Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar production, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750–1807

This dissertation is a study of the Jamaican sugar economy and slave society on the eve of the abolition of the British slave trade.This dissertation was completed in the Department of History at the university of Minnesota (December 1999), under the direction of Professor Russell R. Menard. Published work based on this dissertation can be found in Ryden, “Does Decline” and “‘One of the Fertilest pleasentest Spotts.‘” Its most significant finding focuses on the “Decline Thesis,” as laid out by Eric Williams more than 50 years ago in his classic work, Capitalism and Slavery. Slavery, according to Williams, was doomed to failure because it encouraged planter absenteeism and plantation mismanagement, resulting in the tendency to overproduce. Thus, planters were increasingly saddled with steadily rising input costs while facing falling revenue. Williams explained that the first cracks in the sugar economy appeared with the loss of the North American colonies. From this point on, the British West Indian planters saw a fall in their profits. This late-eighteenth-century decline of the slave mode of production culminated in Parliament abolishing the slave trade in an attempt to cut production levels and thereby revive West Indian fortunes.Williams, Capitalism.