Images Courtesy Beineke Library
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library recently acquired the papers of Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th century Englishman who traveled in 1750 to Jamaica, where he chronicled in an extensive collection of writings his experiences over the course of more than three decades as a slave master and plantation owner.
Kathryn James, Beinecke’s curator for early modern books and manuscripts and the Osborn Collection, said in an email, “We were offered the Thistlewood archive last spring, and were immediately interested in the possibilities it offered for research in many different fields, particularly in the fields of trans-Atlantic studies, slavery, the Caribbean, and British history. These are all areas in which the Yale collections are very strong, and which my colleagues and I have been working to build.”
James said, “The archive offers a very detailed view of the daily life of a plantation owner, and on the plantation, in the second half of the 18th century. Thistlewood gives extremely detailed daily observations of the finances, events, people, and relationships that he encounters.”
The Thistlewood archive also provides insight into certain cultural aspects of the Enlightenment.
“One of the most interesting parts of the collection is the set of reading diaries Thistlewood kept over several decades: these show his reading, the books he purchased, the individuals with whom he corresponded over this period,” James said. “The archive gives tremendous scope for scholars to analyze what it meant for someone like Thistlewood — someone who clearly participated in the philosophy and science of his period — to be a plantation owner in the West Indies in that period.”
Thistlewood organized his writings chronologically, which adds value to the archive as a historical record and resource.
“One of the wonderful aspects of the collection is simply that Thistlewood kept annual journals — his diaries, his reading notebooks, his weather journals are all organized by year, over decades,” James said. “Researchers will be able to situate Thistlewood’s life and thoughts, as they change over decades, but also to extrapolate out from his observations to broader political and historical contexts.”
James pointed out that “any archive on slavery is an important archive,” and, “the Thistlewood papers are particularly useful because his observations are so detailed, cross so many fields, and were kept so consistently over decades. The combined breadth and depth of the collection offers really extraordinary scope for researchers.”
James said the Thistlewood archive would be open for research in November.