Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807–1838

Abstract

With the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, the British colonies in the West Indies went through significant economic, demographic, social, and political adjustments. The central problem faced by planters revolved around increasing competition from the new sugar zones in the world market, in a situation in which they could not count on the constant replenishment of new enslaved laborers from Africa.Dave St. Aubyn Gosse's book addresses this issue through a careful analysis of the management of the Jamaican slave plantations between 1807 and 1838. This is a topic that has been extensively explored within the historiography of the British Empire. In the context of Seymour Drescher's argument with Eric Williams, historians such as J. R. Ward, Michael Craton, James Walvin, and B. W. Higman questioned the then-consecrated interpretations of the economic crisis of British slavery at the turn of the nineteenth century, examining the innovative responses of the West Indies planters to the end of the slave trade, including substantial changes in slave management practices and technological improvement of their sugar plantations. St. Aubyn Gosse dialogues with these revisionist publications reviewing the classical interpretations of the economic decline of the West Indies, and he follows closely the argument that Selwyn Carrington developed for the period prior to 1807.Based on the crop accounts series for the plantations that have substantial managerial correspondence, the author examines how planter management affected production levels and therefore the pace of economic decline. The managerial structure of plantations directed from a long distance — a result of widespread absenteeism — produced a series of distortions in the functioning of the sugar business, in view of the divergent interests of owners residing in the metropolis and their representatives on the ground. Disputes over gains in the short term and the long term often put them on opposite sides. The same problems that affected sugar production in the context of a general crisis affected attempts at economic diversification. Coffee plantations faced problems quite similar to those faced by sugar plantations regarding their inability to improve slaves' health and achieve a sustainable population growth. Both also overexploited the available labor force.Perhaps the most positive aspect of the book is its ability to demonstrate how Jamaican planters and their agents were crucial actors in their own economic ruin, as they contributed significantly to worsening the living conditions of the slave population between 1807 and 1833. With the conjuncture of shrinking sugar and coffee prices and restricted labor supply, the planters only offered in response “poor plantation management,” which proved to be fatal “in the era that called for bold, creative leadership” (p. 4). The management patterns were at the heart of the conflicts between masters, managers, and slaves, and they helped to deepen the crisis of slavery. The great Jamaican slave revolt of 1831–1832, decisive for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the following year, should be read in light of the failure to improve the material life of enslaved laborers and the efforts to increase plantation productivity after 1807.Despite its merits, the book shares two common problems with the ones it criticizes. I refer to the lack of due attention to environmental issues and the isolated treatment of Jamaica in relation to other New World slave zones. The ecological argument on soil exhaustion produced by the practices associated with large-scale slave commercial monoculture was a distinctive aspect of the decline thesis formulated by Eric Williams. Jamaica as a sugar zone was an area already deeply exploited in the early nineteenth century, unable to cope with the new commodity frontiers of that time. Much of the extra work demands imposed on slaves (especially the exhausting job of digging cane holes) derived from the environmental damage caused by almost a century of intensive sugar production. From this first problem comes the second problem. To properly understand the failures of plantation improvement in Jamaica, in particular its inability to cope with the drop in sugar and coffee prices in the world market, it would be necessary to incorporate into the analysis what was happening in the new zones of sugar and coffee production. The crisis of the Jamaican slave economy was largely an outcome of the economic success of slavery in Cuba and Brazil. If, on the one hand, we should congratulate the author of this competent and important book, on the other hand we should point out that to better understand the crucial period of 1807–1838, it will be necessary to incorporate perspectives that deal with the Caribbean as a totality beyond its imperial frontiers and that bring new lenses to the role of environmental conditions on the development of the Caribbean plantation economy.