Abstract
Over the last forty years the study of British West Indian sugar estates during the period of slavery has shown that they achieved significant technical change. Proprietors emphasised their commercial distress, and the need for commercial privilege; their critics, arguing for slave emancipation, were pleased to accept evidence that slavery was inefficient and unprofitable as well as inhumane. While sugar planting in the ‘old’ British West Indies clearly made important advances between 1750 and 1834, it might be argued that to show this is to deal with only part of the original critique against slavery as an economic system, that the masters of slaves were by nature negligent and benighted. Ploughing made more progress on Antigua than anywhere else in the British West Indies.
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