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Enterprise & Society 4.4 (2003) 709-710



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Selwyn H. H. Carrington. The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. xvii + 362 pp. ISBN 0-8130-2557-5, $59.95.

Just as the 1970s ushered in a plethora of New England town studies that revolutionized the way we think about everything from Puritanism to material culture, the past quarter-century has vastly broadened the range of inquiries into the way the African slave trade and slavery shaped behavior, economy, and thought in the Atlantic world. This work has enriched and deepened our discourse not only about slaves and slave societies, but also about many others aspects of Western society. Selwyn Carrington's new study of the economic climate of the years leading up to the abolition of the slave trade in the sugar islands will enrich that discourse still more, by expanding our understanding of the ripple effect of the prelude to "abolition," a phenomenon that had profound implications for everything from economic policies and management in Britain to black and white birth rates in the sugar islands.

Arguing that as Western capitalism "matured" during the eighteenth century, a slave labor agricultural system became out-dated, cumbersome, and inefficient, Carrington uses a wide array of sources—both public and private—to shore up his case that abolition was much more about changing economics than about growing enlightenment about human rights. By the end of the eighteenth century, Carrington argues, the slave trade was ceasing to serve the purposes of the British economy, and by the 1790s "slavery was now proving unprofitable" (p. 217). West Indian planters soon became wary of a system that not only could not guarantee good profits, but also was always under threat of being toppled by slave revolts; the 1795 Maroon War in Jamaica only heightened their awareness of this possibility. The Sugar Industry is about slavery, but it is also a model for discussion about other institutions (such as church or family) involved in a dynamic battle for "relevancy" in changing eras.

Carrington's explorations invite further inquiry into those relationships. For example, those of us who see the world through the lens of Quaker history wonder what was the impact of the Quaker communities in Virginia, Antigua, and other Caribbean islands. Although not all Quakers were abolitionists, the Society of Friends often had a mitigating effect on slave treatment and a hastening effect on abolition. What is the importance, if any, of the significant Quaker leadership in British banking and commerce? Quakers have a well-deserved reputation for balancing the tension between "doing [End Page 709] good" and "doing well." What must they have been thinking in 1801 when the sugar market was glutted and West Indian planters struggled with what Carrington calls "an outdated compact" (p. 109) with British markets?

Readers may wish for more intimacy, more specificity, and more of the human dynamics of the story Carrington tells. The author's use of "the West Indies" and "Britain" obscures the multivariate textures of these political/social/economic entities in a nonspecific mist that also obscures the motives and perspectives of the individuals who shaped public policy. For example, he introduces us to a number of West Indian planters and British financiers and politicians, but the reader is often left wanting a few more dependent clauses to elucidate what experiences brought the Taylors, Pinneys, Steeles, Stuarts, or Turners to take the positions they did on the subject of slavery, humanity, and economics. Might religion, class tensions, regional background, or family connections help give deeper texture to the positions adopted by certain people, policy-making bodies, or economic units? He mentions both mixed-race Caribbean inhabitants and some women, but there is scant discussion of "West Indian" solidarity among these diverse peoples. In fact, the diversity among "the West Indian planters," "the British," "the Americans," or "capital" has a veneer of misleading sameness.

It is easy for a reviewer to play Monday-morning quarterback; we should not lose sight of the...

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