The mature plantation complex

Alongside the venerable idea of an Age of Revolutions, promulgated first by R.R. Palmer in 1959, a complementary notion derived from the study of empires has emerged in recent years to become, as David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam argue, a testable thesis.¹¹ This holds that a ‘world crisis’ began in the mid-eighteenth century and lasted into the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century.

Bayly, in particular, lays out a broad framework within which the world crisis of the late eighteenth century can be placed. He argues that between 1660 and 1720—a period that follows directly on from what is provided in Bayly’s unspoken model, Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of a general crisis in Western Europe in the long seventeenth century beginning somewhere around 156013—there occurred a broad upswing in global economic activity everywhere in Eurasia and in the Atlantic World. The development of the large integrated plantation, first in Barbados in the 1660s and then throughout the Atlantic plantation world in the early 1700s, proved crucial in stimulating economic development and more importantly in the establishment of institutions that led to the creation of Britain’s eight­eenth-century fusion of fiscal issues and military activity under state control.¹⁴ From 1700, and especially after 1750, the Atlantic slave system moved into a higher gear, expanding, becoming more sophisticated, and becoming ever more voracious in appetite.

But as the Atlantic plantation system moved into maturity and great profitability around mid-century, all was not going well in other parts of the world. Around 1720, cracks started appearing in the picture of broad stability and economic expansion that had char­acterised the last half-century. Imperial overstretch started to affect Asian and Middle Eastern empires. The major problem was the cost of war, which rose greatly in the first half of the eighteenth century. Most Eurasian empires failed to overcome the financial pressures of warfare. At first the exception seemed to be the overseas empires of Western European nations and their metropolises which acted in Eurasia as the great destabiliser and opportunistic invader. But eventually, as Bayly incisively explains, imperial Europe from the Seven Years’ War onwards started to feel the same stresses from the enormous cost of warfare that Eurasian empires had experienced a generation previously. They felt pressure on fiscal structures most notably when European states were forced to defend their colonial possessions. As William Pitt memorably described the process of warfare during the first global war, the Seven Years’ War of 1756—1763, it was like ‘breaking windows with guineas’.¹⁶

Even Britain, which seemed to have worked out a suitable way of creating a viable fiscal-military regimen to support an expensive overseas empire, started to feel the strain in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. So, too, did France, though for more explic­able reasons, notably defeat in global warfare. Britain’s attempt to recoup its losses through more intrusive intervention into British America provoked a serious and ultimately suc­cessful colonial revolt in thirteen North American colonies.

Matters seemed to be turning from good to bad everywhere around mid-century. Unlike the previous half-century, the second half of the eighteenth century no longer offered rapid economic expansion, even in Western Europe, the most dynamic and flourishing part of Eurasia. It was also too early for the positive effects of industrialisation to have kicked in. Population growth seems to have overtaken the capacity of farming to innovate in much of Western Europe, and growing numbers of people living in tumultuous and insalubrious cities were prone to riot.¹⁷ The Atlantic plantation system, however, seemed a major exception to the general tendency towards ‘world crisis’. By any standard, plantations continued to do well in the years immediately before the American Revolution that began in 1776. There may be some arguments for the economic causation of Atlantic revolutions but in the plantation system revolutions generally occurred while planters prospered. Slavery had made the Atlantic work and planters remained well aware of their value to imperial enterprises. As Barbara L. Solow remarks, ‘What moved in the Atlantic in these centuries were predominantly slaves, the output of slaves, the inputs to slave societies, and the goods and services purchased with the earnings on slave products’.¹⁸

By the 1770s, the plantations of the Americas accounted for a remarkably high pro­portion of the trade of the slave-trading nations of Western Europe. The West Indies and Brazil produced sugar, rum and coffee, while British North America exported tobacco, rice and indigo. The annual value of colonial exports in the early 1770s rose to £5.6 million in the British plantations, £5.2 million in the French colonies and £1.8 million in Brazil. Total exports to Spanish America (mostly bullion but also including plantation produce) amounted to £4.9 million.

The wealthiest plantation societies, Saint-Domingue or Jamaica, had turned into eco­nomic powerhouses that far outstripped in average wealth and dynamism those colonies in Atlantic America that had not committed themselves so fully to African slavery. On the eve of the American Revolution, Jamaica, for example, was as important to Britain in terms of wealth as a large county such as Lancashire or Sussex. The beneficiaries of such wealth creation were Jamaican planters, who took advantage of Jamaica’s natural advantages in the production of a high-value commodity export to establish an extremely profitable system of slave management in which they successfully manipulated complex agro-indus­trial technology, a complicated integrated trade network and, most importantly, a brutal method of labour exploitation that used and discarded overworked, badly fed and abused slaves of African descent.²⁰

One reason for the dynamism of the eighteenth-century plantation system, especially in the British and French Empires, was its easy relationship, despite slavery, with principles of capitalism. Under the influence of Adam Smith and his disciples, and following an indus­trial revolution in Europe, which, despite the arguments of Eric Williams, was probably very little dependent on wealth brought into Europe by slave-owners and the plantation system, slavery in plantation America came to be thought of as a retrogressive, backward, technologically and entrepreneurially challenged, and morally reprehensible system that would soon be replaced by more modern, dynamic and capitalist economic systems.²¹

But it would be a great mistake to transpose economic ideologies from the mid­nineteenth century and later retrospectively onto a system that to contemporaries, and to most modern historians, stood at the vanguard of modernity.

The labours of the colonists settled in these long-scorned islands are the sole basis of the African trade, extend the fisheries and cultivation of North America, provide advantageous outlets for the manufacture of Asia, double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the universe.²²

That sentiment could be applied everywhere in the Atlantic plantation world: these ‘factories in the field’ were at the forefront of transitions to modernity. The plantation world was framed by a number of severe traumas of global significance, including the extirpation of the Amerindian population, degradation of the tropical environment, and the triple effects of slavery, sugar and the imposition of the plantation system, leaving it a diminished and regressive world where enslavement gave a nightmarish quality to quotidian existence. It nevertheless represented pioneering modernity. The Caribbean was an area of vital fusions between peoples brought, often unwillingly, from all over the world. It was, as Philip D. Morgan states, ‘a generative front, a cultural frontier, a gathering place of broken pieces’.²³

Some metropolitan intellectuals found the dynamism of the plantation system, the confidence of the planter class and the brutality of the slave system deeply disturbing. Abbe Raynal’s Histoire des deux mondes, a classic Enlightenment text first published in 1770, inclu­ded a number of ringing condemnations, written by Diderot, of the practices of colonial

slavery. Enlightenment thinkers generally opposed slavery, even if they also tended towards new and pernicious forms of scientific racism.²⁴ Samuel Johnson, from the conservative side, became a fierce opponent of slavery, although as much from dislike of the pretensions of slave-owners as a principled objection to holding Africans in servitude.

Planters enjoyed a mixed press in European imperial capitals, especially those wealthy West Indians, derided, in the phrase later used about American soldiers in Britain during the Second World War, as being ‘over paid, over sexed and over here’. The derision expressed was that of established elites against over-assertive nouveaux riches and few doubted the importance of planters as bulwarks of empire. Moreover, the abolitionist movement, even in Britain, remained tiny until the 1780s, unlikely to attract much support outside of a small Quaker and evangelical Anglican base. Few American or West Indian planters showed awareness of the movement’s existence until its sudden growth after, and probably as a consequence of, the American Revolution.²⁷