Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850

Plantation Jamaica analyses the important but neglected role of the attorneys who managed estates, chiefly for absentee proprietors, and assesses their efficiency and impact on Jamaica during slavery and freedom. Meticulous research based on a variety of sources, including the attorneys' letters, plantation papers and slave registration records, provides rich quantitative and literary data describing the attorneys' role, status, range of activities and demographic characteristics. Higman charts both the extent of absentee ownership and the complex structure of the managerial hierarchy that stretched across the Atlantic. Higman also makes a unique contribution by investigating and describing several topics previously neglected including the postal service, the history of accounting and the role of attorneys in the British Isles. The writing style is clear, persuasive and elegant, and makes the work accessible to not only Atlantic and Caribbean historians but also to general readers.

B.W. Higman is William Keith Hancock Professor of History, Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His award-winning publications include Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History; Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834, which won the Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians; and Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912, which also won an Elsa Goveia Prize and an award from the Jamaica National Heritage Trust.

"Another major contribution by the author to West Indian history and the history of slavery... a first-rate study, among the best recent writings on these topics." - Stanley Engerman, John Munro Professor of Economics and Professor of History, University of Rochester "A sustained tour de force of superb scholarship that deals with an extremely important and hitherto lightly examined topic in Jamaican history in a way that will shape academic discourse on plantation Jamaica for a generation." - Trevor Burnard, Professor of American History, University of Sussex "Plantation Jamaica challenges earlier stereotypes and generalizations about attorneyship and plantation management in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book is essential reading for scholars of Caribbean economic and business history, and it will surely take its place as a standard text against which future scholarship on this issue will be judged." - Kathleen Monteith, Lecturer in History, University of the West Indies, Jamaica"