Sugar, Land Markets and the Williams Thesis: Evidence from Jamaica's Property Sales, 1750–1810
2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0144039x.2012.734110
ISSN1743-9523
Autores Tópico(s)Colonialism, slavery, and trade
ResumoAbstract The economic-history literature of eighteenth-century British America is rich in its quantitative measures of staple production, output prices and demography, but relatively thin in its analysis of input prices. This paper addresses one aspect of this gap by, for the first time, applying a hedonic regression technique to land sales in Britain's most important colony. The results indicate that land values increased over the course of the late eighteenth century, despite economic challenges such as the American Revolution and a series of punishing hurricanes in the 1780s. The model estimates that values reached their peak in 1800, only to decline during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Notes Credit from Britain flowed to sugar planters who required costly plantation inputs, which included enslaved Africans, milling and processing equipment, and provisions. According to the bankrupt Jamaican planter, William Beckford, planters, who received credit for the purchase of plantation supplies, enjoyed low interest payments if they mortgaged their properties to the metropolitan merchants who handled the selling of their sugar crop. In cases where credit was required to purchase Africans, local Jamaican factors, working as agents of a metropolitan slave merchant, would not only organize the sale of the African human cargo, but would also secure the credit to qualified buyers. Beckford warned planters, who purchased Africans, ‘to consider, that the merchant [local factor] must make good his payment at home [Great Britain], whatever disappointments he may meet’ due to the purchaser's inability to repay his debt. The Jamaica agent's ‘credit [given to slave purchasers] therefore, if not his character, is at stake; and a failure of remittances of considerable extent and magnitude may subject him’ to possible ‘financial ruin’. William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 2 (Lodon: T. and J. Egerton, 1790), 340, 353–60. For more on the role of the Jamaica factor's role, see Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan, ‘The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655–1788’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 58 (2001): 213, 215. Jacob Price underscores the importance of land to the economic development of Britain's plantation colonies, identifying the importance of Parliament's Colonial Debts Act of 1732, which ‘declared that lands, houses, chattels, and slaves of debtors in the American colonies were liable for the satisfaction of debts’. Jacob Price, ‘Credit in the Slave Trade and Plantation Economies’, in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, ed. Barbara Solow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 309, 330–1. Russell Menard tends to downplay the importance of metropolitan credit to the existence of a plantation complex, but he does concede that the ‘intervention’ of London merchants ‘did speed … up’ the growth of the Barbados economy. Russell R. Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 64. Similarly, Eltis argues that metropolitan credit was not central to the rise of the English plantation system, but he nonetheless gives an account of plantation foreclosures by the slave trading firm, the Royal African Company, in the late-seventeenth century. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 217, 223. B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1995 [1976]), 10. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]), 51–107, 113; Lowell Ragatz, The Fall of Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (New York: Octagon Books, 1963 [1928]), 111–203. The point about Jamaican absentee planters and merchants spearheading the lobbying activities of the London West India interest is a central theme of David Beck Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 1783–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Island Record Office, Twickenham Park, Jamaica, Old Series Liber, Volumes 138–559. Veront Satchell, From Plots to Plantation: Land Transactions in Jamaica, 1866–1900 (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1990). For each year sampled there was at least one transaction in every parish except in 1760 and 1770. During the former year, there were no land sales in Portland or Port Royal. During the latter, there were no exchanges in St David. Trelawny, of course, does not appear in the database until 1780, the year the parish was created from the parishes of St James and St Ann. James Robertson, ‘Maps of the Counties of Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey, Constructed from Actual Surveys’, TNA CO 700/JAMAICA 25–27 (1804). On the eve of the American Revolution, Sheridan estimates that ‘at least 84 percent of slaves were either directly or indirectly in the sugar industry’. Higman notes that a similar percentage may have existed for the 1832, but he takes pains to explain that the sugar estate did not necessarily define the slave experience, where only one half of all enslaved Jamaicans resided on sugar plantations. For Sheridan and Higman's estimates, see Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834, 9, 16–17; See also Kathleen Montieth, The Coffee Industry in Jamaica 1750–1850 (Mona: University of the West Indies, 1991). Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834, 12. Sugar accounted for 76 percent of the island's exports and revenue. For the first half of the eighteenth century, Kingston, and to a lesser extent Port Royal, were the only ports of entry used in Jamaica. To settle economic the problems concerning clearance, customs houses were established via in Order-in-Council of (June 29, 1758), in Montego Bay, Savanna-la-Mar, and Port Antonio. Other ports of entry – Falmouth, St Ann and St Lucia (Lucea) were established immediately after the American War of Independence in 1783. However, despite the use of other ports, Kingston's dominance was unrivalled. In terms of commodity imports, the port of Kingston accounted for over 50 percent of the island's imports, and roughly 70 percent of the island's enslaved imports. TNA CO 137/31 folio 27. See also Frank W. Pitman's, The Development of the British West Indies (London: Frank Cass, 1967), 307. Edward Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2 (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), 103. The total population of the white population was 12,737 in 1774. Thus, roughly 40 percent of Jamaican whites resided in Kingston, which only had 25 percent of the land transactions. For the island population in 1774, see Trevor Burnard, ‘European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 53, no. 4 (1996): 769–96. IRO, Old Series, Liber, vol. 305, folio. 111, 19 December 1780. The typical layout of Kingston covered 240 acres and the focal point of the town was the Parade, an open space which served as a meeting place for its inhabitants. Straight streets cut one another at right angles and divided angles and were into a grid. The street blocks were some 320 feet wide, and were bisected by lanes running from north to south. The depth of each building lot was 150 feet by 50 feet and this formed the basis on the parish's commercial and settlement layout during this period. See Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, and Colin Clarke's, Kingston, Jamaica, Urban Development and Social Change, 1692–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Very little research has been devoted to Jamaican township and village life. See Nadine Hunt, ‘Expanding the Frontiers of Western Jamaica through Minor Atlantic Ports in the Eighteenth Century’, Canadian Journal of History 65, no. 3 (2010): 485–501. ‘Barquadier’, in Dictionary of Jamaican English, ed. F.G. Cassidy and R.B. LePage (Mona: University of West Indies Press, 2002), 29–30. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 46, 63, 76, 80. More than 95 percent of non-Kingston properties that were recorded in terms of feet were less than one acre in size. On the life and times of Thomas Thistlewood in Westmoreland parish, see Trevor Brunard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–36 (London: MacMillan, 1989); Amanda Thornton, ‘Coerced Care: Thomas Thistlewood's Account of Medical Practice on Enslaved Populations in Colonial Jamaica, 1751–1786’, Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 4 (2011): 535–59. Ryden and Menard, ‘South Carolina's Colonial Land Market: An Analysis of Rural Property Sales, 1720–1775’, Social Science History 29, no. 4 (2005): 599–623; R. French and R.W. Hoyle, ‘The English Individualism Refuted: And Reasserted: The Land Market of Earls Colne (Essex), 1550–1750’, Economic History Review, New Series, 56, no. 4 (2003): 595–622. Sean Hartnett explains how two frontier towns had an annual turnover rate of roughly 33 percent once they were settled in earnest between the 1840s and the 1850s. Sean Hartnett, ‘The Land Market on the Wisconsin Frontier: An Examination of Land Ownership Processes in Turtle and LaPrairie Townships, 1839–1890’, Agricultural History 65, no. 4 (1991): 46, 61; Gene Wunderlich, ‘Trends in Ownership Transfers of Rural Land’, Agricultural Information Bulletin, No. 601 (Washington, DC: United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 1990). On the capital city of Spanish Town, see James Robertson, Gone is the Ancient Glory: Spanish Town, Jamaica, 1534–2000 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2005); On eighteenth-century Kingston and its central economic role, see Trevor Burnard, ‘The Grand Mart of the Island: The Economic Function of Kingston, Jamaica in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage, and Culture, ed. Kathleen A.E. Monteith and Glen Richards (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 225–41. Because of the high mortality in Jamaica, and in the south side of the island specifically, Trevor Burnard suggests that the ‘high death rates and the lack of immediate kin in Jamaica’ would have ‘allowed more land to come onto the market than may have otherwise been available’. Trevor Burnard, ‘A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica’, Journal of Social History 28, no. 1 (1994): 63–82. French and Hoyle, ‘The English Individualism Refuted’, 606; Ryden and Menard, ‘South Carolina's Colonial Land Market’, 608. The correlation for the 8 years of data is rxy = 0.54. The estimate is statistically significant at a only at 0.10 level, one tail test. Claudius Fergus, ‘Dread of Insurrection’: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain's West Indian Colonies, 1760–1823’, The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 66, no. 4 (2009): 758. Long, History of Jamaica, vol. 2, 2–145. It is also important to note that that half the island is above 1000 feet and elevations exceed 6000 in the Blue Mountains. Jamaica's topography consists of a highland interior that stretches from the May Day and Santa Cruz Mountains, known as the Central range in St Elizabeth, to the Blue Mountains in St Thomas. The Blue Mountain range, the island's largest and highest elevation of over 7000 feet, forms part of the boundary for the parishes of St Andrew, Portland, and St Thomas. The Central range is equally expansive. It forms part of the boundary for the parishes of Clarendon, St Elizabeth, Manchester and St Ann. Supplementing these two mountain ranges are numerous peaks, hills, plateau, and gullies that extend the length of the entire island. The first researcher to coin the term ‘hedonic’ regression was Andrew Court, who was making reference to Jeremy Bentham's proposal to devise a means of assigning prices to things not priced in the market place. Before Court's proposal, however, there was a University of Minnesota land economist named G.C. Hass who had applied the same concept to a 1922 paper. See Peter F. Colwell and Gene Dilmore, ‘Who Was First? An Examination of an Early Hedonic Study’, Land Economics 75, no. 4 (1999): 620–6; A.T. Court, ‘Hedonic Price Indexes with Automotive Examples’, in The Dynamics of Automobile Demand (New York: General Motors Corporation, 1939), 99–117; Ryden and Menard, ‘South Carolina's Land Market’, 612. It is certainly plausible that many of the property's unidentified as such were actually functioning estates, thus we can only state that a bare minimum, the dataset incorporates between 5 and 10 percent of Jamaica's improved sugar estates: 1739 = 429 sugar estates; 1763 = 556; 1768 = 651; 1772 = 775;1791 = 767; 1804 = 830. Ryden and Menard modify a hedonic model outlined in Robert Margo, ‘The Rental Price of Housing in New York City, 1830–1860’, Journal of Economic History 56, no. 3 (1996), 605–25; Ryden and Menard, ‘South Carolina's Land Market’, 612. Prior to taking the natural log of land prices, we controlled for the steep inflation by converting the Jamaica prices into sterling, then deflated the figures using Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter's well-known price index. Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, ‘English Prices and Public Finance, 1660–1822’, Review of Economics and Statistics 20, no. 1 (1938): 21–7. Margo presents this transformation of dichotomous variables (when taking the natural log of the dependent variable) in Margo, ‘The Rental Price of Housing in New York City’, 611. Melissa Hardy, Regression with Dummy Variables (Newburry Park, California: Sage, 1993), 57–8. Margo, ‘The Rental Price of Housing’, 611. Clarendon was selected for its reputation as neither an high nor low performing parish. By definition, (EXP(0))*100 = 100. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 18–20. If one consolidates all non-sugar properties with the identified categories, a similar estimated coefficient for the sugar term, thus suggesting that, ceteris paribus, the selling price of a sugar estate was 2.25 times more valuable than other property sales. Bryan Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, abridged edition (London: Crosby, 1798), 222–3. Comparisons of contemporary estimates of fixed capital costs can be found in Menard, Sweet Negotiation, 129–32, 136. Higman, Slave Population and Economy, 25; Verene Shepherd, ‘Pen and Pen-Keepers in a Plantation Society: Aspects of Jamaican Social and Economic History, 1740–1845’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1988); Verene Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2009), 36–47. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 132, 135–6, 149–52, 169, 178. James Walvin, ‘Why Did the British Abolish the Slave Trade? Econocide Revisited’, Slavery and Abolition 32, no. 4 (2011): 583–5. To be fair, those who stress a direct connection between slave resistance and metropolitan anti-slavery action link the Christmas Rebellion of 1831/1832 in Jamaica to Emancipation in 1834. Hart and Beckles, however, claim that there was clearly an anti-slavery spirit amongst slaves that is largely ignored by historians who are ‘Reveling in Britain's liberal image earned by the abolition of the slave trade and slavery’. Richard Hart, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in Rebellion (Mona: University of West Indies, 2002 [1985]), iii; Hilary McD. Beckles ‘Joao Pedro Marques, Slave Revolts and the Abolition of Slavery: A Misinterpretation’, in Who Abolished Slavery?: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism, ed. Seymour Drescher and Pieter C. Emmer (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 178–82; Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self-Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks’, in Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader, ed. Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd (Kingston: Ian Randall, 2000), 869–78. Drescher argues, in regard to abolition of the British slave trade, that slave held anti-slavery was not prominent in the decision making process in London. See his ‘Civilizing Insurgency: Two Variants of Slave Revolts in the Age of Revolution’, in Who Abolished Slavery, ed. Drescher and Emmer, 124–5. Selwyn H.H. Carrington, The Sugar Industry and the End of the Slave Trade, 1775–1810 (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 237. Transatlantic Slave Trade Database Estimates, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces (accessed February 23, 2012). Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 11 (Scholarly Resources Microfilm, Reel No. 6): 618–20. According to this report, there were 65 sugar estates that were ‘thrown up’ since 1799; 32 sugar estates that were sold by order (or threat of order) by the court of chancery since 1802; and 115 sugar estates that were to be sold by order of the court of chancery. Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 206–7, 271–3. The most compelling evidence in support of Ryden's account is the radical decline in land transactions between the 1800 peak and 1805 (see Table 2, column (f)). Ryden, West Indian Slavery and British Abolition, 196–7, 206–7, 266–7, 271–3. The London Society of Planters and Merchants continued to be dominated by Jamaican absentees and merchants down to at least 1815. See David Beck Ryden, ‘Sugar, Spirits, and Fodder: The London West India Interest and the Glut of 1807–15’, Atlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 41–64. Dorothy Burne Goebel, ‘British Trade to the Spanish Colonies, 1796–1823’, American Historical Review 43, no. 2 (1938): 289–94. For more discussion on planter anxiety of the free port system, see Frances Armytage, The Free Port System in the British West Indies: A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London: Longmans, Green, 1953), 52–71; Joshua Montefiore, ‘Jamaica’, in his Commercial Dictionary (London: T. Gillet, 1803). Thomas Cooke, A History of the West Indies, vol. 1 (Liverpool: Nuttall, Fisher, and Dixon, 1808), 356; Two letters dated 1811 published in Joseph Dennie ed., The Port folio, 1801–1812, 439–47. Also, it was noted in 1811 that the city was much improved thanks, in part, by the refugees San Domingue who had settled in Kingston. See Gilbert Farquhar Mathison, Notices Respecting Jamaica, in 1808–1809–1810 (London: John Stockdale, 1811), 6. B.W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica: Captial and Control in a Colonial Economy (Mona: University of West Indies Press, 2005), 2. Sir William Young, West Indian Common-Place Book (London: 1807), 3. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAhmed Reid Ahmed Reid is Assistant Professor of History at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY), Colston Hall, Room 301, 2155 University Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453, USA. David B. Ryden David B. Ryden is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston-Downtown, 1043 North, One Main Street, Houston, TX 77022, USA. Email: Rydend@uhd.edu.
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