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

Fear or Security ? Slaveholder Proposals to Arm Black Men in Jamaïca and South Carolina during the American Revolution

Comment la minorité blanche des esclavagistes des grandes Antilles à-t-elle réagi à la crainte d\u27une attaque d\u27un ennemi européen de l\u27extérieur, combinée en même temps à la menace d\u27une insurrection des esclaves? La révolution américaine à contribué à soulever cette question lors des assemblées coloniales de la Jamaïque et de la Caroline du sud, en 1778, 1779 et 1782. Les esclaves noirs des deux colonies ont profité de la crise des empires coloniaux de 1775 pour se soulever violemment contre leurs maîtres.Comment la minorité blanche des esclavagistes des grandes Antilles a-t-elle réagi à la crainte d\u27une attaque d\u27un ennemi européen de l\u27extérieur, combinée en même temps à la menace d\u27une insurrection des esclaves ? La révolution américaine a contribué à soulever cette question lors des assemblées coloniales de la Jamaïque et de la Caroline du sud, en 1778, 1779 et 1782. Les esclaves noirs des deux colonies ont profité de la crise des empires coloniaux de 1775 pour se soulever violemment contre leurs maîtres

Slave law and the politics of resistance in the early Atlantic world /

The success of the English colony of Barbados in the seventeenth century, with its lucrative sugar plantations and enslaved African labor, spawned the slave societies of Jamaica in the western Caribbean and South Carolina on the American mainland. These became the most prosperous slave economies in the Anglo-American Atlantic, despite the rise of enlightened ideas of liberty and human dignity. Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World reveals the political dynamic between slave resistance and slaveholders' power that marked the evolution of these societies. Edward Rugemer shows how this struggle led to the abolition of slavery through a law of British Parliament in one case and through violent civil war in the other. In both Jamaica and South Carolina, a draconian system of laws and enforcement allowed slave masters to maintain control over the people they enslaved, despite resistance and recurrent slave revolts. Brutal punishments, patrols, imprisonment, and state-sponsored slave catchers formed an almost impenetrable net of power. Yet slave resistance persisted, aided and abetted by rising abolitionist sentiment and activity in the Anglo-American world. In South Carolina, slaveholders exploited newly formed levers of federal power to deflect calls for abolition and to expand slavery in the young republic. In Jamaica, by contrast, whites fought a losing political battle against Caribbean rebels and British abolitionists who acted through Parliament. Rugemer's comparative history spanning two hundred years of slave law and political resistance illuminates the evolution and ultimate collapse of slave societies in the Atlantic World.-