In search of excess

Abstract

Lambert Blair rose from relatively humble origins to control vast amounts of human and economic capital in the British empire, acting as a teenage agent and trader and then, in his adult years, controlling a large share of sugar and cotton plantations, as well as more than 1,000 enslaved people, in Berbice, across an area that would later become British Guiana. He was the perfect example of a trader in the West Indies, an archipelago full of what Sir James Marriot once called ‘renegadoes of all nations’. Lambert is sketched in anecdote in a well-known travel journal by Dr George Pinckard from 1796, published in 1806. In Pinckard’s three-volume work we are given an image of a generous, even gluttonous, planter. He is variously described as a ‘rich planter’, ‘opulent’, with an enviable mansion and the wherewithal to dispense his generous bounty. This chapter aims to restore further flesh to Lambert’s apparently ample frame, and to try to piece together his imperial career in order to understand better the unique position of Irish enslavers and traders in the Greater Caribbean.