The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

succession of stereotypes from both colonies illustrates that white men did not see white women clearly. They tended to describe women’s differences in terms of race rather than social class, a tendency that has been replicated by most modern historians. Edward Long and Moreau de Saint-Méry, among others, divided women in their societies among consuming white women, producing black women, and parasitical brown women. Long condemned white women for their “constant intercourse from their birth with Negroe domestics whose drawling, dissonant gibberish they insensibly adopt,” meaning that their “ideas are narrowed to … the business of the plantation, the tittle-tattle of the parish, the tricks, superstitions, diversions and profligate discourses of black servants.” Moreau followed a similar line but with more analytical reasoning and a more interesting conclusion. He argued that white women were removed from the processes of production almost completely by black women and that they had lost their sexual role within the planter household to brown mistresses. All that was left for them, he suggested, was a largely symbolic role as the keepers of racial purity, achieved through their reproductive function as the producers of white children.¹¹⁶ Yet white women were not merely present in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. They were active agents in urban life.¹¹⁷ There is no reason why we need to accept as true the gendered inaccuracies put forward by contemporary male observers in both colonies who saw women as dangerous strumpets in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and as redundant ornaments by the late eighteenth century.

      The best example of a white woman as active agent in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica was Teresia Constantia Phillips.¹¹⁸ A famed beauty, as her portrait by Joseph Highmore in 1748 reveals, she cut a swathe through fashionable society in Britain as a participant in the demimonde of Augustan London, first as the mistress (shamefully abandoned, she argued) of the future fourth Earl of Chesterfield and then as the wife and lover of numerous other rich and fashionable men. A colossal spendthrift, a lover of theatre and social assemblies, she ended up cutting her losses in love and money and moving to Jamaica around the year 1751 in order to be with her wealthy Jamaican lover, the Clarendon planter Henry Needham. There, she continued her scandalous life as a courtesan, arbiter of social life in the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, and devoted self-fashioner. She was singular as a woman in Jamaica in having an official government post, as Mistress of the Revels, a largely invented position given to her by Needham’s friend, Governor Henry Moore. She received a small government stipend for this role and presided over Jamaica’s small but flourishing dramatic scene. In her official capacity, she oversaw and orchestrated all events involving the governor, such as the balls, assemblies, and entertainments held in the governor’s honor. More significantly, she gave official approval to all theatrical productions, earning herself 200 guineas for this task.¹¹⁹ It was a perfect position for her, as her life was as theatrical as a life could be in a mid-eighteenth-century British colony.

      Figure 11. Teresia Constantia Phillips by John Faber Jr., after Joseph Highmore, mezzotint, 1748. © National Portrait Gallery.

      Phillips’s theatrical and ceremonial responsibilities made her a figure to be reckoned with.¹²⁰ To an extent, she demonstrated the “cultural heteroglossia” of mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, where multiple displaced, avaricious, and exiled people created a syncretic culture, although Phillips did not show any interest in non-British theater or revelry. But she demonstrated how Jamaica manifested a particular kind of Englishness, an aspect of metropolitan culture that disturbed contemporaries with its materialism, and acceptance of all kinds of transgressions—financial, ethical, and sexual.¹²¹ As Kathleen Wilson notes, Phillips “appreciated her cachet as an émigré who could perform the role of the poised and witty English lady with considerable aplomb.” She mixed with leading planters and denigrated creole women, whom she thought immodest, dull, and crass with tongues that expressed “the meanest satire.” She made a great deal of her Englishness and her patriotism, even writing an anonymous letter published in the Kingston Journal that condemned the overly exuberant celebrations of planters in Spanish Town following their defeat of Governor Knowles in 1756 when he attempted to transfer the capital to Kingston. The planters, in their enthusiasm, burned not just an effigy of Knowles but also an effigy of his royal vessel, including its flag. Phillips (ungallantly outed as the author by the printer when he was taken to task by an outraged House of Assembly) declared this action “a most atrocious mark of their ingratitude to his majesty, as well as a very impudent insult upon the gentlemen of the Navy.”¹²²

      Thus, Phillips adopted the role of grand English lady, albeit one of dubious reputation, bringing English culture and English standards of behavior to less culturally advanced creoles. Her promotion of theatre was part of her educative mission in Jamaica: to transform the colony into a place where English values could flourish and where unlearned creoles could be exposed to English cosmopolitan manners. That seems to have been her intention as Mistress of the Revels. In particular, her oversight of elaborate gubernatorial “performances” was designed to enhance the authority of executive office by implanting in Jamaica the symbols and practices that linked politics with theatre. She was not averse to lecturing Jamaicans about their lack of patriotism and to pronounce against Scots and Irish merchants, whom she thought were in a perpetual power struggle to dispossess English landed gentlemen from their rightful place as rulers of the island.¹²³

      In England, Phillips was a symbol of the dangerous and rebellious woman, as willing to sleep with Catholics as with Protestants and entirely removed from the maternal realm. In Jamaica, she was a symbol of a different kind, one usually associated with free women of color in the historical literature, rather than with white women. She was especially resourceful, even though reliant on female charm rather than inherited advantage to make her way in the world, declaring in her memoir that “My Beauty, while it lasted, amply supplied the Deficiencies of my Fortune.”¹²⁴ As Wilson comments, “her extravagant lifestyle, proclivity for vulgar display, recurrent overwhelming debts and lavish attention to her own natural resources made it clear that she had taken the laws of imperial mercantile capitalism to heart … [she was] an excessively consuming female” with a “taste for the sensual, the sensational and the luxurious.”¹²⁵ These were the types of terms in which writers like Long and Moreau deplored the lifestyles of free women of color. The towns of Jamaica, like towns and cities in France and Britain, offered opportunities, social and economic, for those women enterprising enough to challenge social conventions and willing to accept the risks that independence brought. That was as true for white women as it was a fact for free women of color. White women in Jamaica did not necessarily lead as cloistered lives as Long and other defenders of patriarchal order imagined.¹²⁶

      Despite Phillips’s rackety private life and unusual public career, some aspects of her sui generis Jamaican experience illuminate the workings of gender in the colony. In this respect, the most salient fact about her was that she was childless. White women in Jamaica were not defined by maternity. Few women had children, and even fewer had surviving children. Most marriages were short and were interrupted by the sudden death of one partner. For many women, such childlessness and the experience of fragile marriages was undoubtedly a tragedy, especially if they needed to eke out an uncertain living in fickle urban economies. But some women, such as Teresia Phillips, developed personas that fit well with the frenetic hedonism and risk-taking character of Jamaican and Dominguan society.¹²⁷

      Phillips was no simpering, uneducated, and passive white woman in thrall to African vices like those Edward Long denigrated. She was indeed a “consuming” woman, but her consumption—of goods, ideas, and new modes of behavior—was active rather than passive and marked her out as a principal agent in fashioning slave societies into new and disturbing places where traditional gender roles came under considerable stress and sometimes alteration. What Teresia Phillips resembled most was the popular characterization of the alluring free colored woman—the mulâtresse, usually depicted by travel writers and colonial authors as avaricious, alluring, sensuous, and highly disruptive.¹²⁸

      If the reality of white women’s lives in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue was more varied than the stereotype put forward by commentators like Long and Moreau, so too was the stereotype of free colored women at variance with