James Epstein examines the nature of British imperialism at the beginning of its final phase of expansion in the Caribbean together with the impact of this expansion on metropolitan perceptions of self. The platform for the analysis is the first decade of British rule (or rather misrule) in Trinidad, taken from the Spanish in 1797, particularly the trial and near disgrace of its first governor when he returned to London six years later. In 279 pages of text, the book offers competing narratives of Governor Picton's vicious regime and private life as represented by his supporters on the one hand and his opponents on the other—among the latter being a radical writer who visited and was quickly expelled from the island in 1803. The trial arose from Picton's practice of ignoring due process and his use of torture, especially in the case of a young free colored woman, though this is only the first example of the destructive force of colonial rule that fills these pages. Moving gradually from London to Trinidad, the seven chapters explore the implications of the case, the failed search for alternatives to slave labor that abolitionists hoped to put into place, and, in a final chapter, a close analysis of an official documentary account of the island's 1805 slave conspiracy—accompanied inevitably by more violence. Underpinning and linking these various narratives is the author's major preoccupation, which is to explore how brutal events in a new colony challenged British conceptions of justice, free labor, race, and the rights of the individual. This is a story of the emergence of a new and harsher imperialism, yet it is also a story of imperial anxieties as much as authority. Finely argued, thoroughly researched, and beautifully written, this is a truly entertaining read.

The book nicely illustrates the limitations of the postcolonial approach to explaining the past by first raising and then sidestepping some fascinating questions. As the above suggests, the author displays a deep knowledge of British political culture and overseas imperialism in his chosen period. Moreover, he sets his analysis in a global context, writing with great assurance and insight about the roles of the British elite, the radical underworld, and colonial subjects (including slaves) in Asia as well as in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But at the same time, he is curiously blind to the long-run evolution of colonial rule and the attendant rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. Colonial rule was possible largely because what was not permissible at home was permissible beyond the line. Violent, brutal, and licentious behavior in newly occupied or conquered colonies was as much a constant as was resistance—beginning with seventeenth century Ireland. What was new was the metropolitan reaction to it. The key point is that the Picton case could not have happened at an earlier time in British colonial history. However, it was not just the Picton case. Epstein mentions Governor Joseph Wall, hanged in 1802 for flogging a soldier to death in Gorée without due process, but there were similar cases in this era. Beginning in 1764, several slave ship captains were charged with killing slaves under their control. The Zong case (only the latest instance of mass murder on a slave ship) became notorious in 1781, and a planter was hanged in Tortola in 1811 for murdering a slave. New constructions of social class, race, and morality since the late seventeenth century combined to make such events possible. But whatever colonial insecurities were generated as a consequence in early British Trinidad, they must have begun well before the “Age of Revolution” of the title, and surely well after the beginning of slave resistance (which we can take as a constant). Postcolonial research and cultural studies do not easily engage with long-run shifts in values, especially ones that appear to manifest themselves simultaneously across class lines.

A second elephant in the room is the fact that with full access to the transatlantic—or even the intra-Caribbean—slave trade, Trinidad under the British would certainly have had its time as the leading Caribbean source of plantation produce, especially sugar. The British decision to delay the sale of Crown lands in 1802 and restrict the inflows of slaves from other British Caribbean islands meant that instead of the several hundred thousand arrivals that abolitionists were forecasting in 1800, inflows amounted to only 2,500 a year between 1797 and 1808, and then ended altogether. The various imperial schemes to “develop” the island in the absence of this option were indeed utter failures prior to 1840, but amid all his close discussions of imperial mayhem and competing options for the island, the author appears uninterested in the question of why Trinidad was not opened up to the slave trade like every other Caribbean island that the British acquired after 1650.

The decade after the conquest of Trinidad was indeed critical, but is there nothing in the colonial and imperial records that allows the author to say something new about the above issues for his decade of choice? After many millennia during which all societies accepted slavery as normal, Trinidad was the first British plantation colony that abolitionist policies began to affect. In the Americas as a whole after 1800, ten million slaves—freed over nine decades—began a long tortuous journey to full citizenship. Neither the process itself nor why Trinidad had such a central role at its beginning is anywhere suggested.