Distance and Blame: The Rise of the English Planter Class

abstract:Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English, 1624–1713, remains a key book that shapes our understanding of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. His work depicts the creation of the English West Indies, with a special focus on Barbados's turn to sugar, its commitment to slavery, and the emergence of its planter class. Dunn sees the region as set apart by its socially dysfunctionality, a site of unprecedented brutality. He conveys a strong sense of moral outrage about the cruelties of life there. His depiction inadvertently supports the efforts to distance the slaveholding Caribbean from the English metropole. In this view, the Caribbean attracted the dregs of English society who then of necessity created a brutal social environment, one that included slavery. Dunn does not endorse this view of how slavery developed, acknowledging the role of elites and the middling sort in the rise of both slavery and the planter class that profited from it. We now understand slavery's reach differently, so that the West Indies (and even the lowest of its English migrants) can no longer be blamed for its rise and centrality.