‘In the wreck of a master's fortune’: slave provisioning and planter debt in the British Caribbean

Abstract

This article traces how debates over the ability of indebted West Indian planters to adequately provision their slaves influenced the politics of slavery in the British Empire in an era of abolitionism and amelioration projects. Specifically, the article examines the promulgation of colonial laws establishing priorities for debts incurred for the purchase of slave provisions over mortgage debts in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Debt-priority laws and contemporary responses to them suggest the ways in which both proslavery and antislavery interests defined and contested the moral as well as material dimensions of West Indian commerce and finance. A detailed quantitative case study provides information on provisioning and other expenses on two Tobago sugar estates (1807–1815).