In 1792, a Jamaican plantation owner was faced with a question about the possible impact of an end to the slave trade. Simon Taylor, recently arrived in London, was providing evidence to a House of Lords enquiry. Asked what he thought the effect of abolition would be on poorer white colonists who supervised work on Jamaican slave-run sugar plantations, his immediate reply was, ‘Sending them off the island’. He went on to elaborate that they came to Jamaica ‘with an intent to better their circumstances; what little money they can save out of their salaries, or whatever little credit they can procure, they invest in Negroes’. Some employed their newly acquired human property as ‘tradesmen’ others hired them out to the plantations as part of a ‘jobbing gang’. Taylor said that those white men with more money ‘endeavour to get settlements’, raising crops for local consumption or coffee for export, but that ‘if they were not able to have Negroes they certainly could not cultivate these settlements, and consequently would go to some country where they could be better off ’. This testimony exaggerated the consequences of ending the slave trade but accurately reflected one of the social facts that defined life in Jamaica. From the wealthiest of planters like Taylor to the lowly white staff on his properties, slaveholding was central to the lives of white settlers. Managing slaves was a means of employment, and for white men, owning slaves was a path to material betterment, to independence and to greater freedom.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the rise of the British abolitionist movement meant slaveholders like Taylor were pressured into defending the social and economic world that they perpetuated in the Caribbean. After 1787, a sustained political campaign called for the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade, and after the end of the trade in 1807, abolitionists continued to lobby for the reform and gradual ending of slavery. In 1833, following a radicalization of metropolitan antislavery campaigning and a large-scale slave uprising in Jamaica, the imperial government finally passed legislation that would free slaves living in the British empire.