author

Thomas Atwood

d. 1793

Best known for writing one of the earliest full-length accounts of Dominica, this late 18th-century judge left behind a vivid record of the island’s landscape, government, and colonial life. His surviving work is valuable both as history and as a window into British Caribbean attitudes of the period.

1 Audiobook

The History of the Island of Dominica

The History of the Island of Dominica

by Thomas Atwood

About the author

Thomas Atwood, who died in 1793, was a British judge associated with Dominica and later the Bahamas. Surviving reference works describe him as chief justice in Dominica, and little appears to be firmly recorded about his early life.

He is chiefly remembered for The History of the Island of Dominica (1791), an ambitious account of the island’s geography, natural resources, government, trade, and society. In the book’s introduction, he explains that he had spent several years in Dominica and hoped the work would help promote the island’s prosperity.

Atwood is also linked with Observations on the True Method of Treatment and Usage of the Negro Slaves in the British West India Islands (1790). Today, his writing is read not only for the information it preserves about Dominica, but also for what it reveals about the colonial world in which he wrote.