Description: In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.
Brief description: James Epstein is Distinguished Professor of History, Department of History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. His previous publications include In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (2003) and Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (1994).
Review Quotes: "In this rollicking, sensational tale of imperial misrule, James Epstein takes readers into the colonial underworld peopled by those rogues and scoundrels who both represented British colonial power and defied it in the Caribbean of the early nineteenth century. Drawing on legal records, parliamentary debate, personal memoirs, print culture and the uneven, fragmented remains of the colonial archive, he weaves together the fractious histories of Thomas Picton and William Fullarton, suturing their clash of wills to the most important questions of the day: the rule of law, the fate of free labor and the career of liberalism in and outside the metropole. For all their fugitive archival presence, Epstein never lets the men and women of color whose suffering was the scandal of colonial rule fall below our sightline. This is postcolonial history at its best: erudite, breathtaking, subversive - and portable, in methodological terms, to a host of other imperial times and places as well."
Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign