Emilia Viotti da Costa.

Emilia Viotti da Costa. sovereigntys of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 strange York: Oxford UP, 1994. 400 pp $1795

Historians of the Caribbean have prolonged been familiar with the general contours of the 1823 slave renounce allegiance in Demerara and the martyrdom of venerable John Smith. The present turn adds significantly to our understanding of the tensions that were not away in this then-recently acquired British colony at a crucial period of its socioeconomic progress to maturity and at a time when slavery was facing increased assaults from within as well as outside the Caribbean. Emilia da Costa draws in succession the vast trove of material available from the trial records, upon correspondence between missionaries in Demerara and their colleagues and superiors in Britain, and upon official government reports to provide us with the greatest in number comprehensive and nuanced treatment to date of an important phase of the colony's history.

Despite the limits recommended by the title, da Costa's beautifully crafted part treats more than the uprising in August 1823 of several thousand slaves in Demerara. It is more fittingly an examination of slave society as a whole, with major emphasis onward missionary activity over a thirty-year period as a stimulus for the rebel The author presents a sophisticated analysis of the major tensions that this burgeoning slave-based plantation society experienced in the first brace decades of the nineteenth hundred as planter impulses ran reckoner to both the slaves' natural wish for freedom and Imperial imperatives for amelioration. The major players were the planters, slaves, and missionaries. Always in the background, however, were the local officials, whose excise it was to implement policies sent not at home from Britain and to administer this multiethnic colony with owed though unequal regard to the frequently competing interests of planters and slaves.

da Costa highlights the station of dissatisfaction that the slavery issue in its overseas possessions evok in Great Britain. A major ingredient of this growing anti-slavery sentiment was a broadly based petition move that sought to influence the two popular opinion and Parliamentary voices At one level, slavery aroused powerful emotions among a British working class that was beginning to unfold a radical sense of self-identity and a notion of the universal brotherhood of the working man. At another even however, was an anti-slavery sentiment firmly soded in the British nonconformist evangelical manner of moving Of the various groups that actively promot this credo of equality and saw slavery as abhorrent, the actions of the London Missionary Society mostly profoundly affected the hastening of the final denouement. With their emphasis forward missionary work, the LMS sent to Demerara a number of individuals whose behavior touched opposite the sequence of events that culminated in the disgust of 1823.

These missionaries came at a time when planters were already fighting a dogged, rear-guard action to maintain their hegemony in answer to mounting abolitionist pressure in England. Planters, too, viewed principally officials as generally insensitive to and non-supportive of their make uneasys Fearful of emancipation from above, they perceived missionaries as notwithstanding another group of individuals who were interposed between their authority and the slaves; in fact, they accused a certain quantity of missionaries of being rabid anti-slavery agitators. The missionaries would, therefore, have be in want ofed considerable tact to navigate the treacherous waters of the planter-slave relationship during this critical period. The klutzy behavior of a number of missionaries who hailed from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds evok the wrath of planters, who invariably accused them of meddling in plantation management and undermining their authority.

The master-slave world was experiencing considerable tension at the surpassingly period that missionary activity intensified. A declining, aging slave population was now working longer and harder in answer to the demands necessitated by dint of the elimination of coffee and cotton production and the emerging see the verb of sugar cultivation as the major export first stomach With the virtual taking away of what all parties had customarily regarded as "free time," slaves complained of being denied "rights" they had protracted enjoyed through either law or custom. Moreover, with a world view enhanced through antislavery rhetoric and the Caribbean-wide forces of the Haitian Revolution, Demerara's slaves, like their counterparts from top to toe the British Caribbean, became increasingly restive as they sought to redefine their part in society.

The missionaries, then, ground an unsatisfactory situation awaiting them. any planters, like Hermannus Post, in succession whose plantation of Le Resouvenir he lived, welcomed venerable John Wray, the first arrivant, in the waiting under the possibility of fulfilment that missionary presence would exalt slave subservience and enhance plantation management. Wray, however, almost immediately met with immense opposition from hostile planters who refused to give their slaves Sundays opposite or to permit them to attend services at his chapel. Wray's successe can, however, be measured at the fact that some slaves walked a distance of fifteen miles to attend his Bethel Chapel, that he crafted catechisms for local use, and that he endeared himself to the slaves. These accomplishments, however, came at a price. The strains of working in a hostile environment necessitated that he reassure doubting whites that his actions and teachings pos no threat to the social order, and this took its toll in succession Wray, who was replaced in 1817 on John Smith.