Top-down History?

The article assesses the book "Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867," by Catherine Hall from the perspectives of a historian. He says that the book offers a rich insight into the ideas and mores of mid nineteenth-century provincial English midlands society and how those beliefs were translated as practice to Jamaica, a slave economy that then moved through apprenticeship to new forms of racial paternalism. In the book, the reader is introduced to Christian, notably Baptist, views of Jamaica, ideas about and notions of slavery, race, class, color, culture, colonialism, and empire.