Keeping up a distinction of Colour: Gender, Race, and Identity in the British Caribbean and the Metropolis

Brooke Newman explores how West Indian identities – white, black, and mixed-race – were defined and contested during the eighteenth century, both by West Indians themselves and by metropolitan Britons who imagined, critiqued, and caricatured the inhabitants of the sugar islands. More than anything else in these slave societies, Newman demonstrates, gender relations and racial mixture undermined white West Indian attempts at collective self-definition.