ABSTRACT
Slaves generally had masters, and those masters were generally wealthy men of high status, even if the ranks of slave owners sometimes included women, free coloureds, and the state. Masters’ authority in the family, community, and polity was enhanced by owning slaves. If one is to understand the world of slaves, then one needs to look at the world of their masters, not only because the purpose of enslavement was to make masters’ lives easier, but also because slavery tended to be an intensely personal institution. One particular set of masters and mistresses deserves close study if we are to understand the distinctive features of slavery in the Americas. This group was planters, the owners of large-scale agricultural establishments, populated by enslaved people through whose labours tropical produce was made that was transported throughout the world, especially to Europe. The planter class of the Americas was a New World invention. Their lives, ideas, and interactions with slaves were of paramount importance in shaping slave life in the Americas. Although planters existed wherever there were plantations – in places such as the tea plantations of Assam, the sugar plantations of Fiji, the rubber plantations of Malaya, and the tobacco plantations of Zimbabwe, the plantations and the planter class who ran them took a special form in the Americas. This chapter examines who planters were, what they did, how they interacted with their slaves, and how their power in the Americas came to be reduced by the mid-nineteenth century. Initially, “plantation” was synonymous in English with “colony”, making all colonists
planters and vice versa.1 By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the word “plantation” had taken on a specific and narrow definition: an overseas settlement producing a cash crop for export through the labour of enslaved people of African heritage. The owners of these plantations form the subject matter of this essay. The planter was a discernible social type, the progenitor of a powerful yet usually colonial class that exercised enormous power within society, and especially over slaves. It was backward looking in many of its social assumptions, but forward thinking in its racial and economic ideas, and was the closest group of people in the New World to the aristocracy of early modern Europe. Sustained through slavery, the planter class in its most important locations – Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South – left an indelible imprint on political and social development in large swathes of tropical and semi-tropical America.
