The rise of a new planter class? Some countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807-33
The rise of a new planter class? Some countercurrents from British Guiana and Trinidad, 1807-33
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新种植园主阶级的崛起？
DOI：
10.1080/14788810.2012.636996
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发表时间：
2012
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Draper N
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Draper N
本文质疑英国殖民地单一“种植园主阶级”的衰落，并认为在英属圭亚那和特立尼达的新奴隶领地，奴隶经济在1807年废除奴隶贸易和1830年代解放奴隶之间蓬勃发展。在这些殖民地，特别是在英属圭亚那，从奴隶的劳动中提取的财富，大部分流向了英国的一群缺席的奴隶主，并在大都市创造了一个新的种植园主阶级，超出了牙买加种植园主的传统范围。根据1833年《废奴法案》的规定，奴隶赔偿专员负责监督向奴隶主发放2000万英镑的赔偿。根据专员的记录，这篇文章追溯了这群新人的规模，其中许多人集中在格拉斯哥和利物浦的商业精英中。这些人在英国有明显的政治影响力，文章认为，只有承认他们的角色和影响，我们才能理解解放奴隶协议的结构，它对新领土上的奴隶主有利，而不是旧的种植园统治，或者，更深刻地说，西印度群岛在谈判解决问题时的持续活力，这种活力困扰着埃里克·威廉姆斯，他认为，到19世纪30年代，西印度群岛的种植园主是“一种过时的利益，从历史的角度来看，他们的破产令人闻风丧亡。”
This article interrogates the notion of the fall of a single “planter class” in the British colonies and argues that in the new slave territories of British Guiana and Trinidad, the slave economy flourished between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and emancipation in the 1830s. The wealth extracted in these colonies from the labor of enslaved people, especially in British Guiana, largely flowed to a group of absentee slave owners in Britain and created a new fraction of the planter class in the metropole, outside the conventional sphere of the established Jamaican planters. Using the records of the Commissioners of Slave Compensation, appointed to oversee the distribution of £20 million in compensation to the slave owners under the Abolition Act of 1833, the article traces the dimensions of this grouping of new men, many of them concentrated in the mercantile elites of Glasgow and Liverpool. Such men had demonstrable political weight in Britain, and the article argues that only by acknowledging their role and influence can we make sense either of the structure of the emancipation settlement, which favored slave owners in the new territories over the old plantocracy, or, more profoundly, of the continued vigor of the West Indians in negotiating that settlement, a vigor which troubled Eric Williams, given his view that, by the 1830s, the West Indian planters were “[a]n outworn interest whose bankruptcy smells to heaven in historical perspective.”