In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

The surgeon-apothecary Anthony Robinson (d. 1768) self-consciously continued the work of Hans Sloane, Patrick Browne, and Mark Catesby while covering more physical ground in Jamaica than any naturalist before him. His unpublished manuscript notes provide important insights into the daily challenges of a naturalist at work in the West Indies. Enthusiastically embracing Linnaean taxonomy, he struggled to make sense of Jamaican nature by collating information from published sources, his own observations, and those of local informants. He established a network of collaborators across the island, some of whom he befriended. His intellectual friendships with Thomas Thistlewood and Robert Long (brother of Edward, the author of the influential History of Jamaica [1774]) reveal the benefits of such relationships for White male colonists: They satisfied curiosity and emotional needs, and they cultivated disciplined, “virtuous” identities that further distanced them from the enslaved while asserting their worth against metropolitan disdain.

Part III, “Tristram Shandy in the Tropics: or, Reading Enlightenment in Jamaica,” begins with vignettes that demonstrate how acquiring publications was as important for Jamaicans as it was for British people of the metropole and North America and that they did so for similar reasons. Part III thus addresses a significant lacuna in the histories of the book and reading, vigorous fields in European and early American Enlightenment studies. As in Parts I and II, Part III shows the continuity in a colonial context of metropolitan intellectual practices and their adaptation by colonists to suit their needs, interests, and purposes. It begins with an impressionistic survey of reading on the island that explores what publications colonists secured and how they did so. It then delves into the meaning of reading for two Jamaicans, the ex-overseer Thomas Thistlewood and the planter Robert Long, by focusing on two themes: race and slavery, and religion. While the practices of these two readers cannot be generalized to all Jamaican readers, they demonstrate how colonial readers took possession of Enlightenment through reading and suggest how their reading was informed by personal experience, social status, intellectual, and even spiritual aspirations.

The work of contemporary Barbadian-Canadian artist Joscelyn Gardner engages extensively with the Caribbean historical archive as it manifests in the form of published books, museum collections, paintings, and unpublished plantation journals. In her lithographs as well as her multi-media installations, Gardner refers to a whole range of early Caribbean sources in the form of written or visual quotations, most importantly Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) and the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood. Gardner’s three series of lithographic prints, Creole Portraits, combine detailed drawing and handwriting, challenging the visual and written languages of eighteenth-century colonial culture in the Caribbean. For Gardner, lithography as practice – with its close connection to the history of the book – not only opens the colonial ‘book’ to new readings from the perspective of a contemporary Caribbean artist, but it also addresses the question of what constitutes a book more generally in the context of current art practice in the region.