In 1627, the english began their colonization of Barbados and the creation of a British plantation world that would span the circum-Caribbean. They adapted to their new setting ably, creating a creolized English culture that celebrated metropolitan mores even as it made concessions to life in a tropical environment. That culture proved both durable and replicable. In 1655, Barbadians joined the English forces that sailed across a thousand miles of sparkling Caribbean sea to join in the conquest of Jamaica, an island twenty-six times the size of Barbados and of enormous economic potential. Founded another fifteen years later, South Carolina...

In the british plantation colonies, the legal establishment of the Church of England meant that locally elected vestries supervised the building of parish churches and chapels-of-ease, providing for everything from their exterior structures to the furnishings of their interiors. They purchased reading desks and pulpits for the reading of scripture and preaching, and communion tables and chancel appointments for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Vestries also guided the construction of pews for congregational seating. This provision of liturgical space and the securing of a minister made available the resources for following the liturgical year established in the calendar of...

The british plantation colonies were fertile in only one sense: as places where warm climates and rich soils produced exportable commodities that made some planters very rich. For Africans and Europeans and their descendents, Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina were often places of demographic decrease, where typical human reproductive activity usually failed to sustain population levels.¹ This basic demographic problem and the culture it engendered have led many historians to speak of the failure of the colonial project in the plantation regions, creating a historical literature of the Caribbean and the early South that reveals stunted societies, composed of violently...

Certain pastoral rites, especially those closely related to times of life-stage transition, seemed necessary to Christians in the British plantation colonies. Early modern people generally felt that couples needed to be married, babies had to be baptized, and the bodies of the dead had to be buried. Yet those seemingly necessary pastoral rites were not the sum total of ritual practice in the plantation colonies. The sacrament of the Eucharist was celebrated there as well, contrary to the historiographical tradition that suggests that Christian practice in these regions consisted of little more than moralizing sermons on the necessity of obedience...

Regular worship, marriage, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper all offered a sense of predictability in the religious life of the plantation colonies. At the same time death constantly disrupted colonists’ best-laid plans. One of Jamaica’s early historians insisted that “If Death is more busy in this Place than in many others, his Approach is no-where received with a greater Unconcernedness.”¹ “Unconcernedness,” however, hardly captures the vibrant cultures of death created by colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina. In those tropical and subtropical climates, persons of all ethnicities and social ranks experienced endemic and epidemic mortality at extremely high rates.²...

Speaking to south carolina’s general assembly in 1777 in favor of the disestablishment of the Church of England, Congregationalist minister William Tennent dwelled on the colonial government’s material support for the worship of the established church. He complained that among the many denominations of early Carolina, the “law knows the Clergy of the One, as Ministers of the Gospel; the law knows not the Clergy of the other Churches, nor will it give them a license to marry their own people.” Furthermore, “the law builds superb Churches for the one—it leaves the others to build their own Churches.” And...