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

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29

Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar production, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750 1807

This dissertation is a study of the Jamaican sugar economy and slave society on the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade.This dissertation was completed in the Department of History at the university of Minnesota (December 1999), under the direction of Professor Russell R. Menard. Published work based on this dissertation can be found in Ryden, Does Decline and One of the Fertilest pleasentest Spotts. Its most significant finding focuses on the Decline Thesis, as laid out by Eric Williams more than 50 years ago in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery, according to Williams, was doomed to failure because it encouraged planter absenteeism and plantation mismanagement, resulting in the tendency to overproduce. Thus, planters were increasingly saddled with steadily rising input costs while facing falling revenue. Williams explained that the first cracks in the sugar economy appeared with the loss of the North American colonies. From this point on, the British West Indian planters saw a fall in their profits. This late-eighteenth-century decline of the slave mode of production culminated in Parliament abolishing the slave trade in an attempt to cut production levels and thereby revive West Indian fortunes.Williams, Capitalism.