The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810 (review)

Inspired by the works of Ragatz and Williams, this study posits the continuous and uninterrupted decline of the British sugar industry between the outbreak of the American War of Independence and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1806/07.¹ Carrington makes his case with acom- bination of official statistics and a large array of citations from plantation records, transatlantic correspondence, and Colonial Office records. The author devotes special attention to the impact of American independence and British mercantilist policies on the sugar market. He also offers a lengthy discussion of changing managerial policies, especially planter attempts to substitute hired slave labor for fresh purchases of Africans. Carrington abundantly documents the planters' often unsuccessful struggles to find the appropriate productive and reproductive means of coping with a volatile and unpredictable market for their product.

Carrington subverts his basic argument with some of his methodological and conceptual choices. The more than fifty tables covering the entire period are heavily skewed in favor of the "turning point" of decline—1775. Carrington provides more than five times more tabulated data for the mid-1770s than the early 1800s. The closer the account gets to slave-trade abolition the more the author relies upon selected quotations from planters and their correspondents. The effect of this imbalance is revealed in the study's repeated failure to offer comparative figures, extending over the period as a whole, about the assessed value of the colonial property, the value of imports and exports, changes in the size of the labor force, the movement of commodity prices, and indexes of productivity and profitability. Carrington sometimes avoids showing trends even when the data are readily available. Thus, he offers rising decadal values of West Indian trade from 1740 to 1780 as a good measure of rising value and progress. He neglects to mention that the same trade figures rose even faster between the 1780s and 1800s. Available statistics on British trade would show that sugar was Britain's most valuable import for more than a century before 1810, and was growing more rapidly in importance from 1780 to 1810 than from 1750 to 1780. Per capita British sugar consumption was also peaking on the eve of abolition. Concerning labor supply, even rough estimates show that George III was ruling over more (and twice as many sugar-producing) slaves in 1810 than in 1775. Inexplicably, in none of these fifty tables, nor anywhere else in the text, does Carrington hint that, by 1800, British sugar production had risen to dominance in the world market as never before or after.

Even developments that Carrington selects as especially favorable to his thesis fail to meet empirical scrutiny of change over time. The Sugar Industry extrapolates the severe constraint on trade with America after 1775 as an enduring disaster for the British sugar islands. A tabular presentation of American trade figures to the time of British abolition would falsify this assertion. Until 1807, the sugar islands remained what they had been in 1775, America's main source of rum, and the latter's best Caribbean customer for American domestic products. Despite impediments, the structural continuity of American and West Indian trade remained intact.

These methodological elisions are compounded by a pattern of historiographical omission. This account simply ignores findings of major historians who implicitly or explicitly challenge one or another element of Carrington's thesis. His claims that the West Indian colonies did not recover in the 1780s, that plantation productivity and profitability after the American War generally declined far below the period before the conflict, that the sugar colonies became less valuable to British politicians after 1783, that profitability was generally lower after the 1770s than before, and that "in reality not much occurred in the colonies" with the passage of abolition are all contradicted...