In the 1960s through the 1980s, studies of the Caribbean tended to be focused on social statistics, on plantation management practices and on slaves. Since the 1980s, however, more and more scholars have begun studying culture in the shadow of slavery, and indeed, as this trend has developed, Africa and the African background is gradually entering the history of the Caribbean. Vincent Brown's study of death and the culture of death in Jamaica is a fitting new addition to this culture-centered trend in Caribbean history.

From the start, Brown reminds us that death was one of the critically defining aspects of Caribbean life in the eighteenth century. Jamaica was not only, as most readers realize, a death trap for its African slaves, it also killed Europeans off in great numbers. High mortality was commonplace in the eighteenth century but, in stable populations such as Europe and Africa, it was mostly the elderly and young children who died. Death in Jamaica upset this regime by taking not only the very young, the old and the infirm, but also apparently strong and healthy adults. Although Brown does not engage in much statistical research, neither trying to discover death rates in Jamaica, nor seeking to compare those of Jamaica with European or African rates, he has in fact demonstrated that, even by eighteenth-century standards, Jamaica was unusually deadly, and not just for the exploited and abused slaves, but also for their European and even Euro-Jamaican masters. To drive this latter point home, Brown uses a late eighteenth-century illustrated book, Johnny New-come in the Island of Jamaica, as a sort of illustration and trope for the ubiquity of death for white Jamaicans.

It is not surprising, in a world defined by high mortality, that Jamaica should develop a culture in which death became almost a pre-occupation. Brown skillfully uses this obsession with death to write a much broader social history of Jamaica than he might have using the more mundane measures of social statistics. He advances his argument in parallel sections, contrasting Euro- and Afro-Jamaicans' manner of dealing with death. He argues, for example, that white Jamaicans used death to assert and reassert status (whether in announcements, monuments or funerals), while black Jamaicans used the ceremonial of death to seek regeneration of a shattered society. Elsewhere, he seeks to demonstrate how masters understood and sought to manipulate African and Afro-Jamaican religious beliefs to give torture and execution an extra, spiritual dimension, while the same Afro-Jamaicans used spiritual poisons as counter-terror. A meditation on the Zong case, in which a ship captain threw slaves overboard to cheat insurance companies, reveals the widespread influence of the case, and others like it, in shaping Abolitionist appeals, and how the economic costs of high slave death rates helped spur ‘amelioration’ and, ultimately, the end of both the slave trade and slavery. High death rates among the missionaries sent to Jamaica made full-scale conversion of Afro-Jamaicans to Christianity more difficult, and resulted in a sort of half-way ground, rooted in the death culture of the slaves, mixed with African religions and Catholicism from Africa or (later) Haiti.

Given the wide-ranging nature of Brown's study, this book is in fact much more than simply a study of death and mortuary practices. It examines social status and hierarchy, religious beliefs and conversions, perceptions of crime (or social control) and punishment, and finally, as befits a topic so weighted with symbols, provides a fine study of symbolism. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the cultural context of slavery, so often absent in the more economically focused studies of the past, but much more in tune with the study of slavery in the context of Atlantic history.

From an Africanist perspective, the book is much more firmly rooted in Jamaica than it is in Africa. While Brown is cognizant that many Jamaicans he studies were born and socialized in Africa and were thus likely to bring their ideas about death and the afterlife to their observances of death rituals, he presents the study of death in Africa more as background than as a fundamental part of the dynamic. The slave trade had profound demographic effects in Africa, for example, and death and deportation led to substantially skewed sex ratios over time, but this and other dynamics that might have been relevant are unexplored in the book. Brown does engage existing secondary literature quite well, and has explored fruitfully a good range of African primary literature too, so the criticism is rather more one of emphasis than one of neglect.

In total, however, Brown's work is engaging and original, and raises important questions about the African diaspora. He is certainly cognizant that many Jamaicans were Africans and keeps Africa in the picture. His contribution to the study of Jamaican and Caribbean history is substantial and the book is likely to be frequently noted in the emerging new culture-focused studies of Caribbean history.