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This edition of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, England, funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this volume, 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 history.Keywords: planters; slavery; Caribbean; abolitionism; decline theory Email: c.petley@soton.ac.uk 2 The fall of the British-Caribbean planter class was an important part of what Philip Curtin has termed "the rise and fall of the plantation complex", the broad outlines of which are well known. 1 The rise entailed the development between the sixteenth and eighteenth century of New World sugar plantations as the engines of an Atlantic economy, worked by enslaved laborers imported from Africa, transforming societies on all sides of the Atlantic. From the end of the eighteenth century this complex and profitable system of slavery and plantation agriculture came under new forms of pressure. Abolitionists in Europe and in the Americas campaigned successfully against it, first for the end to the transatlantic slave trade and then for the ending of slavery itself. Enslaved people, who had always found ways to challenge this Atlantic slave system, adopted new forms of resistance in the understanding that they were no longer the only opponents of the planter class. Other groups, including missionaries and free people of color in the colonies, worked to undermine and reform aspects of slave societies. And governments on either side of the Atlantic were unable to ignore the tide of discontented criticism that rose against slavery; one by one they were persuaded or cajoled into passing reforms that moved towards its end. These factors precipitated the end of slave holding and the fall of the New World plantation complex. By the close of the nineteenth century, the institution of slavery had disappeared throughout the Americas, helping to seal the economic fate of the planter class across the region. Zones of plantation agriculture remained, and they still exist, but by the twentieth century these were no longer the most economically productive parts of the Americas. Their heyday had been at the height of the Atlantic slave s...
This edition of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, England, funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this volume, 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 history.Keywords: planters; slavery; Caribbean; abolitionism; decline theory Email: c.petley@soton.ac.uk 2 The fall of the British-Caribbean planter class was an important part of what Philip Curtin has termed "the rise and fall of the plantation complex", the broad outlines of which are well known. 1 The rise entailed the development between the sixteenth and eighteenth century of New World sugar plantations as the engines of an Atlantic economy, worked by enslaved laborers imported from Africa, transforming societies on all sides of the Atlantic. From the end of the eighteenth century this complex and profitable system of slavery and plantation agriculture came under new forms of pressure. Abolitionists in Europe and in the Americas campaigned successfully against it, first for the end to the transatlantic slave trade and then for the ending of slavery itself. Enslaved people, who had always found ways to challenge this Atlantic slave system, adopted new forms of resistance in the understanding that they were no longer the only opponents of the planter class. Other groups, including missionaries and free people of color in the colonies, worked to undermine and reform aspects of slave societies. And governments on either side of the Atlantic were unable to ignore the tide of discontented criticism that rose against slavery; one by one they were persuaded or cajoled into passing reforms that moved towards its end. These factors precipitated the end of slave holding and the fall of the New World plantation complex. By the close of the nineteenth century, the institution of slavery had disappeared throughout the Americas, helping to seal the economic fate of the planter class across the region. Zones of plantation agriculture remained, and they still exist, but by the twentieth century these were no longer the most economically productive parts of the Americas. Their heyday had been at the height of the Atlantic slave s...
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