Rethinking the Fall of the
Planter Class
From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war, the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the fall of the planter class, offering a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.
Christer Petley is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton, UK. Among his publications are Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (2009) and articles in Atlantic Studies, Slavery & Abolition and The Historical Journal.
Rethinking the Fall of the
Planter Class
From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war, the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the fall of the planter class, offering a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.
Christer Petley is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton, UK. Among his publications are Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (2009) and articles in Atlantic Studies, Slavery & Abolition and The Historical Journal.
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Contents
Citation Information
The chapters in this book were originally published in Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Chapter 1
Rethinking the fall of the planter class
Christer Petley
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 117
Chapter 2
Et in Arcadia ego: West Indian planters in glory, 16741784
Trevor Burnard
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 1940
Chapter 3
Sugar, spirits, and fodder: The London West India interest and the glut of 180715
David Beck Ryden
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 4164
Chapter 4
The rise of a new planter class? Some countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 180733
Nicholas Draper
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 6583
Chapter 5
Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean
Christer Petley
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 85106
Chapter 6
The decline of Jamaicas interracial households and the fall of the planter class, 17331823
Daniel Livesay
Atlantic Studies, volume 9, issue 1 (March 2012), pp. 107123
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Notes on Contributors
Trevor Burnard is Head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of several books on Atlantic history and on white slave owners in the Chesapeake and Jamaica, and a large number of articles on such things as the history of early Jamaica; gender, whiteness and slavery in plantation societies; and the character of the planter class in the British Atlantic world.
Nicholas Draper is a member of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership project team in the Department of History at University College London, UK. His work researches the impact of the business of slavery on the formation of modern Britain. His book about the compensation paid to slave owners under the 1833 Abolition Act, The Price of Emancipation, was published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press.
Daniel Livesay is Assistant Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, California, USA. He is currently revising a book manuscript, Children of Uncertain Fortune: West Indians of Color and the Atlantic Family, 17501820, tracing the migration of mixed-race individuals from the Caribbean to Britain in the long eighteenth century.
Christer Petley is a former Chair of the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and teaches History at the University of Southampton, UK. His work has focused on slavery and abolition in the British Caribbean, particularly on slave owners and the planter class. He is the author of Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (Pickering and Chatto, 2009) and has published articles in Slavery and Abolition
