![](https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/63384/cover/9780521863384.jpg)
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Map 1 Major trade routes of the British Atlantic
- 1 Introduction: Remembering and Forgetting
- 2 Halls and Vassalls
- 3 Rise of the Lascelles
- 4 Lascelles and Maxwell
- 5 The Gedney Clarkes
- 6 Merchants and Planters
- 7 A Labyrinth of Debt
- 8 Managing a West India Interest
- 9 The Enslaved Population
- 10 Between Black and White
- 11 Epilogue
- Archival Sources
- Index
8 - Managing a West India Interest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Map 1 Major trade routes of the British Atlantic
- 1 Introduction: Remembering and Forgetting
- 2 Halls and Vassalls
- 3 Rise of the Lascelles
- 4 Lascelles and Maxwell
- 5 The Gedney Clarkes
- 6 Merchants and Planters
- 7 A Labyrinth of Debt
- 8 Managing a West India Interest
- 9 The Enslaved Population
- 10 Between Black and White
- 11 Epilogue
- Archival Sources
- Index
Summary
Nothing I wish for more than to be Liberated from all Concerns in the Indies.
(Edwin Lascelles, 1788)Absentee plantation ownership has been much criticised for its deleterious social effects and productive inefficiency. The economic case against absenteeism was founded on arguments first advanced by Adam Smith. Slavery was one of the examples used by Smith to illustrate his theories of monitoring and incentives. A slave, he wrote, was a ‘person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much and labour as little as possible’. While systems of coercion and control might succeed in preserving the profitability of enslavement, such an institution could never be efficient.
Agency problems are created whenever a conflict of interest arises between an owner and the overseer of a business, and when the costs of monitoring the overseer's behaviour are high. West Indian estates were located thousands of miles away from Britain and communications were very slow by modern standards (a letter sent out to the colonies might take up to two months to be delivered). White managers of absentee estates possessed powers of coercion over enslaved labourers; observing the daily conduct of such overseers was well-nigh impossible. Smith's criticism of slavery argued that managerial failures compounded a slave's inherent lack of incentives. In consequence, agents were well placed to defraud distant grandee employers, more concerned with status-enhancing projects of conspicuous consumption than with scrutinising the cost schedules of their estates.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British AtlanticThe World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834, pp. 226 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006