Plantation societies

TREVOR BURNARD

Few institutions define world history in the early modern era as completely as the plantation complex. Initiated in Europe; realised in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the Americas; involving both Asia as a source of capital and Asians as labourers; focused strongly on Africa, from where the great majority of plantation labourers came; and extending eventually in the nineteenth century into the Pacific and into Australia - the plantation complex and the social forms it engendered was a global phenomenon.

The development of the plantation system had far-reaching consequences. It was the imperative force behind the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, especially during the mature period of that trade. Through that trade, 12.5 million Africans left Africa, primarily for the Americas, and 10.7 million captives arrived to become chattel slaves in a large geographic region that ultimately stretched from Rio Grande do Sol in southern Brazil to the Mason-Dixon Line of southern Pennsylvania in the United States between 1500 and 1866, 7.3 million of whom arrived before 1800, the great majority disembarking in Brazil or in the Caribbean. There have been larger migra­tions subsequently, but in the pre-industrial age this was the most significant forced migration of people across a long distance over a relatively short period. At its height, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, nearly 75,000 Africans arrived each year in the Americas, transforming the demo­graphic make-up of the Americas and making plantation America a cultural offshoot not so much of Europe but of West Africa. Prime plantation regions such as the British and French Caribbean, Bahia and Pernambuco in Brazil, and Virginia and South Carolina in the United States had populations in which a majority or near majority were enslaved people of African descent, making these areas more like what a Swiss newcomer to South Carolina in 1737 termed ‘Negroe countries' than European-like societies.

Moreover, the plantation itself was a highly distinctive innovation, espe­cially after its transformation as an economic institution in mid-seventeenth century Barbados and the subsequent spread of the Barbadian plantation model throughout British and French America. It was the most complex and semi-industrial form invented in the early modern period, with the regime of the sugar mill showing significant resemblances to that classic industrial institution, the cotton mill. Both were dangerous and unhealthy and fiercely patrolled places that consumed their workers. The successful plantation system was a place of finely calibrated coordination internally and externally, involving as it did complex long-distance trade relationships, the careful cultivation of demand for plantation products, and innovative and capitalistic financial instruments that were seldom used in other trades. The result of the development of the plantation system was the creation of highly specialised and differentiated ‘factories in the field' that provided enormous wealth to their owners and misery and impoverishment to workers. Once established in places suited to the production of tropical goods for sale in Europe, the plantation proved to be an irresistible force, subsuming all other economic activities in its wake and creating a variety of social, economic and political characteristics that were of long-lasting importance. Quintessentially a fea­ture of early modern colonial life, the plantation did not fade away once modernity arrived but continued to grow, develop and expand into the nineteenth and even into the twentieth century in places as diverse as Natal and Queensland.

The plantation was modern with pre-modern features, most notably a reliance on forced labour. It was marked by a distinctive and generally pernicious set of social and intellectual understandings, predicated upon the relentless exploitation of workers denigrated for their racial origin. Planters did not create racism; but they did provide the ideal setting in which forms of racial denigration could flourish.

Some historians have pondered whether the plantation system added much to human experience besides the immiseration of large numbers of people. David Eltis, for example, rather derisively claims that the whole history of the plantation can be attributed to Europe's sweet tooth and added relatively little to European and North American economic well-being except greatly increased and cheaper amounts of addictive luxury products. Walter Rodney thought the major contribution of the plantation system was to contribute to African underdevelopment.^[226] Such diminishments of the impact of the plantation complex are unfortunate. The plantation was a vital early modern institution. It contributed hugely, if only sometimes positively, to shaping the contours of social, economic and political existence in the New World.

Definition of plantation

The first plantations - farms devoted to producing sugar, the quintessential plantation crop - started in the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages and became established in a form later generations would recognise in the fifteenth century in the Canary Islands, then in Madeira, and finally in Sao Tome, an island off West Africa. From there it crossed the Atlantic to northeastern Brazil, where sugar began to be produced in sizeable quantities in the 1540s. The term plantation did not exist in its current form for sixteenth-century Iberians.

Philip Curtin outlines six features that define the mature plantation complex. The most important feature was the labour force, which from the middle of the seventeenth century was normally an enslaved population of people of African descent. That population was generally not self­sustaining and thus relied on fresh importations of people from the Atlantic slave trade to keep population constant. Not all plantation systems had non­self-sustaining populations - the American South managed to achieve natural demographic increase from the 1740s in the Chesapeake and from the 1760s in South Carolina. But sugar plantations in particular were so destructive of health that these plantation systems depended on the Atlantic slave trade for their labour needs. Plantations, moreover, were capitalist enterprises, even if they retained some aspects of feudalism, especially in Brazil where planta­tions were oriented around engenhos, or sugar mills, where lavradores de canha, small farmers who grew cane, took their canes to mills where it was milled by senhores de engenhos. These capitalist enterprises produced for distant markets in Europe and thus were dependent on the vagaries of long­distance trade for their success or failure. Only American tropical societies were so intensely export-oriented - no sections of Europe, Africa or Asia relied as heavily on long-distance trade as did plantation societies. Finally, plantation societies were colonial societies, with political control lying in European imperial systems. Plantation societies thus did not grow autono­mously. Each was linked to a particular European country and through that country to the European state system.

The Brazilian model

The plantation is not exclusively for the production of sugar. Planters produced other luxury tropical crops, notably tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee and rice. But sugar was the most important plantation crop. Its cultivation was the most connected to the development of the plantation complex before the nineteenth century. The Iberians led the way in its cultivation and in its integration into emerging mercantile capitalism, which is ironic because in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Spain and Portugal could hardly be called capitalistic. They also lagged behind other Western Euro­pean nations in the subsequent development of capitalism.

Iberia's relative lack of involvement in the growth of mercantile capitalism influenced the development of the plantation system. Brazil's plantation system - the most significant early form - retained elements of feudalism, principally the usurpation by private subjects of jurisdictional rights over workers that were usually the province of the state. The most notable consequence of feudal remnants in the plantation was planters' insistence that the great majority of workers had to be owned - fixed costs, in economic terms - rather than hired - variable costs, in capitalist parlance. Coerced labour was integral to the plantation system from the start. Planters always feared the bargaining power that free labourers might have, especially in the critical harvest period where time was always of the essence.

Brazil was ideally suited to sugar production. Northeast Brazil contained large areas of flat land, with good soil and excellent rainfall, fine forests for the supply of firewood and other supplies, and was close to the Atlantic Ocean and transatlantic shipping channels. Sugar cane was first introduced in the 1530s by colonists with experience in Madeira and the Canary Islands. These first planters used their contacts in Antwerp, where a market for the sale of sugar that catered to increased demand for sugar in northwest Europe was developing, to get necessary capital to construct engenhos.

The early seventeenth-century Brazilian sugar economy was determined by three factors - the structure of ownership, the supply of labour and access to credit. All of these factors were related to an absence of capital. The lack of large amounts of capital eventually meant that it was difficult for Brazil to compete against more efficient forms of sugar production developed in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century. The structure of ownership was unusual in that there was a separation between the owners of sugar mills and the farmers producing sugar cane. Such separation put limits on productivity and on profits from economies of scale and was evidence of the diffusion of investment and risk in the Brazilian sugar industry.

Brazilian sugar production depended heavily on bound labour. At first Brazilians used indigenous labour, but demographic decline and growing levels of resistance encouraged them to replace Native Americans with Africans by the end of the sixteenth century. Turning to African slave labour made sense, as the Portuguese had the best access to African slave markets of any European nation. Portugal's well-established connections to Angola allowed Portuguese traders to obtain easily captives who could be taken to northeastern Brazil on voyages that were much shorter than elsewhere in the Atlantic slave trade. The result was dramatically lower mortality rates and a relatively low cost of transhipment, especially compared with voyages to the Caribbean or British North America.

The move from Indian to African labour was of momentous import. African slave labour had many advantages, both over Native American coerced labour and also over European indentured labour, which was the initial form of labour used in British and French America. Africans, adrift from home and without the protection of law or custom, could be worked hard in ways that were impossible for Indians and especially for Europeans. Slaves, for example, generally provided much of their own food needs through being forced to work on their own provision grounds, while indentured servants had to be provided with room and board as part of their terms of indenture. The differences in treatment were especially obvious for women. European women did not work in the fields, but African women were forced to do so, becoming the majority of field workers in sugar cultivation with many men taking on supervisory or tradesman roles. Moreover, because Africans were owned in perpetuity, they had the time in service to learn the often difficult processes of cultiva­tion and processing tropical crops. Unlike indentured servants, who came to the Americas as young people and seldom worked for planters for more than a few years before going on to other activities, often while aged under 20, African slaves who survived three or four years of ‘seasoning' became experienced and productive plantation operatives. The typical slave force was concentrated around men and women in their twenties and thirties. The older age of slaves when compared with servants made sugar plantations more productive and profitable. It also made natural population growth difficult for enslaved people. Women of childbearing years were worked relentlessly and without consideration of their reproductive needs. The result was poor health and low female fertility.

Brazilians, especially in the initial flush of plantation growth, made good money from sugar planting. They were handicapped, however, by lack of access to credit and capital, leading them into considerable indebted­ness. Debt was a continual problem everywhere for planters even at the peak of the plantation system. Planters got into debt both because they adopted lavish and unsustainable modes of living and also because the plantation was a voracious consumer of up-front costs that could only be paid through borrowing from local and especially European merchants. Conflict between merchants and planters was endemic in any plantation system. When prices for sugar slumped in the 1620s and as slave resistance increased planter vulnerability and reduced profits, Brazilian prosperity declined. From rapid growth, the mid-seventeenth-century Brazilian sugar industry moved into a long period of stability and low profits. Their place as leaders in the plantation world was taken by English and French planters, who were better integrated than the Portuguese into North Atlantic commercial networks. The Dutch played a vital role in Brazilian decline. They did not become planters themselves - the Dutch proved reluctant to live in slave societies - but they lusted after Brazilian wealth and tried to gain it through attacking Bahia in 1624 and seizing Pernambuco in 1630, which they held until Portugal retook it in 1644. The Dutch learned the techniques of sugar cultivation and played a possibly important role (historians debate the matter) in passing on knowledge about sugar making to English and French planters in the eastern Caribbean and in providing the necessary capital to invest in sugar mills. War between the Dutch and the Portuguese in the 1640s also disrupted Atlantic commerce, leading to a rise in sugar prices at a very propitious time for Barbadians making the shift to plantation production.

Thus, Brazil's golden age ended just as that of Barbados began. Sugar became less important in Brazil as other activities, notably gold in Minas Gerais, became significant. But Brazil remained the third largest producer of sugar into the nineteenth century and a major producer of other tropical crops such as coffee. While fazendas, or sugar estates, did not employ modern management models, they had low costs rooted in an efficient slave trade. Brazil was both the first place to develop the modern plantation complex and the last country, in 1888, to abolish slavery, the system that allowed all plantation systems to flourish. Their model of slave-based plantation labour was long lasting and was copied throughout all sectors of Brazilian society.

The Barbados model

By the early seventeenth century, the potential for profit from the production of sugar was clear. Demand for sugar was high, as it was for other crops produced by plantation methods, such as tobacco, which was grown in quantity and in high quality in the tidewater area of Virginia. The relative roles of supply and demand in the growth of plantation models are much debated. It is clear that supply was important - plantations were the result of an agricultural revolution and a revolution in human capital evaluation with planters finding ever more effective ways of exploiting labour. But demand played a part, too. Sugar moved from being an elite form of consumption to a product that ordinary people could afford. Moreover, plantation products became highly desirable objects. The rise of capitalist farming and manufac­ture fed into a new culture of consumption symbolised by the fierce appetites of men like Rabelais' Gargantua and Shakespeare's Falstaff. The early seven­teenth century saw changes in consumer demand that led people to want to smoke tobacco, drink sweetened coffee and wear clothes made from new textiles especially, as E. A. Wrigley notes, in countries like England where ‘steadily growing productivity per head in agriculture had permitted a shift of the structure of demand for necessities and comforts and even luxuries'.^[227]

A small, uninhabited West Indian colony first settled by English adven­turers in 1627 provided a new model of plantation development. Barbados was the crucible in which the mature plantation system was incubated. What Barbadian planters did most crucially was to move away from the dispersed system common in Brazil to a system in which they integrated the growing and processing of sugar cane. Some historians think of this, grandiloquently, as a ‘sugar revolution', but, as Russell Menard insists, the process was more evolutionary than revolutionary, with Barbadians moving by trial and error to a new system over a period of nearly thirty years. The main impetus behind the creation of the integrated plantation was falling sugar prices after 1660, which forced planters to innovate in order to improve productivity. The large integrated plantation in which hundreds of slaves worked in gangs producing and processing sugar happened haphazardly and coexisted with the dispersed system. Significantly, this integrated system emerged in Barbados and everywhere else in British America after, not before, the introduction of slavery on a large scale. By the 1650s Barbados was a majority-black population slave society, but it did not have large integrated plantations for at least another twenty years. The key was not so much the adoption of slavery but instead the development of a form of labour organisation that could produce large enough quantities of sugar to bring wealth sufficient for substantial reinvestment. That organisation was the development of ganged labour, with its lockstep discipline and its liberal use of the whip to force slaves to work as hard as possible. With ganged labour, slave forces could dramatically increase until typical slave forces were well over a hundred slaves in the Caribbean and over fifty slaves in British North America.

Barbadians drew on Brazilian experience in creating their version of the plantation, but they had one key advantage denied to their predecessors. They had access to the vast resources of the London capital market and had a number of well-placed merchant friends willing and able to invest in their activities. These merchants saw in ganged sugar plantations ways of making lots of money. Large integrated plantations had major economies of scale when compared with small farms. Those economies of scale worked best when slaves worked in gangs in rhythmic unison. The first mention of gang labour came relatively late in Barbadian history, in 1679 in a tract written by a pioneering planter, Henry Drax. To an extent, forcing slaves to work in gangs was an obvious thing to do, given that most of the work required for growing and processing sugar made sense done in gangs. It was also an obvious path to follow for many Barbadians because the rhythms of ganged labour were akin to rhythms in the military. The bell calling slaves to work was like that used at sea, while the methodical routines of working in gangs

were similar to repetitive marching in step and loading and firing guns in standardised movement common in the new and larger armies of Europe that resulted from the military revolutions of the seventeenth century. Like all French and English plantation societies, Barbados fashioned its social hierarchy around military honorifics. Many of its white residents had experi­enced being in the English Civil War or had served aboard slave ships. Gang labour was not only similar to drilling. It also involved slaves being subject to ferocious discipline that was not found elsewhere other than in the brutal treatment meted out to common soldiers in late seventeenth-century armed forces.

Gang labour changed African labour patterns in the New World irrevoc­ably. It also made plantation agriculture more profitable than it had been previously. Slave labour was more efficient than other forms of pre-industrial labour less because slaves were worked excessively hard in terms of hours worked but because when they worked, they worked very intensively. Slaves on sugar plantations worked the longest hours, labouring 3,288 hours per year in late eighteenth-century Jamaica. Slaves in rice and tobacco in British North America worked considerably fewer hours but their labours remained very difficult. Planters were relentless in the demands they placed upon enslaved people, willing, while the slave trade operated successfully, to sacrifice slaves' health in order to make a crop. The result was that slaves suffered chronic bad health caused by stress, poor childhood nutrition and onerous and dangerous work, even in advanced pregnancy. The main sufferers were those slaves who worked in the fields, who tended to be women of childbearing age, and children, whose welfare was generally for planters a matter of great indifference. A project comparing 12,000 skeletons from 1000 bc with examples from the early twentieth century ranked slaves who had been field hands in eighteenth-century South Carolina near the bottom of all historical populations, in the same range as pre-Columbian populations facing extinction or demographic disaster.^[228]

The switch to the integrated plantation and to gang labour was not uncontested. Africans hated working in gangs and detested the regimentation that gang labour forced upon them. A slave rebel in seventeenth-century Barbados declared that ‘The Devel was in the English-man, that he makes everything work, he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the wood work, the Water work, and the winde work.' Slaves resisted: Barbados went through one of its periodic bursts of slave rebellion, with plots, actual and imagined, uncovered by planters in 1675, 1683, 1686 and 1692. These rebel­lions were put down with maximum ferocity, with rebel slaves tortured and executed in barbarous fashion in order to cow slaves into obedience.

To a large degree, such repression worked. The shift to ganged plantation labour throughout British and French America marked the nadir of black life in the Americas. As Ira Berlin notes for the Chesapeake, the plantation regime needed raw power to sustain it. Planters mobilised the apparatus of coercion, private and state, in the service of this new regime. Slavery had always been brutal in the Americas, but the level of violence exercised against Africans dramatically increased as the size of slave labour forces grew. After 1700, Chesapeake slaves faced the pillory, whipping post and gallows more frequently and in larger numbers than before. Moreover, the punishments meted out to slaves were not only cruel, they were intended to humiliate and demoralise, such as when William Byrd ιι of Virginia forced a bedwetting slave to drink a ‘pint of piss'. Yet after the initial period of transition to the large integrated plantation, when slave opposition to new demands was considerable, slave rebellions declined in frequency. In British America, the only slave rebellions of real seriousness that occurred before the nineteenth century came in Antigua in 1736 and Jamaica in 1760. Other­wise slaves were forced into quiescence. Planters used strategies of divide and rule as well as ingenious applications of spiritual terror against slave communities, which had lost much of their social bearings in the transit across the Atlantic. This was accompanied by appalling levels of violence and harsh work regimes to keep enslaved people demoralised, traumatised and obedient. Such strategies were largely successful. In Barbados and Virginia, for example, there was no slave revolt in the eighteenth century, despite material conditions for enslaved people markedly deteriorating. Similarly, there was no slave rebellion in Saint Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolu­tion, despite the plantation regime being more onerous (and more profitable to owners) there than anywhere else in the eighteenth-century Americas.

The frequency of slave resistance to new working arrangements helps explain one of the mysteries about the switch to the integrated plantation system. Other slave societies were very slow to emulate the Barbadian example, even though as early as 1680, when a census revealed Barbados to be the wealthiest place in the British Empire, the advantages that the integrated plantation system brought to fortunate owners were evident. Yet it took at least another generation for the integrated plantation to become dominant in the Leeward Islands and Martinique. Big plantations with 200 or more slaves did not become common in Jamaica until the 1710s or 1720s and it took until the 1720s and 1730s for the integrated plantation to become common in Saint Domingue. The switch to integrated planta­tion agriculture took longer in the Chesapeake, only really occurring in the 1730s.

The reasons for the slowness of the move seem to lie less in the difficulty of mastering new techniques of production than in the problems planters had in retaining control over large numbers of hostile African men. Man­aging a gang of traumatised, hostile and potentially violent African slaves was a different proposition from controlling a smaller group of enslaved people. The shift from small-scale to large-scale slave plantations only came about when planters solved the problem of disciplining enslaved people. They solved this problem through the application of terror. To make slaves terrified, planters needed people willing to inflict terror. These people were ordinary white men, acting as overseers on slave plantations. This new subaltern class emerged as a result of three simultaneous developments: the decline in opportunities outside the plantation economy for ordinary white men; the increased presence in plantation America of men who had considerable experience of being brutalised and meting out brutality as soldiers and non-commissioned officers in the large armies of the Nine Years' War (1688-97) and the War of Spanish Succession (1700-13) or as sailors in the increasingly numerous English or British slave ships plying Atlantic waters; and the increasingly racialised disposition of labour on large planta­tions, where white men were promoted out of indentured servitude into managerial positions as overseers while the vast majority of black slaves were consigned to difficult work as field hands. What planters needed were tough men prepared to do whatever it took to control enslaved men and women working in dreadful conditions. They found such tough men from the ranks of poorer whites, men accustomed to violence and prepared to put up with the hardships of supervising recalcitrant slaves and growing perish­able crops in return for good wages and the rewards of white privilege in societies turning from class-conflicted societies into ones with a significant racial caste dimension.

The Atlantic slave trade

The large integrated plantation ate up its workers. In the most complete plantation societies, especially those devoted to sugar, the wastage of human life in plantation labour was enormous. The migration of nearly 700,000 Africans to Jamaica before 1788 resulted in a slave population of just 211,000. Nearly 800,000 Africans were transported to Saint Domingue between 1680 and 1777 for a population of enslaved people of 290,000. Before the nineteenth century, plantation societies everywhere outside mid-eighteenth­century British North America depended on fresh inputs of labour from the Atlantic slave trade. Without it functioning effectively, plantation life would have been very different.

The Atlantic slave trade was an important means whereby Africa became included in world history. From the perspective of societies in West Africa, the slave trade was not an unalloyed bad thing. It allowed Africans to rid themselves of surplus outsiders. It provided West Africans with European commodities they would have found difficult getting otherwise. It was also only part of a developing trade between Africa and other continents. Slaves only become the dominant export trade in Africa in the late seventeenth century, although by the 1780s when the slave trade was at its peak slaves accounted for over 90 percent of all African exports. It was only after 1700 that the French and English became major players in the trade. And it was only around this time that the slave trade began to play a decisive role in shaping coastal African communities and politics.

Europeans were able to buy captives from Africa because Africans were willing participants in the trade. Indeed, Africans controlled it. They had long experience with slavery, especially in the Islamic north where the enslavement of non-Muslims was customary. They welcomed European traders, but made sure that they were in charge of how slaves were obtained and exchanged. European traders could only succeed if they worked within African norms.

The trade was very complicated and risky, although it offered large potential profits. It involved long stays in Africa, intricate commercial rela­tionships and multiple decisions in order to coordinate supply and demand cycles. The plantation system imposed considerable constraints on what traders did. What they wanted to do was to provide planters with slaves either before or during the harvest season. That meant planning the purchase and passage of slaves with great care. It was very easy to get things wrong and to end up with a voyage that lost money. Planters wanted slaves from some regions rather than others, but generally demand was more pressing than supply and planters had to take whatever slaves they were offered. As planters tended to buy slaves in small numbers either directly from a ship or from an urban slave merchant, and as shipments in British and French America tended to come from a range of African places, the result was that plantations were usually stocked with slaves from a variety of ethnic origins.

It was a grisly business. The Middle Passage was especially horrible. Hundreds of terrified and naked Africans were sent to the Americas in tightly packed, foul-smelling ships on a 4-6-week journey. The violence was one problem; but dehumanisation was a much bigger issue. It was on these ships that captives became commodities, preparing them for the enslavement that awaited them on arrival. The slave ship was a distinctive social place, a combination of war machine, mobile prison and factory. The Africans who survived the passage - 2 million did not - suffered both emotional trauma and also an ontological crisis of identity. When they entered the ship they became ‘socially dead', people who were no longer people but things and cut adrift from all the social ties that had sustained them in their homelands. Slave ships were distinguished by their many ‘lacks'. Slaves suffered material and social misery along with cognitive dissonance and were defenceless in the face of the supernatural and in respect of sailors, who were quickly shown to be their enemies. What were left of their truncated psyches were violence, terror and personal self-disintegration.

Sale in America enhanced these feelings of social alienation and psycho­logical distress. Slaves felt like and were treated like livestock and, sent to work on plantations, were made to feel isolated and desolate. Some plantation slaves tried to ease the plight of new slaves, especially if new slaves came from their own African countries, but in general slaves were left to adapt to slavery on their own. The alienation they felt was overwhelming. Even though as they adjusted to slavery, slaves tried to recreate the African cultural patterns they had left behind, it was difficult to overcome the sense of loss that Africans felt in being ripped from their homeland. In such circumstances, the creation of vibrant slave communities was difficult. Nevertheless, the continued addition of people fresh from Africa into soci­eties where memories of Africa remained strong did allow slave communities to retain African cultural practices, notably in family arrangements and in religious practice. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century, for example, that slaves started to convert to Christianity in serious numbers. Until then, slave societies were imbued with a large degree of African cultural forms and remained essentially African in character and aspiration. That Africanness can be seen in periodic slave rebellions, which until the nineteenth century were fashioned according to African values and which aimed for African solutions, such as the creation of African kingdoms, to New World problems.

The mid-eighteenth-century plantation: economic performance

In the 1770s, the plantation system was at its pre-industrial peak. Its economic performance was extraordinary. Produce from plantations amounted to around 40 percent of the trade of the leading European Atlantic states. It was slavery and slave-produced goods that integrated the Atlantic system and which made it so dynamic in the eighteenth century. Even those places that had neither slaves nor plantations were involved in providing goods and services that supported plantation economies. Plantations themselves con­tributed mightily to imperial coffers. The annual value of colonial exports, the great majority of which came from plantations, just before the American Revolution, was £5.6 million for British America, £5.2 million for French America and £1.8 million for Brazil.

Individual colonies and individuals within colonies were very rich. The wealth of Jamaica increased from under £500,000 in 1680 to over £28 million in 1780, making this small island with just 15,000 free settlers as valuable to Britain as a large county such as Lancashire or Sussex. Whites in the island were fifty times as wealthy as the average person in Britain, and the richest planters, men with 1,000 or more slaves and several plantations, had wealth that only men in the highest reaches of the aristocracy in Britain had. Saint Domingue, the wealthiest plantation colony of them all, accounted for nearly two-thirds of French overseas commerce immediately before the French Revolution. The French plantations were especially valuable. The French outperformed the British in the West Indies as the eighteenth century progressed, despite relatively weak demand for plantation produce in France. One reason for their success was the extent to which state support comple­mented private initiative. The French government was much more willing than the British to provide considerable help in irrigation and infrastructure works. Good roads and the best modern irrigation systems greatly raised productivity and encouraged Saint Dominguean planters to import huge numbers of Africans into the colony each year in the decade before the Haitian Revolution.

The economic performance of plantation societies has attracted consider­able historical attention. One question has been whether plantation slavery provided the momentum for European industrialisation. Slave trade profits and accumulated wealth by planters and merchants reinvested back in the metropolis no doubt provided a stimulus to growth, although it is true that few plantation profits went directly into industrial development. But recent work in world history suggests that American land and products gave Western Europe a vital extra edge through ‘ghost acres'; Britain in particular was able to pioneer the transition to industrialisation while having available to it the output of acres of highly fertile land in the New World. Having these ‘ghost acres' obviated the British needing to devote resources to getting what it gained from overseas produce. Moreover, industrialisation benefited not just from export markets but also from technical innovations in finance and insurance that resulted from long experience with the difficulties of long-distance trade in slaves and slave-produced goods.

A related question has been whether the plantation system was in decline even as it seemed to be at its height in the late eighteenth century. Was the plantation system profitable in itself or, more to the point, was it making the sorts of profit that detracted attention from the growing dynamism of the temperate regions of North America and Europe? A general consensus has emerged that slave owners were not congenitally conservative, backward looking and opposed to any form of innovation. Rather they were active, aggressive and generally successful managers who achieved rising productiv­ity returns from their workers and made usually rising profits. In 1800 the plantation system was not in irreversible decline but on the verge of a new burst of activity. It was profitable, productive and capable of both diversifi­cation and also technological and managerial improvement. Perhaps the most remarkable innovation was in planters' approach to developing human capital. Slave men, in particular, were trained as tradesmen or placed in junior supervisory positions as drivers, partly to make the plantation work more efficiently but also in order to increase their value on the market. The result of paying attention to developing capital was not only improved productivity and enhanced profits but also an increase in the capital value of the planter's human capital. The increasing value of slave property - accounting for over 40 percent of non-landed wealth in Jamaica in the 1770s - made investing in slavery an economically logical decision. By the time of the abolition of the slave trade in British America in 1807, when slaves were overpriced by planters paying handsome prices for new slaves and thus stockpiling slaves against future hardship, slaves in the British Caribbean were worth nearly three times what they had been worth thirty years before. Planters' investment in this property made them among the wealthiest businessmen in the world. The abolition of the slave trade put a stop to this expansion of wealth in the British West Indies. The Haitian Revolution destroyed the value of French American plantations overnight, with dramatic consequences for the French metropolitan economy. But as the continued growth of plantation agriculture in the nineteenth century in the southern United States and in Cuba showed, and as was demonstrated by the spread of the plantation system to places such as Mauritius, the economic potential of plantation agriculture was still strong in 1800.

Planters and slaves

The plantation system created two enduring social types: the planter and the slave. Neither social type was synonymous with the plantation. Slaves especially had existed throughout history and worked in a variety of capaci­ties outside the plantation complex. But in the early modern period the typical slave was a plantation slave, probably an African or a person of African descent, working in sugar cultivation. Planters tended to be white; slaves were overwhelmingly black. Planters were rich; slaves were over­whelmingly poor and indeed constituted easily the largest group of very poor people in the western hemisphere. Planters relied on their slaves for their wealth and slaves were a means of upholding their vaunted independence. They expected slaves to be obedient and devised a variety of means, alongside the state-sponsored violence that at bottom upheld their authority, to impress upon slaves that they were helpless, worthless and dependent upon the planter's goodwill. The plantation system was a complex social order, but in the end it was very reliant upon personal interactions - slavery was a negotiated relationship between one group, planters, who had most of the power but who could not always get their own way, and slaves, who faced large handicaps in trying to establish lives for themselves independent of their master's control but who had a few weapons of their own that they deployed to weaken planters' control over their bodies and their thoughts. It was in the working out of that negotiated relationship that the theory of the plantation - masters ordered and slaves obeyed - was contradicted by complex practice. Masters were, in fact, more reliant on slaves than vice versa and thus had to cajole unwilling slaves to work for them rather than have slaves do willingly what they were required to do.

As a distinctive social type, planters everywhere shared similar social and cultural characteristics. They saw themselves, and were seen by others, as being genteel New World aristocrats whose role was to be the upholder of rural social and economic relations, the person at the top of a harmonious social hierarchy. The planter saw himself as providing leadership and protec­tion to inferiors in return for their respect and obedience. Even more than Old World aristocrats, however, planters' practices belied their beliefs. Slaves were not European peasants with established if unequal relationships with landowners. Planters refused to recognise slaves either as fully human or as having rights to land or custom that they were obliged to respect. The planter self-image as a hospitable, public-spirited gentleman was not always accepted. European elites thought them irreligious, philistine and barbaric and resented their nouveau riche intrusions into European society - ‘over­paid, oversexed and over here' might be a fair summary of how planters were thought of in Europe. And they were considered hypocrites. How, SamuelJohnson quipped, could we take seriously planters' loud protestations about their ‘rights' during the American Revolution when they were so intent on depriving Africans of every liberty? Moreover, their proclaimed distaste for black people and justification of racial slavery as an institution that inferior black people were inherently suited for was belied by their compulsive obsession with sampling the sexual charms of black women. If they thought black people so inferior, why were they so willing to have sex with them and produce a new class of mixed-race people?

They were especially considered hypocrites because of their indulgence in brutal methods of slave management. Punishments inflicted on slaves went well beyond humiliation into sadism. Such brutality showed the extent of planter fear about what their slaves might do to them if given the chance. Planters did, of course, sometimes establish ties with slaves that involved a degree of personal intimacy. But, in the main, planters treated slaves with contempt. Outside of the American South, where paternalism had consider­able purchase, planters seldom tried to destroy the autonomy of the slave community, although they punished harshly manifestations of slave culture, such as vodou or obeah, which they thought involved dangerous social practices that might compromise planter power. The psychological pressure to obey that planters placed on slaves was not negligible, but the messages they tried to implant about their innate superiority were always undermined by planters' ethical failings.

Slave culture was influenced by their twin identities: coerced workers and unwilling migrants. Like all migrants, African slaves tried to recreate in the Americas what they had left behind in Africa. They congregated where they could with fellow countrymen; they practised African religions; they spoke African languages, although they also had to learn European languages in order to deal with their owners; they performed songs and dances similar to those in Africa; and struggled, surprisingly effectively given the conditions they faced, to establish kin and family relationships that could provide them with some personal stability within functioning communities. Scholars are divided about how successful these attempts to establish viable cultures of their own were. In some places, such as Bahia, where almost all slaves came from one ethnic region, African customs were very effectively recreated. In other places, such as British North America, where blacks were outnum­bered by whites, the cultures established tended to have relatively little African influences and instead were creative adaptations of European and American cultural forms. Everywhere, slaves struggled against alienation, uncertainty and continuing flux in living and working arrangements. They faced much greater difficulties than other migrant groups in controlling their religious, family and cultural lives. Nevertheless, the sheer number of African slaves and their long persistence in American plantation societies made their cultural influences upon all aspects of plantation society in the Americas deep rooted and long lasting.

Reactions against the plantation system

For most of the early modern period the occasional complaint about the horrors of plantation slavery had no discernible effect on metropolitan European opinion. The economic performance of the plantation system was sufficiently strong as to overcome doubts about its morality. Around 1750, however, a small group of evangelical Christians in Britain started to question the ethics of slavery and the slave trade, drawing in part upon a developing ideology of sympathetic humanitarianism in which humans were expected to have some obligations to outsiders, even outsiders of a different racial and ethnic complexion to themselves.

By 1800 the abolitionist movement still had some years to go before slavery came fully under attack. But the signs were there that planters would no longer get their way without opposition. The image of the planter began to change after the American Revolution, an event which not only raised afresh questions of freedom and the extent to which imperial formations should be based upon slavery, but also encouraged Britons to conceive of the planter not as a fellow countryman but as an exotic and disturbing outsider. Alongside abolitionist sentiment, the rise of scientific racism played a role in the demonisation of the planter class as a group overly connected sexually and culturally to Africans, although this did little to improve the ideological position of the African in European discourse. The Haitian Revolution showed graphically that planter assertions that enslaved people were happy under bondage had no basis in fact.

The revolutionary age had mixed implications for slavery. In America, the creation of the United States encouraged abolition in the northern states, where the plantation system did not exist, but shored up slavery and the plantation system in the southern states, where the great majority of slaves lived. Overall, the American Revolution was a positive event for planters and a negative one for slaves. Its major effect, ironically, was in the British Empire, where conservative evangelicals argued for an empire that had neither slavery nor freedom-loving planters. The French Revolution's impact was even more mixed. It led directly to the Haitian Revolution and the implosion of the greatest plantation system in the Americas. It stopped the French from developing a large tropical empire. But it provided a fillip to the British and the Spanish in the Caribbean and to Americans in Louisiana. These nations quickly filled the void left by the destruction of Haiti by expanding their own plantation systems.

Thus, in 1800 the plantation system and the institution of African chattel slavery that sustained it were far from dead. Even those British abolitionists clamouring to end the slave trade did not foresee an end to the plantation system. Rather they portrayed abolition as a path to amelioration and as a way of reconciling humanitarianism with the national interest while retaining plantation production. But plantations and slavery were not as strong, as institutions, as they had been. The advent of industrialisation provided a different model of economic enterprise to plantation slavery that was soon to exceed the plantation system in economic and social importance. The moral­ity of slavery was no longer in doubt: few people seriously considered it a good thing. And slaves had shown by their own resistance to slavery, notably in Haiti, that they had a different, and compelling, interpretation of human rights than that which had been invented during the cataclysms of the French Revolution. The plantation system was not dead. But it was wounded.

FURTHER READING

Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

Blackburn, Robin, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011).

Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Curtin, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).

Edelson, Max, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain', Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 123-44.

Menard, Russell R., Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

Miller, Joseph, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).

Morgan, Philip D., Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin Books, 2007).

Schwartz, Stuart B., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Sweet, James, RecreatingAfrica: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Walsh, Lorena, Motives of Honor, Pleasure & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).