The rise of a new planter class? Some countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807–33

Abstract

This article interrogates the notion of the fall of a single “planter class” in the British colonies and argues that in the new slave territories of British Guiana and Trinidad, the slave economy flourished between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in the 1830s. The wealth extracted in these colonies from the labor of enslaved people, especially in British Guiana, largely flowed to a group of absentee slave owners in Britain and created a new fraction of the planter class in the metropole, outside the conventional sphere of the established Jamaican planters. Using the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, appointed to oversee the distribution of £20 million in compensation to the slave owners under the Abolition Act of 1833, the article traces the dimensions of this grouping of new men, many of them concentrated in the mercantile elites of Glasgow and Liverpool. Such men had demonstrable political weight in Britain, and the article argues that only by acknowledging their role and influence can we make sense either of the structure of the emancipation settlement, which favored slave owners in the new territories over the old plantocracy, or, more profoundly, of the continued vigor of the West Indians in negotiating that settlement, a vigor which troubled Eric Williams, given his view that, by the 1830s, the West Indian planters were “[a]n outworn interest whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective.”