Welsh Journals

acted as bankers. The bills of lading and exchange which crossed the Atlantic made up the intricate economic network of the planter economy which was to bring far more wealth to the mother country than to the islands. But although the stress among the British plantocracy was on absenteeism, planter society did flourish in the islands and the letters here transcribed most interestingly reveal aspects of it. Most official life centred on the Governor- almost invariably appointed from Britain (the case of Valentine Morris of St. Vincent and Monmouthshire is an exception). In Jamaica and Barbados there was an elected House of Assembly, and as the letter from Kean Osborn, reveals (N.L.W. Slebech Papers, MS. 9225) political life in the islands could be very turbulent, especially if the Governor did not make common accord with the local magnates such as Kean Osborn or the Hibbert family of Jamaica (a particularly wealthy interest group). Many of their disagreements were of limited interest; virtually they all supported slavery, including even the famous West Indian historian Bryan Edwards, and all were concerned with the running of their estate as well as what official duties, a magistracy or membership of the House of Assembly, might fall to them An agricultural economy meant a bureaucracy to deal with the registration of titles and deeds, sales and surveys, and included, too, customs officials and Court house officers. Shopkeepers held less status (as Nathaniel Phillips had found), and what town life existed, as for example, in Bridgetown in Barbados, or Spanish Town (the official capital of Jamaica) or Kingston (only the commercial capital until the late nineteenth century), was often limited, dependent on the Governor and his wife for some degree of elegance. Life expectancy was not high for slave or master, fevers being a particularly serious hazard, and the large meals which many planters consumed even in the cool of the day did not help. Rum was of course readily available, and wines, especially Madeira, in great demand. Most planters nominally belonged to the Established Church, and the Anglican religion did nothing to disturb the slaveholding tradition. By the end of the eighteenth century a few dissenting sects, Methodists and Baptists mostly, had established a tiny hold, the spearhead of the work for anti-slavery to come. Impermanence and instability, a frantic rush to get and spend, an agricultural world in which many desired a share and not all gained even a small part, characterise West Indian planter life. Too often the British found that the world they had created in the islands held no charms for them: even with rich soils hardly before tilled, and all the protection the British navy could give against foreign intruders or African insurgents, even with wealth which hard toil might offer planter society in the British islands, most usually preferred life in Britain, and the few who remained in the islands sank into an undeserved provincial obscurity. By the time of emancipation in the early nineteenth century the British islands were left largely deserted by the white inhabitants, and it was left for the true Creoles, those of long established residence, to make the islands into a multi-racial community. CLARE TAYLOR Aberystwyth