Best Academic Book
Book Industry Association of Jamaica, 2006
Outstanding Research UWI Press Author Awards Ceremony, 2008
Plantation Jamaica analyses the important but neglected role of the attorneys who managed estates, chiefly for absentee proprietors, and assesses their efficiency and impact on Jamaica during slavery and freedom. Meticulous research based on a variety of sources, including the attorneys= letters, plantation papers and slave registration records, provides rich quantitative and literary data describing the attorneys= role, status, range of activities and demographic characteristics. Higman charts both the extent of absentee ownership and the complex structure of the managerial hierarchy that stretched across the Atlantic. Detailed case studies compare the attorney Simon Taylor=s management of Golden Grove Estate in the decade before the American Revolution and Isaac Jackson=s control of Montpelier in the years immediately following the abolition of slavery. These examples provide a wealth of information about plantation life and labour, technology, trade, investments and profits. Higman also makes a unique contribution by investigating and describing several topics previously neglected, including the postal service, the history of accounting and the role of attorneys in the British Isles. The writing style is clear, persuasive and elegant, and makes the work accessible to not only Atlantic and Caribbean historians but also to general readers.
This book is critical in the ongoing historiographical debate about the impact of absenteeism in Jamaica, Great Britain's largest sugar-exporting colony. The sophisticated economic and social analysis reveals how managers, overseers and owners constructed an efficient value system, which permitted ethical behaviour among themselves yet perpetuated the brutal exploitation of plantation workers, enslaved and free.
“Another major contribution by the author to West Indian history and the history of slavery . . . a first-rate study, among the best recent writings on these topics.” – Stanley Engerman, John Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History, University of Rochester
“A sustained tour de force of superb scholarship that deals with an extremely important and hitherto lightly examined topic in Jamaican history in a way that will shape academic discourse on plantation Jamaica for a generation.”– Trevor Burnard, Professor of American History, University of Sussex
“Plantation Jamaica challenges earlier stereotypes and generalizations about
attorneyship and plantation management in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book is essential reading for scholars of Caribbean economic and business history, and it will surely take its place as a standard text against which future scholarship on this issue will be judged.”– Kathleen Monteith, Lecturer in History, University of the West Indies, Jamaica
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Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850
