West Indian Planters Research Articles

History of textiles and the Congruence Engine

This essay briefly surveys the rich benefits a project like the Congruence Engine offers to national textile collections. Digital technology provides the means to bring dispersed material, written and oral collections together into one space. However, it also has limitations, and the following will also touch upon these. We finish with an overview of themes such a project should engage with and conclude with a mini study of the pre-Samuel Greg (Quarry Bank Mill) family context and how this links the Mill, the collections held at the Northern Ireland Record Office and West Indian Plantations together.

Amelioration or abolition? British consulship, Haitian recognition, and the question of colonial emancipation

ABSTRACT Faced with the decline of British West Indian plantations and a growing abolitionist tide, Foreign Secretary George Canning embarked upon the policy of amelioration in 1823 with the aim of eradicating the worst excesses of British plantation slavery. Scholars have regarded the rise of ameliorationism within a British imperial framework, neglecting Canning’s use of a modernized consular service in this policy’s promotion, and obscuring its transnational links to other Caribbean locations. This paper argues that Canning’s flagship consular intervention, Britain’s consulate-general at the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, became a major factor in the advancement of colonial amelioration. Charles Mackenzie, the British consul-general to Haiti, adhered to Canning’s ameliorationism, despite Haitian officials’ active attempts to enlist his support in the recognition and legitimation of their radical emancipatory project. Mackenzie’s mission undermined the abolitionist cause, reinforced the policy of planter indemnification, and facilitated the marginalization of Haiti in the Atlantic world.

North American Calm, West Indian storm: the politics of the Somerset decision in the British Atlantic

ABSTRACT A significant historiographical literature posits that Lord Mansfield’s famous decision in the 1772 Somerset case deeply threatened slaveholders throughout the British Empire. Colonial slaveholders had good reason to believe that this ruling threatened their power over their slaves, and West Indian planters and their representatives publicly expressed fear and outrage about Mansfield’s ruling and what it represented. But the bulk of North American slaveholders did not either in public or in private. This article attributes that relative silence largely to the links between the politics of slavery and those of the imperial crisis of the 1770s. It was British emancipatory policies during the American Revolutionary War, rather than this decision, that panicked North American slaveholders and ultimately taught them their need to control the state.

Spatial Consciousness and Spiritual Practice in Austen’s Mansfield Park

Spatial Consciousness and Spiritual Practice in Austen’s Mansfield Park Toby R. Benis (bio) Space is everywhere in the scholarly conversation about jane Austen; she is the writer of the rural village, of the country estate, of the far-flung empire.1But rather than assuming the analytical primacy of any one kind of space, this article begins with a broader question: how do different scales of space operate together to shape the developmental arcs of the novelist’s heroines?2In a work like Persuasion (1817), the answer seems clear: women’s domestic experiences of loneliness and trial are compared in detail with those of naval professionals in theaters of combat. The narrative dramatizes mutually reinforcing scales of space and community in ways that Edmund Burke proclaims are a particularly British characteristic: “to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”3 [End Page 333] Postcolonial scholars have identified similarities, as well as a good deal of friction, between Austen’s representations of “little platoons” like those Burke idealizes and the diverse inhabitants of the sprawling Georgian empire.4Valuable as they are, these analyses have tended to pass over fundamental ways in which space itself is always a social product resulting from a complex array of spatial practices. Austen criticism has reinforced what Henri Lefebvre has called the illusion of transparency: “space appears as luminous, as intelligible, as giving action free rein.”5Lefebvre emphasizes the dialectical character of codes governing social spaces, generated by interactions between subjects and their surroundings in specific historical contexts.6In Austen’s work, female protagonists attain their romantic objectives only when they develop some competence in navigating such codes. Elsewhere, I have discussed Catherine Morland’s development in North-anger Abbey (composed in the 1790s, though published in 1817) in terms of her difficulties in negotiating changing eighteenth-century public spaces, from city streets to rural neighborhoods.7Written some 15 years later, Mansfield Park (1814) approaches the question of space from the point of view of the profession most represented in Austen’s corpus: the clergy. Fanny Price’s transformation from cowering waif to self-possessed young woman depends on her acquired ability to understand codes at work in Evangelical Anglicanism and to enact them in spaces over which she has some control. Mansfield Park has been dubbed Austen’s “Evangelical novel,” since many of the views associated with Evangelicals are in evidence here. Seeking to infuse a new seriousness and piety into religious practice and social life, Evangelical Anglicans promoted mandatory residency for clergymen [End Page 334] in the parish of their living; the abolition of the slave trade; calls for private reflection; a condemnation of decadence in the Regency beau monde; and a distrust of amateur acting.8The novel’s extended arguments over where the clergy should live, and why, reflect the Evangelical conviction that the space of the parish was the foundational unit of the clergyman’s identity. Only by inhabiting small-scale spaces could neighbors and clergymen interact through social routines that possess spiritual and moral force, or what Austen calls “habits.” This dimension of the novel’s discussions about the clergy suggests a spatially informed way of approaching the Evangelicals’ critique of imperial slavery. The Evangelical requirement that clergymen devote themselves to their home parishes points to an ethos at odds with an increasingly globalized British economy in which the absenteeism of West Indian plantation owners like the Bertrams is of a piece with their disregard for the suffering that occurs there. Accordingly, the man who takes clerical orders during the course of novel—Edmund Bertram—cannot resolve the contradictions between the Evangelical principles he appears to endorse, most notably parish residency for priests, and the colonial source of his family’s wealth. When the family conversation turns to how men like his father profit from distant human misery, Edmund does nothing to fill the “dead silence” that follows Fanny Price’s question about the slave trade.9Austen...

Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal by Caitlin Rosenthal

Reviewed by: Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal by Caitlin Rosenthal Kathleen E.A. Monteith (bio) Caitlin Rosenthal. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018, xiv + 295 pp. US$35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-97209-4. Hardcover. Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery is an analysis of accounting procedures on sugar estates in the West Indies and cotton plantations in the antebellum South in the USA in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based on an assessment of plantation journals kept by their managers and owners. The work successfully establishes how the history of American slavery fits into the larger history of American capitalism, and in so doing, firmly establishes plantation history within the field of American business history. As pointed out by the author, American historians and scholars have long struggled with the idea of seeing production units based on enslaved labour, as capitalistic enterprises. As a result, the history of the plantation slave enterprise in general has remained outside the realm of American business history. To a large extent this also had to do with the way in which business history, and particularly American business history emerged in the early twentieth century, and how it has evolved since then. On the other hand, scholars of Caribbean history, and more specifically, those who specialize in West Indian economic/business history, have long recognized plantation enterprises worked by enslaved labour as capitalistic enterprises. One of the early pioneers in this regard, was Douglas Hall, whose case study of the Grenadian sugar estate Westerhall discussed the problems associated with the calculability of profitability in the West Indian sugar industry using Max Weber's "Formal Rationality of Capital Accounting".1 It is also well established in West Indian historiography that the region was the site of some of the world's first large-scale industrial production units in terms of both capital and labour with the respect to sugar industry, and that beginning in the eighteenth century, a multi-divisional type form of organizational structure was developed, with systems of management and control [End Page 266] being put in place. In addition to the large industrial sugar producing ventures, the region was also the site of small business enterprises both during and after slavery ended. Indeed, by and large Accounting for Slavery covers much of what has already been established within the historiography on plantation management slave systems and enterprise for the British colonial Caribbean, with similar terminology, analyses, and conclusions.2 Nevertheless Accounting for Slavery has much to offer the history of West Indian plantation slavery, as it provides a systematic assessment of plantation records within the framework of the concept, scientific management. Rosenthal, whose background is in management consultancy, has brought fresh interpretations and analysis, and in so doing, placed plantation enterprise based on enslaved labour firmly within the context and framework of American business history, and business history itself. Rosenthal's book is essentially about the systems of plantation management that were implemented on sugar estates and cotton plantations during slavery, as demonstrated in the records created and maintained by owners and managers of these properties. Five chapters, a conclusion and a postscript make up the book. Chapter one, "Hierarchies of Life and Death: Accounting and Organizational Structure in the British West Indies", begins in Jamaica and Barbados, discussing the organizational structures prevalent on the large scale industrial sugar estates, recognizing the managerial and labour organizations manifest in the industry being similar to the multidivisional or M-form, which was to take root among American industrial enterprise in the early twentieth century. The second chapter, "Forms of Labor: Paper Technologies in Comparative Perspective", discusses the development of pre-printed forms leading to the standardization of record keeping in the journals used in the management of production and labour. Rosenthal notes that planters, overseers and bookkeepers, often became the "vectors for the transmission of plantation technologies, moving methods across the Atlantic, and between the colonies. Through this circulation, knowledge of accounting moved both north to south and south to north, and in both directions across the Atlantic. Information practices crossed boundaries between slave and free and between different regions of slaveholding" (75–75...

Grainger’s West Indian Planter: Property and Authority in The Sugar-Cane

This article examines the relationship between eighteenth-century ideologies of property rights and imperial authority in James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764). Placing Grainger into dialogue with Joshua Steele, a Barbadian planter and partial critic of existing Caribbean slavery, the article shows how Grainger’s poem seeks to articulate planters’ property rights in sweeping fashion in order to render the scope of imperial authority as expansive as possible. The fact that The Sugar-Cane is unable to fully suppress Atlantic slavery’s terrible realities registers anxieties not only about empire itself but also about the nature and meaning of property in the colonies.

Sugar and the English language

Sugar has been an important engine of social, economic, and linguistic change. It developed from a rare spice to an upper class luxury, to a common foodstuff, and these changes affected the growth of social institutions. Initially part of the display that symbolized royal authority, sugar contributed, through the London coffeehouse, to intellectual development and to linguistic standardization and codification. Later, it became essential to the new urban proletariat, whose sugar-laden tea made a new pattern of work and new forms of speech possible. It also became a cause and symbol of oppression for the slaves that produced it in the Caribbean. These changes are reflected in English vocabulary and in the development and distribution of varieties of English. Sugar became an English commercial interest with the acquisition of Barbados and Jamaica, resulting in West Indian plantation agriculture, the English-speaking slave trade, and the creation of new English-speaking populations and new English languages. When slavery was abolished, the continuing demand for sugar led to further population transfer, of workers from British India to the Caribbean, Fiji, and South Africa, and hence to yet more varieties of English. Thus sugar played an important role in structuring the present-day English language complex.

‘In the wreck of a master's fortune’: slave provisioning and planter debt in the British Caribbean

ABSTRACTThis article traces how debates over the ability of indebted West Indian planters to adequately provision their slaves influenced the politics of slavery in the British Empire in an era of abolitionism and amelioration projects. Specifically, the article examines the promulgation of colonial laws establishing priorities for debts incurred for the purchase of slave provisions over mortgage debts in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Debt-priority laws and contemporary responses to them suggest the ways in which both proslavery and antislavery interests defined and contested the moral as well as material dimensions of West Indian commerce and finance. A detailed quantitative case study provides information on provisioning and other expenses on two Tobago sugar estates (1807–1815).

A Question of Colour

Although a great deal has been written on the colonial influences in the works of the Brontë sisters, there is always more to discover. This paper will present several little-known facts that appear to connect the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge during the time of the Brontës’ attendance there with the world of West Indian plantation owners and Yorkshire cotton spinners. No conclusions are drawn but the material is suggestive, particularly in connection with Charlotte’s last unfinished novel, Emma. This paper will also propose that both Charlotte and Emily Brontë reworked the only important black character from the juvenilia — Quashia Quamina — into their mature writing: Charlotte, in her late juvenilia, presents him as a minor and comic character. Emily uses his story as a template for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Foodways of Enslaved Laborers on French West Indian Plantations (18th-19th century)

In the plantation settlements of the Americas, enslaved Africans and their descendants were compelled to create a system of foodways that provided sufficient nutrition for their survival and that could be assembled out of the resources available to them. The ability of the enslaved plantation workers to do this is a testament to their creativity, and the cuisine they developed lives on today in the creole foods of the former slave colonies. The foods, the methods of their procurement, the methods of preparation, and the artifacts used in that preparation consist of a blend of African, European, and American influences reflecting environment, cultural heritage, and economics. In this article, we integrate ethnohistorical and historical documents with archaeological materials from excavations at two plantation slave villages, one in Guadeloupe and one in Martinique, in the context of Caribbean creole foodways within the French West Indies.

Materialism, slavery, and the history of Jamaica.

This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY: THE UNHISTORICAL SELF OF WHITENESS STUDIES

In the years following Bacon's Rebellion of 1676, the rich planters of colonial Virginia hit upon a New World expedient that would be fateful for the entire history of race in America. Edmund Morgan tells the story memorably inAmerican Slavery, American Freedom. Having narrowly evaded death and devastation at the hands of the former indentured servants who comprised the region's lower classes, and still faced with a chronic shortage of labor, the planters began to import African slaves to work the tobacco crops on which their wealth depended. They weren't the first in the New World to try this approach. West Indian sugar planters had already successfully organized the labor on their large plantations along these “racial” lines, and there was sufficient precedent in Western culture at large for associating “blackness” with evil to defuse moral alarm at the practice.

Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries: The Material Culture of Improvement during the Age of Abolition in Barbados

This article uses plantation archaeology to explore white Barbadian responses to the British anti-slavery campaign during the late eighteenth century. By blurring disciplinary boundaries between history and archaeology, we examine how competing British and Caribbean images of West Indian planters were contested through material culture. Drawing on an archaeological case study at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation, St. Peter, Barbados, we highlight how the landscape of slavery was transformed with the emergent, English ideal of ‘improvement’. This early Barbadian response to anti-slavery was a form of political mobilization deployed by the planter elite, allowing for the construction of new racial and cultural identities.

From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1880

From Memory to Masteryexplores the development of commercial numeracy and accounting in America and the English-speaking Atlantic world between 1750 and 1880. Most histories of accounting begin in the factories of England and New England, largely ignoring slave economies. I analyze both traditional sites of innovation, including textile mills and iron forges, and also southern and West Indian plantations. Along several dimensions, the calculative practices of slave owners advanced ahead of northern merchants and manufacturers, and many recorded and analyzed the productivity of their human capital with cruel precision. Following threads from Jamaica and Barbados to the American South, I show how plantation power relations stimulated the development of new accounting practices. The control of planters over their slaves made data easier to collect and more profitable to use. Commercial recordkeeping also expanded in free factories, but in different ways than on southern plantations. The mobility of labor made accounting necessary for keeping track of wages but relatively futile for detailed productivity analysis.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

New Men: Manliness in Early America (review)

Reviewed by: New Men: Manliness in Early America Mark E. Kann (bio) New Men: Manliness in Early America. Edited by Thomas A. Foster. (New York: New York University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 281. $24.00 paper) In her insightful “Afterword,” Toby Ditz highlights the impressive variety of masculinities that existed in colonial and revolutionary America, the military context that framed most of those masculinities, and the ways in which the various militarized masculinities structured the terms of women’s subordination. My list of highlights would be similar. That said, the scholars brought together in this fine collection present additional noteworthy findings. First, the competition over the meaning of manhood was often an historically fruitless effort. For example, in his study of Jamestown, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that the well-born saw military service as a means of maintaining their inherited status as notable men whereas lesser-born colonists saw the military as an opportunity to achieve and demonstrate their manhood and improve their social status. However, the contest between ascription and achievement may have made little or no difference, especially to the Virginia Company that sponsored the Jamestown settlers. Neither the rich nor the aspiring colonists succeeded in generating profits for the company’s investors or stability for the new settlers. Similarly, Natalie Zacek shows that West Indian planters represented both civil versions of masculinity that were consistent with British notions of gentility and undisciplined, brutal versions of masculinity that threatened constant violence and social chaos. Finally, Carolyn Eastman explores the two-sided lives of pirates, both their subversive willingness to ignore rules and endanger civil society, and their often-admired transgressive sexual behavior and crude ethic of rough equality. In each instance, [End Page 101] conflicting aspects of manhood may have competed with each other, but they did not necessarily play a prominent part in determining the outcome of historical events. Second, conflicting variations notwithstanding, different masculinities often spotlighted similarities between ostensibly different groups of men. Thus, Tyler Boulware points out that both Indian and British men relied on the language of masculinity to reinforce their identities as manly warriors and criticize the effeminacy of their opponents. Trevor Burnard shows that joint claims to patriarchal privilege (and even sex with the same women) linked white men and black men in eighteenth-century Jamaica. Janet Moore Lindman suggests that military chaplains strove to reconcile the tensions and contradictions between the violence implicit in war and the pacifism and piety of religion to enable soldiers and evangelicals to function together in wartime. Apparently, the different meanings of manhood that helped to define particular male populations did not prevent men from fraternizing, fighting, and governing one another cooperatively. Finally, the masculinities found in early America did help to structure gender relations and hierarchies but only in haphazard and unsystematic ways. For example, Thomas Foster explains that for John Adams and other founders, virtue and chastity were primarily considered feminine traits. But those traits were also embraced by many self-proclaimed, masculine men in the new Republic. Kathleen Brown reveals that enslaved men, although deprived of manly rights to own property and head families, relied on developing and using their bodies to define and achieve manhood. This simultaneously united them with white slaveholders (who relied on their bodies to produce children) and alienated them from white society (for fear of their acts of physical violence and rebellion). Like bachelors, pirates, and other quasi-subversive males, enslaved men who exhibited bodily vigor and vitality were often admired for their ability to live beyond the boundaries of gentility and well-tempered manhood. New Men: Manliness in Early America is a marvelous book not only because it explores the variations in masculinity, militarism in masculinities, and masculinities that defined the subordination [End Page 102] of women. It is also a contribution to the literature on American manhood because it is filled with small surprises that add depth and meaning to the role that gender played in early America. From the function of men’s voluntary associations dissected by Jessica Choppin Roney to the Indian dreams and spiritual communities analyzed by Susan Abram, New Men brings to life the many ways by which gender shaped early American...

CARIBBEAN SLAVERY, BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY, AND THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF VENEREAL DISEASE

ABSTRACTVenereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

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

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.”

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history.

Et in Arcadia ego: West Indian planters in glory, 1674–1784

The decline of West Indian planters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was both remarkable and, to an extent, inexplicable outside the context of a determined abolitionist onslaught against them. During the eighteenth century, planters in the biggest and most important West Indian colony, Jamaica, created a highly profitable plantation economy in which annual returns on investment were satisfactorily high, debt levels manageable, and productivity rapidly improving. Jamaica on the eve of the American Revolution was one of the wealthiest places in the world. Planters were justified in thinking the future for their colony, for slavery, and for the plantation system was rosy in both the short and long term.