Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor David B. Ryden Christopher Taylor. 2018. Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. 320 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-7115-1 Economic historians, such as myself, are often struck by the combination of moral bankruptcy with modern market sophistication found among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Caribbean planters and merchants. For those interested in managerial and financial developments in the New World, the British settlers proved to be quintessential capitalists, whose economic pursuits spurred the development of long-distance credit, insurance, and business practices that made the Atlantic World an unparalleled epicenter of international trade. The sugar and slave trades both supported and fueled critical institutional developments that mitigated investor risk and maximized investor return. Further, the hyper-capitalist milieu of the British plantation supported a labor system that was unregulated in any meaningful way, thereby transforming Africans and their decedents into nothing more than ledger entries in the eyes of the law and of their owners: market behavior shaped and defined the elite creole culture of the West Indies. Planters were generally uninterested in becoming paternalists or lords of the manor. The most successful elites (1) harnessed the labor of hundreds of workers; (2) strove to improve efficiency and productivity, and (3) pored over financial forecasts in order to capitalize on the most advantageous markets. For all intents-and-purposes, these men (and a handful of women) supplied a highly competitive commodity market, with no individual or collective economic power over the aggregate supply or price of sugar. For many economic historians, the continuity between the early modern capitalism and our own day is worth stressing. This approach, of course, does not sit well with scholars who embrace the cultural turn and emphasize the striking difference—in both epistemology and mentalité—between those of the eighteenth- and nineteenth century and those of our (post-)modern world. Christopher Taylor stakes out a kind-of-middle ground, exploring the significance of global capitalism in shaping elite creole identity in Jamaica and in other parts of the the greater Caribbean. Unlike neoclassical economic historians, however, Taylor does not limit his focus to plodding through the story of British Caribbean economic decline. Instead, he explores how planters and their figurative and actual [End Page 207] decedents processed the fact that the West Indian sugar islands no longer held the interest of imperial policymakers and commentators. As the title suggests, by at least the 1840s, if not well before, the West Indian quarter of the Empire slipped into metropolitan irrelevance as free-trade policy edged-out the protectionist ideology of the previous century. But Taylor argues that imperial "neglect" was not an unthinking decision, but rather one that was deliberately pursued under the seemingly positivist economic guise of liberal free trade-ism. Echoing the fury of Eric Williams, Taylor argues that neither the theoretical superiority of free labor found in economic liberalism nor genuine antislavery were part of the project to rationalize the U.K. Economy. Alternatively, the application of the Smithian policy was focused solely on freeing intentional trade, with little or no concern about the un-free labor regimes found within the economies of new trading partners. In other words, free-trade ideology of the mid-nineteenth century only strengthened the connection between capitalism and slavery, as British markets incorporated the produce of Brazilian, Cuban, and North American slave plantations. What interests Taylor is how West Indian writers—in their personal letters, memoirs, and fiction—responded to the imperial neglect that was part-and-parcel of the liberal political economic policies of the nineteenth century. Incredibly, these West Indian writers did not directly respond to free-tradism in formal, political-economic tracts or books. Gone were the Edward Longs and the Sir William Youngs of the eighteenth century, who appealed to data and argued for preferential duties and taxes that would assist the West Indian sugar economy, generally, and the old West Indian islands particularly. The new generation of West Indian voices simply ceded the political-economic battlefield to the likes of J.S. Mills and...