[Footnote 7:  Edward Long, History of Jamaica, I, 494, Bryan Edwards, History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, book II, appendix.]

When the final enumeration of slaves in the British possessions was made in the eighteen-thirties there were no single Jamaica holdings reported as large as that of 1598 slaves held by James Blair in Guiana; but occasional items were of a scale ranging from five to eight hundred each, and hundreds numbered above one hundred each.  In many of these instances the same persons are listed as possessing several holdings, with Sir Edward Hyde East particularly notable for the large number of his great squads.  The degree of absenteeism is indicated by the frequency of English nobles, knights and gentlemen among the large proprietors.  Thus the Earl of Balcarres had 474 slaves; the Earl of Harwood 232; the Earl and Countess of Airlie 59; Earl Talbot and Lord Shelborne jointly 79; Lord Seaford 70; Lord Hatherton jointly with Francis Downing, John Benbow and the Right Reverend H. Philpots, Lord Bishop of Exeter, two holdings of 304 and 236 slaves each; and the three Gladstones, Thomas, William and Robert 468 slaves jointly.[8]

[Footnote 8:  “Accounts of Slave Compensation Claims,” in the British official Account:  and Papers, 1837-1838, vol.  XLVIII.]

Such an average scale and such a prevalence of absenteeism never prevailed in any other Anglo-American plantation community, largely because none of the other staples required so much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing the crops for market.  As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793:  “the business of sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must engage deeply....  It requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand pounds sterling to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of success.”  Such an investment, he particularized, would procure and establish as a going concern a plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100 acres each in provision crops, forage and woodland, together with the appropriate buildings and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60 mules and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of L50 sterling a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations of their time for absentee investors.

[Footnote 9:  Bryan Edwards, History of the West Indies, book 5, chap. 3.]

When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in Parliament he learned “that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three thousand pounds at the least."[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote:  “The French colonists, whether Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast no wistful looks toward France....  In our colonies it is