Explores the articulation of white creole identity in Barbados during the age of abolitionism.

David Lambert explores the political and cultural articulation of white creole identity in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados during the age of abolitionism (c. 1780-1833), the period in which the British antislavery movement emerged, first to attack the slave trade and then the institution of chattel slavery itself. Supporters of slavery in Barbados and beyond responded with their own campaigning, resulting in a series of debates and moments of controversy, both localised and transatlantic in significance. They exposed tensions between Britain and its West Indian colonies, and raised questions about whether white slaveholders could be classed as fully 'British' and if slavery was compatible with 'English' conceptions of liberty and morality. David Lambert considers what it meant to be a white colonial subject in a place viewed as a vital and loyal part of the empire but subject to increasing metropolitan attack because of the existence of slavery.

Review
'White Creole Culture is an exemplary cultural history, with its in-depth exploration of individuals and moments, its interdisciplinary range, its utilisation of a range of texts from court cases and poetry to rebel flags and the colonial press, and its eloquent account of the conjunctural formation of white colonial identities across metropole and colony.' Journal of Historical Geography 'Lambert is the first writer since Edward Braithwaite to examine in depth how whites in the Caribbean developed an embryonic white Creole ... The major virtue of Lambert's sensitive delineations of white identities is that it will force historians to pay more attention to divisions within the master class and to how whiteness, and by implication blackness, were contested discourses with significant political implications.' English Historical Review '... theoretically stimulating and empirically rich.' H-HistGeog 'Lambert is the first writer since Edward Braithwaite to examine in depth how whites in the Caribbean developed an embryonic white Creole nationalism ... The major virtue of Lambert's sensitive delineations of white identities is that it will force historians to pay more attention to divisions within the master class and to how whiteness, and by implication blackness, were contested discourses with significant political implications.' English Historical Review

David Lambert is Lecturer in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. This is his first book.