Welsh Journals

ASPECTS OF PLANTER SOCIETY IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES BEFORE EMANCIPATION EIGHTEENTH Century West India planter society was well developed in spite of the high rate of absenteeism, and many aspects of this society can be seen in the brief extracts taken from the Nassau Senior and Slebech Papers in the National Library of Wales. The Senior family had had important links with the smaller West Indian islands, especially Barbados, and their papers came to be collected and deposited in the National Library of Wales under the name of their most prominent member, Nassau Senior, the famous nineteenth century economist, and exponent of anti- slavery. The Seniors were of Jewish origin, and had old connections with the West Indies, particularly after they had married into the Duke family of Barbados. In the eighteenth century they owned plantations in Barbados, Dominica and Tobago, as well as acting as London merchants, and continued to have ties with the region in the nineteenth century when Henry Senior, the brother of Nassau Senior, went out to the Caribbean as a young lieutenant in the Eighteenth Regiment (the Royal Irish). The Slebech Papers, on the other hand, are a very much larger collection. The main portions date from medieval times and concern the Slebech property in Pembrokeshire. This was purchased in the late eighteenth century by the West Indian planter, Nathaniel Phillips, possibly of Pembrokeshire origin, and his West Indian estate papers became part of the bigger Slebech collection. Nathaniel Phillips' father had been a merchant of Mile End, London, and of Kingston, Jamaica, and his son, possibly illegitimate, went out to Jamaica in 1759 and within a few years purchased the estate of Pleasant Hill in St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica. Nathaniel Phillips was to enlarge his estates over the years, purchasing Phillipsfield, Boxford Lodge and Suffolk Park, and retiring there- after to Pembrokeshire in the 1790s to found another fortune and family in Wales. He and his family were permanently absentees thereafter, but for the greater part of his life Nathaniel Phillips had personally conducted his business in Jamaica and many of his papers do reveal most interesting aspects of planter society in the West Indies. So much then for the two collections. The Senior family, as we have seen, had important connections with the smaller islands. That these islands, far less the majority of the West Indian Islands, should have any importance is some indication of the value of the West Indies in the eighteenth century, valued by European powers not only for sugar, rum and molasses, but for spices and coffee as well and, as followed naturally, for their strategic position. Competition for their possession had begun in the seventeenth century and rose to supreme heights in 1763 at the Treaty of Paris, negotiated by England, France and Spain, when not only did many of the smaller islands change hands (and were to do so often during the American Revolution, 1776 to 1783) but there was even dis- cussion between Britain and France of exchanging the French island of Guadeloupe for Canada, just captured from the French. Throughout the eighteenth century,