Proslavery Priest: The Atlantic World of John Lindsay, 1729-1788

Child of the Church of Scotland and product of the Scottish Enlightenment, John Lindsay was an ordained minister of the Church of England, serving church and state in the British Atlantic. The second half of his life was spent in Jamaica, where - in the midst of slave society - he had leisure to live a life of ideas and develop literary and philosophical interests. As well as sermons, he published a novel, a poem and an account of a voyage to West Africa. At his death, Lindsay left manuscript sermons, a natural history of Jamaica and a proslavery polemic. These texts address central questions of eighteenth-century British imperial thought. How might faith and reason sit together, and the laws of nature with the laws of God? How might conjecture, hypothesis, speculation and curiosity fit with the authority of scripture? What does it mean to be human? How could liberty coexist with slavery?