From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war, the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the fall of the planter...

Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by...