Tag Archives: Samuel Sharpe

Understanding Your Ethical Conviction that Slavery is Wrong

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If you want to better understand how all of us came to hold the conviction that slavery is wrong, you might consider the following claim:

“The abolition of New World slavery depended on large measure on a major transformation in moral perception—on the emergence of writers, speakers, and reformers, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, who were willing to condemn an institution that had been sanctioned for thousands of years and who also strove endlessly to make human society something more than an endless contest of greed and power.

David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage, p. 1.

 

That is quite a claim, when one thinks about it.  How often do unjust institutions get struck down, particularly if those institutions have existed for all of human history and could be found in every region of the world?

I am a historian, so I will give you an authoritative answer:  not often.

For many reasons, then, I think we would all benefit from greater understanding of this historical development.  And so, as a little post-game wrap up to my contest between James Bond and Samuel Sharpe, I’d like to recommend a book.  Like millions of others, you can entertain yourself by watching the new James Bond movie, which is fine, but you should also consider the riches of a historical work that deepens your understanding of the world and how it works.

The book, by David Brion Davis, is Inhuman Bondage:  The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.  After a career of extensive and thoughtful study of slavery, Davis wrote this book to explain how slavery came to dominate the Americas and then how it was eventually abolished.  The story is complicated, but Davis condenses a mountain of historical scholarship into a quite readable form, which is one of the reasons that it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Part of the reason why I find this story compelling is because I believe that the hand of God was behind the abolition of slavery.  Davis does not mention the hand of God in the book.  I do not know what Davis’ religious convictions are and I am guessing that he would not agree with my claim that I can see God at work.  As a rule, academic historians do not try to determine if God is at work in history.  Academic historians do give careful consideration to the human forces that lead to historical change and Davis, who is an excellent historian, does that quite well.

I plan to discuss more of this later.  For now, I would think you might find it interesting to read this book with a couple of questions in mind:  was God at work in this movement?  And if so, how?

Oh, and if you are ever in Jamaica, ask your van driver to tell you about Samuel Sharpe.  I am sure that he or she would be very pleased to tell you about him.

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Authenticity.

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I started this contest because the two times I visited Jamaica, our van drivers pointed out spots where James Bond films had been made, but none made any mention of Samuel Sharpe.  Tourists, obviously, are much more interested in James Bond than Sharpe.  So, my question has been which person should we be most interested in?

According to my unscientific and undemocratic and unsystematic process in which I make up the categories and analysis of this contest as I go along, Sharpe is currently beating Bond, 4 to 3.  Today is the last day of the contest.  So, the most James Bond can hope for is a tie, a prospect he never faces in his movies.

Are you nervous?  Are you sitting on the edge of your seat in anticipation, anxiety and excitement?  No?  Well, give me a break.  I’m a historian, not a film maker.  (See the previous post).

Anyway, today’s category is authenticity.

Hmm.

Well, Samuel Sharpe was a real person.  James Bond is not and has never been a real person.  In fact, not even one of the six James Bonds was real.

Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant!  Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant! Samuel Sharpe wins the pennant!

The name is Bond. James Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond, Bond.

Wait a minute.  There are further considerations.  Sometimes fictional characters help us to better see what is real and true even if they themselves are not real. The best literature and the best films do that.

And James Bond…does not do that very well.  If we go back to the posts in which James Bond lost out to Samuel Sharpe, we will find that the Bond films do not give us solid insights into redemption, violence, human nature, race, sex or God.  Yeah, James Bond is cool and the stories are fun, but let’s face it, Ian Fleming was no Shakespeare, even though he had that English thing going for him.  Samuel Sharpe, meanwhile, played a key role in the abolition of transatlantic slavery. For that reason, if nothing else, solid historical analysis of Samuel Sharpe gives us a lot more insight into what is real and true about this world we live in.

A real person. OK, a bust of a real person.

So, yeah, go crazy folks, Samuel Sharpe wins it all.

 

Final Score:

James Bond       3

Samuel Sharpe  5

 

Next:  the post-game wrap up.

 

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Stories

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I wish I had a good story to tell about this one.

I don’t.

Apparently, I don’t have a good story because I am a historian and not a filmmaker.  Here’s the deal:  filmmakers often tell good stories.  Historians often don’t.

Is this news to you?

Bond films, of course, intrigue so many people because they tell good stories.  The typical Bond film often sports some sort of wild, unpredictable action scene toward the beginning, runs through plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and packs in dramatic action at the end.  The filmmakers use appealing narrative and visual tropes: technological gadgets, life-threatening explosions, clever villains, sex appeal, and cars that do things like turn into submarines.  The action often takes place in some sort of exotic and alluring setting.  James Bond is not only cool, he comes with his own background music.

Meanwhile, I have heard plenty of people complain about history teachers who make their students memorize dates.  And academic historians write books that are set up like long legal arguments, complete with professional jargon.  Who reads these things?

(Actually, other historians do.  Does that make us boring people?)

Now, there are very good reasons why academic historians write books that are set up as long arguments, supported by evidence that is meticulously detailed in footnotes.  Histories make claims about the past, and in order to be accurate about those claims, they need to be grounded in the evidence.

But some academic historians have wondered whether we have lost something by ignoring the power of stories and good writing.  Would more people see the significance of history if historians wrote better stories?

I’m not talking about Abraham Lincoln the Vampire Slayer.  I don’t mean that history should be simply be another form of entertainment. And I firmly believe that historians need to write long arguments with detailed evidence, even if these historical works are only read by other historians.

But I also suspect that there are important truths about the past that are best told in story form.  The Apostle Paul may have written theological arguments, but the Gospels are told in story form.

Samuel Sharpe’s rebellion would make a great story.  And a great movie.  Because of the lack of evidence, it would involve making speculation, but that speculation could be grounded in the best available scholarship.  And it would be a great counterpart to the film, “Amazing Grace.”  Admirable as he was as an individual, William Wilberforce does not encompass the entire story of the abolition of slavery.  But for now, all we really have are the historical arguments about Sharpe and the rebellion in Jamaica.

It is a hard to tell a good story AND hold true to the evidence.  But I think historians ought to try to do it more often.

That’s my argument.  I wish I could have told it in story form.

Bond wins this one.

 

Score:

James Bond                3

Samuel Sharpe            4

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Missionaries and World Christianity

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James Bond, missionaries, and world Christianity?

You may be thinking that I have a topic that really does not fit in my contest about which individual we should be more interested in.  You may be thinking that because I have written a book about missionaries and world Christianity, I am looking for a cheap way to turn the topic back to my interests. You may be thinking that I am playing a literary bait and switch here, using James Bond to hook your interest in something totally different.

You may be right.

But then, again, you may not be.

Granted, the nature of James Bond films compels me to shift the point a bit.  I can’t have a sensible contest based on the question of how world Christianity plays out in these thoroughly secular films.  There is, however, a closely related topic to world Christianity.  What happens when the Bond films cross cultural boundaries?  What does cross-cultural engagement look like?

Let’s just say, not great.  Bond films exude an aura of British superiority.  This ethnocentrism, apparently, was even stronger in the Ian Fleming books.  In fact, the whiff of British exceptionalism was so strong that some storylines had to be revised when the books were made into movies for American audiences.  I guess American audiences don’t like to be depicted as inferior.  Who knew?

It gets worse, however, when dealing with non-Anglos, particularly in the books and early films.  The villains are often nonwhites and they are often deformed.  Furthermore, nonwhites just don’t have the brains, the sensibility, the skills, or the enlightened rationality of the Brits (or the Americans, for the film versions).  In “Dr. No,” Bond enlists the help of a Jamaican assistant to investigate Dr. No’s hideout, but this black guy, like the other

The dragon: ha, ha, it’s just clever technology, folks.

Jamaicans, is deathly afraid of the rumors he has heard about a dragon that inhabits the island.  The “dragon” turns out to be a flame-throwing tractor with big teeth painted on the front.  The foolish, superstitious and cowardly Jamaican assistant gets killed in the ensuing battle, but the film viewers are not supposed to care because, like the villains, his life doesn’t seem to matter much.  (It should be noted that even though they are evil, none of Dr. No’s scientific assistants are black.  His hideout displays a level of intelligence that blacks do not seem capable of achieving.)

The Jamaican assistant’s fear of the “dragon” emerges from a common depiction of race and religion that comes straight from the 18thcentury Enlightenment thinker (and Brit) David Hume.  According to Hume, less rational people, particularly those who have not been blessed with civilization, believe in irrational religious beliefs that express themselves in superstitious behaviors.  Enlightened and rational people, on the other hand, build sophisticated, morally superior civilizations that progress beyond the ignorance of previous

Build your own “Dr. No” Lego dragon! Pretend you are intimidating inferior people!

ages.  “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites,” Hume wrote in Essays, Moral and Political.  “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.”  Most people easily spot the racism in Hume’s thinking.  However, his claims about religious faith, which masquerade as rational truth, still infect much of the western world today

Samuel Sharpe, who lived half a century after Hume’s death and more than a century before the first James Bond film, would seem to qualify as a superstitious and naturally inferior “species of men.”

But here is where world Christianity helps expose fallacies in Hume’s and Fleming’s brand of Enlightenment thinking.  Sharpe’s relationship with the missionaries brings out point.  The leaders of this 1831 Jamaican rebellion (as well as a similar rebellion eight years earlier in Demerara, on the north coast of South America) were deacons and evangelists.  Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries from Britain had been ministering among the slaves for the previous decades.  Slaveowners, in fact, complained bitterly that the missionaries were spreading radical and subversive ideas about equality and abolition among the slaves.  (Hume, who believed that evangelical religion led to social disorder, political radicalism, emotional derangement and psychological delusion, would have agreed).

The missionaries, however, did not promote, plan or lead the rebellion.  In fact, they warned the slaves not to plan any resistance, they downplayed the possibility of emancipation getting passed in Parliament, and they did not even know of Sharpe’s rebellion until right before it occurred.

In other words, this movement took off without missionary leadership, in ways they did not expect and could not control.  That is usually what has happened when a movement of Christianity emerged and grew after it had crossed cultural boundaries.

There is also a theological point here about cultural blind spots.  Although they were generally favorable to antislavery ideas, British missionaries preached a simple evangelistic message and stayed away from topics of abolition.  The slaves who had converted to Christianity, however, saw implications in the gospel that white Christians were slow to recognize:  the Exodus story indicates that slavery is not God’s plan for the world.  The same held true for Christian slaves in the American South.  On Sunday mornings they might hear a white minister preach on the text, “slaves obey your masters,” but on Sunday nights, in the privacy of their separate worship, they heard slave preachers draw conclusions about freedom from the Gospel.  And they wrote and sang scores of spirituals with themes of being released from bondage in Egypt and entering in the Promised Land.

These slave spirituals could get emotional, a point that Hume would have looked on with distaste.  The slaves could not boast of “ingenious manufactures” or cool Bondian technology.  They did not display the marks of a “civilized” people.  But they understood truths unknown by rational philosophers like Hume and clever writers like Fleming.

That’s interesting.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  3

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Looking for God’s Hand in History

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And now, a question that makes Christian historians uneasy.  Is it possible to identify how God works through history?

My guess is that many ordinary Christians would answer yes to that question.  Most Christian academics would be very hesitant to say one could do it.

Does that seem strange?

Actually, there are some very good reasons why academic historians—even those with a deep Christian faith–do not think we should wade into these waters.  Frankly, it can be arrogant (and thus sinful) to claim that one can fathom the ways of God in the wider world.  Historians are well aware that Christian Yankees and Christian Confederates during the Civil War each claimed that they could see God at work in the war, but those claims nearly always tried to prove that God was on their side and against the other side.  Historians also know that other Christians, like the Puritans, stumbled over themselves trying to determine what counted as God’s favor, what counted as God’s judgment, what counted as Satan afflicting the faithful, and what counted as Satan fooling people into thinking their prosperity was God’s favor when it was really Christians sinfully putting trust in their own goodness instead of God.  It got messy.

Furthermore, academic historians who try to piece together history from thousands of incomplete, complicated and conflicting primary sources know that figuring out what caused what in history is actually a tentative and uncertain business–even when we don’t try to bring in questions about the hand of God into the picture.  Good historical methodology is based on making careful judgments based on the evidence we have before us.  How in the world could we determine what counts as evidence of God’s activity?  This is complicated by the reality that Christians have different theological explanations for how God works in the world.

Finally, the “rules of the game” for historical scholarship declare that we should stick to evidence and assumptions that all historians can observe and agree upon, regardless of their religious or intellectual commitments.  History is not a discipline, it is assumed, that can address theological questions.

And yet.

And yet, as a Christian historian, I am not fully satisfied with how we do things.  Now, I’m not quite what to do about it.  But I am curious about these questions.

For instance, it seems to me that we humans yearn for a grand purpose and direction in our existence and this comes out in the stories we tell, including our academic histories.  As a result, we consciously or unconsciously end up trying to tell stories that fit into a master narrative that in some way mimics, approximates or searches for the hand of God.

Take James Bond.  OK, it seems odd to look for the hand of God in James Bond films. Bond operates in thoroughly secular world.  One can’t find God, Christian faith or any kind of religious practice anywhere.  Furthermore, these films seem to be little more than entertainment.  The vast majority of viewers don’t think very deeply about James Bond films and the film makers probably didn’t think very deeply about what they were doing, either.  It may be pushing it to look for any larger meaning here.

But millions of people find these films to be interesting stories.  Why is that?  I would suggest that a good part of the reason is that we know that James Bond will not fail.  Yes, there will be set backs and tight spots.  He’ll get conked over the head a few times.  But he always comes out on top by the time the closing credits roll.  And we all know it.

The problem is that no human can go through life with Bond’s success rate.  We can try to fool ourselves into fantasizing about being clever, witty, sexy, technologically astute and successful like James Bond, but we’ll never live up to his fictional example.  But I don’t think Bond’s appeal normally lies in viewers imagining themselves to be like him.  Instead, I would suggest that there is a reason why stories in which good triumphs over evil are so popular.  It is because, consciously or unconsciously, we yearn for a Savior who can defeat evil and make everything right in the end.  Temporarily, at least, James Bond makes us believe that evil will be overcome.

What about Samuel Sharpe?  He was, after all, a living human being and not a fictional character.   How do we tell his story and what meaning do we take out of it?

Here is what I find so interesting about Samuel Sharpe:  he failed.  And he failed spectacularly.  His rebellion was quashed.  He was executed.  So were many of his fellow rebels.  That is about as final of a failure as one could imagine.

But as I pointed out earlier, the low level of violence and ultimate failure of the rebellion helped convince a significant number of Brits that blacks were not animalistic savages.  This reality played an important role in the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

We don’t have a lot of documentation to know what Sharpe was thinking, but I don’t see how he could have predicted how his rebellion would play out.  I think it is safe to say that even though Sharpe probably calculated that a low-violence campaign would help his cause, it seems absurd to think that he figured that a quashed rebellion and his own execution would produce a favorable outcome.

Stay with me, here.  Maybe, just maybe, the structure of those events make it possible to see the hand of God in this.  All people of good will today, whether they are Christian or not, can agree that the abolition of slavery was a good thing.  Christians, more specifically, believe that humans cannot make things right by their efforts alone.  We believe we all stand in need of God’s grace, which in different ways trumps our flaws, failures, sins and evil intentions. The central story of the Christian faith is that God Himself came to earth and was crucified by humanity, but then rose again, overcoming death.  The most important story of the Christian faith is a story of God bringing good out of the flaws, failures, sins and evil intentions of the world.

One can, of course, find plenty of flaws, sins and evil in the system of slavery.  Historians also know that the entire process of abolishing the transatlantic slave system was a large, complicated, multi-faceted process that involved different nations, economic forces, social trends, cultural shifts, and political interests.  No person or group or nation could control the outcome.  We also can identify a number of people who were seeking God’s grace to deal with this oppressive system.  One of those individuals, Samuel Sharpe, failed spectacularly in the process.  And then good came out of it.

Can we say that this is evidence of God at work in history?

I’m interested to hear what you think.

At any rate, it beats James Bond.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  2

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: The NPR Effect

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Monday morning, October 1.  I’m listening to National Public Radio on the way to work and they introduce a weeklong series on James Bond.  Really.  I didn’t realize this, but this week happens to be the 50th anniversary of the release of the first Bond movie, “Dr. No.”  This film, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was filmed in Jamaica and provoked my original question about who we should be more interested in: James Bond or Samuel Sharpe.

Well, that did it.  I decided I just had to bring NPR into round three of our contest.  After all, my local public radio station advertises itself with the slogan, “NPR.  Classical.  Other Smart Stuff.”  NPR has a reputation of being a news station for thoughtful, highly educated folk who care about the world.  NPR goes beyond the facts and gives us insightful analysis.  That’s what they tell us during their pledge drives.

So how does NPR do in the contest?

I googled their website to determine how times they have referred to James Bond.  I turned up 1700 hits.  (Granted, it might be a much higher number by the end of the week).

Samuel Sharpe?  Not quite as many.

Zero hits.

I found this rather curious.  After all, NPR describes itself as smart.  Many people who listen to this station are concerned about justice and ridding the world of oppression.  If one wants to be smart and one wants to think about how to fight oppression, then it would seem to me that NPR would be a site that would be more concerned with the history of abolition than the history of a Hollywood action-movie series.  (Oh, rats.  I think I just tipped my hand.)

Right, (cough), um, what I mean is that if we take an unbiased approach to our contest, then James Bond and Samuel Sharpe have an equal chance at being significant.  And surely NPR would be a great source for determining whether, for instance, James Bond or Samuel Sharpe gives us a better model for determining how to rid the world of oppression.

James Bond. Classic cars. Other smart stuff (?)

All the same, I have to admit that I was surprised by the results.  So I tried a few of different terms in my NPR website search.  Baptist War: zero hits.  Slavery Abolition Act:  zero hits.  Jamaican Rebellion:  zero hits.

OK, time to broaden the search.   NPR surely has done stories that reference abolition, one of the most significant developments in human history.

And….yes!   There we are.  Abolition did indeed turn up as a topic on the NPR website.  Abolition:  653 hits. William Wilberforce (for good measure): 17 hits.

Huh.

Well, the results are clear.  If you like smart stuff and you take your cues from NPR, James Bond is obviously much more important for us to know about than the abolition of slavery (almost three times as much).

 

Score:

James Bond:       2

Samuel Sharpe:  1

 

Yeah.  Unless…..this depiction of “smart” radio is all wrong.

In that case, maybe it is proof of the opposite….and I should give the win to Sharpe?

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: The Cool Factor

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Round two of our contest raises the question of cool.

Cool is interesting.

Of course, it’s hard to pull off.  I, myself, am not any good at it.  Occasionally I’ve dreamed about dressing for class like my film studies professor friend, Andrew Rudd, who is very cool.  One day, much to my surprise, I came very close to doing it, except that I wasn’t wearing the Converse canvas sneakers with my tweed sports jacket, jeans, and green T-shirt.  It appears, in fact, to have been something like the middle-aged woman who wins a pick-up truck by shooting a puck from center ice into a 5 inch cut-out in the hockey net at intermission of the hockey game.  A lucky shot.  I won’t get that close again.

Pierce Brosnan and an Aston Martin Vanquish take a break from their duties for a moment to show us how to be cool.

To a certain generation (I’m talking about you, Baby Boomers), James Bond was cool.   Always a snappy dresser, Bond was suave, cool and sophisticated.  He drove sleek Aston Martins.  Over the years his films introduced audiences to the latest technology like lasers, videophones and infrared scopes. The latest technology, of course, is cool.  He came with his own theme music, starting with the electric guitar spy riffs in the opening credits of “Dr. No,” and continuing over the years with commissioned music by cool artists like Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, and Alicia Keys.  He always got the woman he wanted.

And of course, there was his famous line:  “The name is Bond.  James Bond.”  That’s a cool line.

Samuel Sharpe wasn’t actually very cool.

Nobody, apparently, told Samuel Sharpe how cool he’d look in dreadlocks.

Many Jamaicans are cool, but Sharpe wasn’t one of them.  If we go by the drawings made of him in the years after he died, he didn’t have dreadlocks.  So he missed a chance, there. Not really a snappy dresser, from what we can tell.  No background music.   His technology, which probably consisted of a shovel and a machete, was not the latest that science had to offer.   Sharpe had to walk everywhere.  He didn’t even form a bobsled team for the Olympics, which was cool there for a while.

Now, he had the chance to pull off a great line.  Imagine Sharpe appearing at the door of the stately home of a slave owner with a band of armed slaves behind him.  He tells the slaveowner, “The name is Sharpe. Samuel Sharpe.”  Then he turns and burns down the guy’s sugar mill.

That would have been cool.

But it didn’t happen that way.

 

Score:

James Bond                 1

Samuel Sharpe            1

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: A head to head competition

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James Bond

If you have ever visited Jamaica, there is a good chance that at some point you found yourself in a van driven by a Jamaican driver.  In that affable and jocular way common to many Jamaicans, your driver probably pointed out interesting spots along the way.  And since you probably flew into or docked in Montego Bay or Falmouth, there is a good chance that your driver pointed out a spot on the north shore where they filmed scenes from a couple of James Bond movies.

That is what happened to me.  I have visited Jamaica twice with church members and Malone students on ministry trips.  Two different years, two different drivers, but both mentioned the James Bond movies.  That’s why I think James Bond movies were probably mentioned to you when you visited Jamaica.  Or will be, if you ever visit Jamaica.

OK, I admit this is a terribly unscientific survey of what Jamaican van drivers usually say.  It is a terribly unscientific way to determine what probably happened to you if you ever visited Jamaica.  And it is a terribly unscientific way to predict what will happen to you if you visit Jamaica some day.  But I needed an opening hook for this blog series.  And, anyway, I am still convinced that visitors are likely to hear about James Bond, even though this conviction is terribly unscientific.

Here is what struck me:  neither driver mentioned Samuel Sharpe.  You will find Samuel Sharpe on the Jamaica currency, you will find his face painted on the walls of many Jamaican primary schools, and you will find that the Jamaican government considers Samuel Sharpe to be one of their national heroes.

OK, so who is this Samuel Sharpe guy, you may ask?  And if you didn’t ask, you should, because unless you attended a primary school in Jamaica (a demographic that my blog has not reached in large numbers, for some reason) you probably don’t know who he is.

Samuel Sharpe, a Jamaican hero

Briefly:  Samuel Sharpe was a slave and a Baptist preacher in Jamaica in 1831, when Jamaica was a British colony.  He organized a rebellion against slavery, primarily by working through the Baptist and Methodist church networks, which is why the rebellion is sometimes called the Baptist War.  The rebellion was put down, Sharpe was captured, and he was hanged.  However, the rebellion played a key role in British politics and the abolition cause, which produced the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833, which abolished slavery in all the British colonies.  That’s the short story.  More details will emerge in posts that follow.

It is apparent to me that Jamaican van drivers know about Samuel Sharpe.  But Jamaican van drivers also depend upon the tourist business for their livelihood.  They will point out spots and talk about things that they have found to be of interest to tourists.  That means that the decision to mention James Bond and not Samuel Sharpe is driven by what visitors want to hear.

Now, I think it would be interesting to hear about both.  But I also wondered this:  if visitors to Jamaica are going to hear about only one of these guys, which one should they hear about?

That brings us to my next blog series:  a showdown between James Bond and Samuel Sharpe.  We’ll set them up against each other in a head to head competition, battling it out in a number of categories to determine the answer to this question: which one should we be most interested in?

Stay tuned.