” Page 99 is a good entry point, but The Unnatural Trade has a great deal more to offer.
The Page 99 Test: From Peace to Freedom.
--Marshal Zeringue
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