Plantations and homes: the material culture of the early nineteenth-century Jamaican elite

This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The planter class had a huge material investment in plantation slavery, and wealth derived from this allowed it to live ostentatiously and to consume conspicuously. Those who did not migrate away from Jamaica were drawn towards colonial towns, many of them taking up residence in, or at the edges of, urban centres. Lists of personal property found in probate inventories show how planters cultivated separate spheres of activity on the plantations and at their peri-urban homes, putting physical and cultural distance between themselves and the sources of their wealth

Boundaries of rule, ties of dependency : Jamaican planters, local society and the metropole, 1800-1834

This thesis examines the planter class in Jamaica in the period before the end of slavery in 1834 and considers the relations of the planters with local free society and the metropole. In spite of the large body of scholarly work on Jamaica during the slavery period, we lack a modern study of the planters. Based on archival research conducted in Britain and Jamaica, this research tackles the related issues of how locally resident planters sustained slavery in Jamaica and sought to control local society, how they related to other local groups and to the metropole, and how they identified themselves as British slaveholders in an age in which slavery was coming under increasing criticism in Britain. The study looks at the composition of the planter class and at the relations between the planter elite, non-elite white men, free non-whites and enslaved people. It also examines the way that the planters and their allies responded to criticisms directed against them and their local practices. The main conclusions of the thesis are that, to maintain the creole institution of slavery, the planters depended heavily on the support of other white men, who enjoyed a range of privileges and opportunities. This assuaged class tensions within white society and led to a distinctively local social order based on ideas of racial difference. However, in the period before emancipation, the rising population of free coloureds and free blacks, along with the increased influence of non-conformist missionaries, meant that the planters struggled to sustain local support across free society. Furthermore, their cultural and practical reliance on the metropole weakened their position as anti-slavery came to dominate British public opinion. Therefore, shifting circumstances in both Jamaica and Britain helped to make the planters' continued defence of slavery impractical and contributed to the emancipation of enslaved people in the 1830s

Boundaries of rule, ties of dependency : Jamaican planters, local society and the metropole, 1800-1834

This thesis examines the planter class in Jamaica in the period before the end of slavery in 1834 and considers the relations of the planters with local free society and the metropole. In spite of the large body of scholarly work on Jamaica during the slavery period, we lack a modern study of the planters. Based on archival research conducted in Britain and Jamaica, this research tackles the related issues of how locally resident planters sustained slavery in Jamaica and sought to control local society, how they related to other local groups and to the metropole, and how they identified themselves as British slaveholders in an age in which slavery was coming under increasing criticism in Britain. The study looks at the composition of the planter class and at the relations between the planter elite, non-elite white men, free non-whites and enslaved people. It also examines the way that the planters and their allies responded to criticisms directed against them and their local practices. The main conclusions of the thesis are that, to maintain the creole institution of slavery, the planters depended heavily on the support of other white men, who enjoyed a range of privileges and opportunities. This assuaged class tensions within white society and led to a distinctively local social order based on ideas of racial difference. However, in the period before emancipation, the rising population of free coloureds and free blacks, along with the increased influence of non-conformist missionaries, meant that the planters struggled to sustain local support across free society. Furthermore, their cultural and practical reliance on the metropole weakened their position as anti-slavery came to dominate British public opinion. Therefore, shifting circumstances in both Jamaica and Britain helped to make the planters' continued defence of slavery impractical and contributed to the emancipation of enslaved people in the 1830s.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEconomic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC) : University of WarwickGBUnited Kingdo

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class

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 histor