EMPIRE WITHOUT END

The persistence of empire.

Umoren, a scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is not breaking new ground in writing that, immediately on arriving in the New World, Europeans subjugated and enslaved the Native people. When disease and abuse drove Indigenous people to near extinction, colonists turned to Africans, who were shipped across the ocean in the millions to work under equally unspeakable conditions. Western scholars traditionally cheer abolition (in 1833 by Britain, later by other European nations), but Umoren will have none of that. She maintains that abolition was never intended to eliminate white supremacy, which still remains. Rising in parallel with 19th-century abolitionism was pseudoscientific racism and social Darwinism. Abolitionists themselves often portrayed Black people as docile, innocent, and in need of salvation by European Christians, thereby reinforcing racial hierarchies. Even history buffs will learn something as the author recounts the story of a score of Caribbean island nations. She reminds readers that 18th-century Caribbean agriculture, mostly sugar, generated more wealth than all of North America’s crops. Abolition produced a mass exodus of freed enslaved people from the island plantations. Sugar production is brutally labor-intensive, and planters tried to replace the Black workforce with indentured labor from India and China, but their vast profits never returned; economies drifted down until the islands are now dependent on tourism and suffer widespread unemployment. Umoren’s later sections tell a story of misgovernment and persistent racism—either from Britain or local leaders anxious to curry favor with Britain or the U.S., whose 20th-century rise to dominance did not improve matters. Hundreds of thousands of Black people have emigrated to Britain, and chapters on their post–World War II experiences—such as with working-class white mobs assailing them—will be disturbingly familiar to American readers. Unsettling, too, are accounts of popular movements and laws to restrict immigration—unnerving forecasts of the present day.

A valuable study of how Britain’s Caribbean slavery empire left a legacy of white supremacy.