Grainger’s West Indian Planter: Property and Authority in The Sugar-Cane

This article examines the relationship between eighteenth-century ideologies of property rights and imperial authority in James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764). Placing Grainger into dialogue with Joshua Steele, a Barbadian planter and partial critic of existing Caribbean slavery, the article shows how Grainger’s poem seeks to articulate planters’ property rights in sweeping fashion in order to render the scope of imperial authority as expansive as possible. The fact that The Sugar-Cane is unable to fully suppress Atlantic slavery’s terrible realities registers anxieties not only about empire itself but also about the nature and meaning of property in the colonies.