Sugar's poor relation: Coffee planting in the British West Indies, 1720–1833

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Sugar's poor relation: Coffee planting in the BritishWest Indies, 1720–1833S.D. Smith aa Member of the Department of History , University of York , Heslington, York, YO1 5DDPublished online: 13 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: S.D. Smith (1998) Sugar's poor relation: Coffee planting in the British West Indies, 1720–1833, Slavery &Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, 19:3, 68-89, DOI: 10.1080/01440399808575256

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Sugar's Poor Relation: Coffee Planting inthe British West Indies, 1720-1833

S.D. SMITH

The dominance of sugar in Britain's eighteenth-century West India tradehas long been recognized by historians, just as it was appreciated bycontemporaries who frequently referred to the colonies simply as the sugarislands. Monoculture was a feature of all European territories in theCaribbean during this period, but the preference for sugar was strongest inthe British West Indies (BWI). In 1770 no less than 80 per cent ofmerchandise exports from the BWI consisted of sugar or the sugar-basedproducts molasses and rum. In comparison, the share of sugar in the colonytrade of France, Britain's most important imperial rival, was only a littleover one half.1 The economic consequences of dependence on sugar hasbeen a favourite subject of research in Caribbean studies. Of particularinfluence has been Eric Williams' plantation economy model, whichstresses the retarding effects of a prolonged exposure to export-orientated,large-scale plantation agriculture epitomized by the sugar estate. Williamsobserved that once sugar holdings attained a threshold size ofapproximately 1,000 acres (or between 240 and 250 slaves), the ownerscharacteristically appointed a manager and retired to become absenteeproprietors resident in Britain. The inclination of estate owners to returnhome, Williams stressed, not only transferred surpluses from the Caribbeanto Great Britain, but also accentuated the tendency of the planter elite tolook to Britain for social, cultural and political leadership. In consequence,Williams argued, a system of navigation laws and political institutions grewup around sugar which collectively served to reinforce British supremacyand West Indian dependency to the detriment of long-term development.2

Though the market for sugar experienced fluctuation, typified by the so-called golden and silver ages of the 1640s and the late 1760s, growth in caneproduction was sustained over a long period of time by rising demand forsugar in the British home market.3 It must be emphasized, however, thatwhile cane was the most lucrative staple during the decades after the 1640s,

S.D. Smith is a member of the Department of History at the University of York, Heslington, YorkYO1 5DD.

Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 19, No. 3, December 1998, pp.68-89PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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COFFEE PLANTING IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES, 1720-1833 69

alternatives to sugar existed and slavery was never confined solely to sugarproduction.4 Indeed, the very strength of consumer demand for sugar alsohelped to raise up a potential rival and during the early eighteenth centurycoffee established itself in several European colonies as one of sugar's mostsignificant competitors for the use of slave labour. Experiments in coffeecultivation were undertaken in order to break the Mocha trade's monopolyof supply. Dutch merchants were in the vanguard of the movement toglobalise coffee production and introduced the crop into Java between 1696and 1699. The effort met with a favourable outcome when, in 1711, the firstnon-Arabian coffee shipments were auctioned in Amsterdam. Encouragedby this success, between 1713 and 1723 French and Dutch plantersintroduced coffee to St. Domingue, Surinam and Martinique, and within ashort period of time Caribbean and Javanese coffees began beating Mochasupplies out of the European market.5 In view of these initiatives, it isstriking that in the BWI coffee failed to pose a significant challenge to kingsugar for most of the period of slavery. This failure was a key factor in theinability of the British colonies to create a more diversified export base andthe limited progress of coffee, therefore, enhanced the influence of sugar onthe form that slavery assumed. In this article, the difficulties of expandingcoffee production in the BWI are analysed in order to explain why morecolonists did not emulate their French and Dutch counterparts by growingcoffee.

Britain's West India planters were not oblivious to the potential ofcoffee; indeed, the first trials took place at the same time as those carried outby Dutch and French pioneers. The earliest reference to coffee enteringBritish colonial trade occurs in 1694, when it was included in a list ofcommodities imported into London from Jamaica.6 These beans werealmost certainly a reshipment of a cargo originating elsewhere, but the factthey passed through the West Indies at all is indicative of an interest in thecrop. The first documented experiments in coffee colonisation date from theearly 1720s. Interestingly, they took place on Barbados: the colony wheredevelopments in cane cultivation and rum distilling were also pioneered. Atreatise by the physician and botanist James Douglas published in 1727noted that in 1720 the first coffee plants were carried to Barbados by acertain Captain Young, though whether they originated from Arabia,botanical gardens in Europe, or other islands in the Caribbean is not madeclear. Douglas adds that several seedlings grown from these trees were sentback from Barbados to England, including shipments made by the Governorof the island destined for the gardens of George I, the Prince of Wales, andthe Duke of Chandos.7 The Barbadian experiments assisted in theintroduction of the coffee bush to England, where it could be studied bynaturalists, but the island's almost total commitment to sugar prevented theD

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70 SLAVERY AND ABOLITION

development of a coffee exporting capacity and the early plantings came tonothing. It was to be on Jamaica, where land not suited to sugar wasavailable in greater abundance, that coffee gained a permanent foothold. Yetdespite Jamaica's potential as a coffee producer, it was not until 1728 thatSir Nicholas Lawes raised the first seven plants on his Townwell estate atLiguanea, in St. Andrew's parish.8 Moreover, this experiment, like itsBarbadian precursor, was also short-lived, Lawes dying in 1731 before thetrees had even matured.

Coffee growing in the BWI failed to make lasting progress until privateinitiatives received state sponsorship. In the same year that Lawes died, apetition was raised by several Jamaican planters calling for the promotionof coffee. Cultivating coffee, the petition stated, was well suited to 'thepoorer sort of people, whose stocks and plantations are small'.9 This actionwas followed by a subscription campaign supported by 22 planters andmerchants, which raised £220.10s towards a lobbying fund aimed atsecuring an act of parliament to promote coffee growing. The Commonsresponded by establishing a committee to examine the matter, whosemembership both a former and future governor of Jamaica as well as MartinBladen, a prominent spokesman for the West India interest. Notwith-standing such strong pro-West Indian representation, the committee was notmerely packed with members sympathetic to the planters. It was headed bythe merchants Micajah Perry and John Barnard, both of whom proved vocalopponents of the Molasses Act the following year. Nonetheless, on thisoccasion Perry and Barnard also aligned themselves with the West Indialobby. It is probable that they saw the proposed preferential tariff as a meansof counter-balancing the advance of the sugar interest and as an opportunityto take a snipe at the East India Company (EIC). The two aldermen carriedfresh memories of an unsuccessful campaign, mounted in 1730, against theEIC's monopoly of Asian commerce and they may have welcomed anopportunity to challenge the Company's position as sole supplier of coffeeto Britain.

During its proceedings the committee heard evidence from James Lawsthat Jamaica was 'at present very thinly inhabited by white people'. Lawssuggested that coffee might prove 'a means to bring in the poorer sort ofpeople there, which is very much wanted'.10 The use of a demographicargument in support of coffee reflected the fact that the shift towards sugarduring the later seventeenth century was accompanied by a decline in thewhite population as large-scale plantations based almost exclusively onslave labour became the norm. Whereas in 1650 the BWI was home to44,000 white colonists comprising three-quarters of the population, by 1700their numbers had fallen to 33,000, or just over one-fifth of all inhabitants.At the time the petition was presented to parliament, the numbers of whitesDow

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had steadied at 37,000, but by this date the volume of slave imports hadreduced the white share to a mere fourteen per cent of the total." Thedwindling numbers of white settlers provoked concerns that the security ofBritish imperial possessions was being jeopardized and in response anumber of measures were introduced during the 1730s and 1740s designedto slow down or reverse the trend. The policies included 'deficiency laws'(a requirement that there be a ratio of one white worker to every 30 blackplantation labourers, on pain of a fine), land grants and a head-right system:the offer of free passage, and gifts of land and start-up capital.12 Thepromotion of coffee as a secondary staple should, therefore, be placed in thewider context of what was perceived as a growing settlement problem.Laws' argument that planting coffee would be able to reverse the whitepopulation slide, however, was far from convincing; indeed, under cross-examination he was forced to concede that in the long term coffee mighteven boost the number of sugar estates 'by reason, as the poor people getmoney by the produce of coffee, they will be encouraged to erect sugar-works'. Nevertheless, the committee's response to the petitioners waspositive and 'An act towards the encouraging the growing of coffee in theBritish plantations' passed into law on 30 March 1732. This measureintroduced the first preferential coffee tariff, by reducing the import dutieson plantation coffee from 24d. to 18d. per lb, while making foreign importsand East India imports liable to the higher rate.13

After a five-year gestation period, coffee was exported from Jamaica forthe first time, but for several years the level of shipments remained smalldespite the stimulus of tariff discrimination. A contemporary account statesthat between 1737 and 1744 only 266 casks per annum were shipped fromthe island, while between 1745 and 1751 yearly exports dropped to just 187casks.14 After 1751 there is evidence that coffee production on Jamaicaincreased. A modern study suggests that the volume of exports doubledbetween 1745-51 and 1752-56 to reach 73,940 lb. This statement receivessupport from the Jamaican naval officer's lists, which record that coffeeexports rose from 50,367 lb, during the years 1744-47, to 102,526 lbbetween 1752 and 1754, and to 252,460 lb by 1764. Though indicative ofexpansion, however, these data must be set in context by comparing growthin exports with those of other European colonies. In the case of the FrenchWest Indies, Thibault de Chanvalon noted in 1753 that on Martinique 'leprix considerable du cafe depuis la derniere guerre a presque fait renoncera toute autre production'. He reports that several Martinique cotton andcocoa growers, and even a few sugar cultivators, switched towards coffee inconsequence of the price movements. During the years 1733 to 1737 coffeeexports to France from Martinique averaged 22,700 quintaux per annum,but they rose to reach 70,000 quintaux between 1739 and 1753. OnD

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Dominica there is also evidence of expansion. The number of coffee treesplanted on Dominica grew from 685,000, in 1743, to reach 1.4 million by1749, and 1.6 million by 1753. A similar process also took place in theDutch colony of Surinam after coffee prices reached 17 stuivers per 1bbetween 1745 and 1748, encouraging planters to shift from sugar to coffee.Though prices recorded in Amsterdam slipped back after 1748, they roseagain in 1755 due to the threat of war. Coffee exports from Surinam toHolland responded to favourable market conditions by increasing from alevel of 1.6 million 1b, between 1730 and 1739, to 3.3 million lb during theyears 1740 to 1749, and to 5.9 million lb in the decade 1750 to 1759.15 Thesecomparative statistics indicate that though Jamaica's export performanceimproved during the 1750s, its growth in coffee production lagged badlybehind that of other European colonies, notwithstanding the stimulus offavourable prices. Even during the period 1752 to 1756 Jamaican exportswere equivalent to just five per cent of Britain's total importation of coffee,nearly all of which originated from Arabia.16

In order to boost coffee output further an additional source ofencouragement was required. The growth of coffee cultivation in the B WI,in consequence, was a discontinuous rather than a smooth process and wascharacterised by abrupt responses to specific stimuli. The first stimulus wasprovided by the Seven Years War (1756-63). During the conflict coffeesupplies were initially augmented by the temporary occupation ofMartinique and Guadeloupe during the war, then permanently enhanced bythe retention of the ceded islands of Grenada, Dominica, and St Vincentunder the terms of the Peace of Paris (1763). During the next two decadesthese colonies usurped Jamaica as the leading coffee producer in the Britishempire and accounted for 94 per cent of the 3.3 million lb of coffeeimported on average from the West Indies between 1763 and 1774."Though a stagnant trade had received a major boost, the British colonies'share of Caribbean output remained small and accounted for at mostbetween five and six per cent of total production in this region, c.1775.18

There is evidence that in Jamaica coffee growing experienced stagnation inthe aftermath of the Seven Years War. Stephen Fuller, the colonial agent forJamaica, put on a brave face when he informed the Lords of the Treasury in.1774 that coffee 'being upon a more contracted scale than that of Sugar andRum ... has till of late years employed and given bread to a very greatnumber of White Inhabitants'. The truth of the matter was revealed in areport compiled the same year which valued sugar and rum exports fromJamaica to all markets at £1.4 million, but valued coffee shipments at a mere£13,100. On the eve of the American Revolution, no less than three quartersof Jamaica's slaves were employed on sugar estates, which buoyed by theprosperity of the post-war years had increased their the scale of operation."Dow

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Coffee growing in Jamaica remained circumscribed until the StDomingue revolution of 1791 provided the second stimulus. The revolutiontemporarily crippled the world's largest producer of coffee and, inconsequence, raised European prices sharply. Circumstances were renderedmore favourable still by the dissemination of cultivating techniques byFrench refugees. In response to events on St Domingue, coffee productionincreased on several Caribbean islands, but most rapidly on Jamaica.Between 1790 and 1815 coffee reached its apotheosis on Jamaica as exportsrose abruptly from a level of 2.3 million lb to 13.4 million lb during the1790s, to peak at 34 million lb in 1814. During this period output accountedfor between 15 and 30 per cent of world coffee exports.20 Moreover,Jamaican producers were successful in raising the quality of their coffees aswell as the quantity. The limited expansion that occurred after 1750 wasfuelled primarily by the demand of German-speaking consumers for cheap,low-quality coffees. No less than 80 per cent of coffee imported into Britainduring the 1770s was re-exported to European ports, particularly Hamburg,and in consequence Jamaican producers were encouraged to harvest lightgreen berries, which were subjected to rapid and often careless processing.German immigrants into Continental North America, particularly thePhiladelphia and Lancaster regions of Pennsylvania and the Charlestondistrict of South Carolina, also formed an important market for the Jamaicangrowers. Approximately forty per cent of Jamaica's export crop wasshipped to North America during the years 1744 to 1747; moreover, asJamaican exports expanded, the importance of the North American marketalso rose. Between 1752 and 1754, 67 per cent of the annual crop wasdespatched to the American mainland, while 58 per cent of the 1764 cropwas sent to the same destination.21 The rapid increase of production duringthe 1790s, however, was accompanied by a market shift as British homeconsumption temporarily increased, boosted by reduced taxation. Theimprovement in the quality of output is demonstrated by the rise in thepremium best coffee was able to command over worst and an increase in thenumber of grades of Caribbean coffee recorded in the London pricescurrent.22

The third and final stimulus to coffee growing within the BWI wasprovided by the Napoleonic Wars, which left Britain in territorial possessionof five more coffee producing colonies: Trinidad (1797), St Lucia (1803),Demerara, Essequibo and Berbice (1803). Though Jamaica remained thesingle most important supplier of coffee, the new acquisitions encroachedsignificantly on her trade and their output was sufficient to supplyapproximately one-third of Britain's coffee imports. Moreover, the conflictalso led to the British acquisition of additional imperial territories outside ofthe Caribbean capable of supplying tropical commodities, includingD

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Mauritius in 1810. Despite a revival of the West India coffee trade duringthe years immediately after 1815, as the nineteenth century progressedconditions for Caribbean, producers became increasingly difficult. Theimportance of BWI coffee to Britain steadily declined as new plantationswere established in Ceylon, adding to the number of cultivators able toclaim access to the privileged imperial trading network. The benefits ofpreferential the tariffs themselves were reduced as the customs regimebecame progressively more liberal and plantation coffee lost the benefits ofprotection. Coffee growing was ultimately undermined by the adoption ofpolicies which caused general problems for Caribbean plantationagriculture; namely, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, theabolition of slavery itself between 1834 and 1838, and the erosion of tariffprotection during the 1840s.

Reviewing the course of coffee production in the BWI, it is evident thatmost of the growth in coffee planting over the eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries occurred in distinct surges in response to tariffs,warfare, or revolution. As a result, the expansion of cultivation was largelyunplanned and imperial policy tended, in consequence, to be primarilyreactive in nature after 1732. The stimulus to the growth of output withinthe BWI provided by the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars causedparticular problems for Jamaican producers, illustrating how the expansionof coffee production within imperial boundaries could have divisiveconsequences. Policy inconsistencies go a long way towards explainingwhy coffee failed to become a viable long-run alternative to sugar in theBWI. Perhaps the most serious impediment to the creation of a large,sustainable coffee sector was the limited size of the British home market,itself largely a function of a tax regime which discriminated heavily infavour of coffee's great caffeine-rich rival, tea. The British market wasundermined further by the creation of free ports in Jamaica and Dominicain 1764 and 1766, which inadvertently enabled French colonial coffeeproducers to gain access to the British market by circumventingdiscriminatory tariffs. The Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica, John Dalling,reported to the Earl of Dartmouth, in April 1773 that 'The French, undercolour of bringing Indigo here, have, amongst other things, introduced largequantities of Coffee, which has reduced the price of that article so much,that it has alarmed the whole body of Coffee Planters.'23 Re-exports, inconsequence, were a vital element in the expansion of the colonial coffeetrade because they permitted Caribbean coffee to compete with tea on alevel playing field in Europe,24 yet Britain's navigation acts handicappedcolonial producers in this market also. In 1764, coffee was placed on the listof enumerated goods, thereby compelling all coffee shipments to passthrough British ports prior to re-export to their final destination. TheDow

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measure served to aggravate a problem coffee growers were already facing,since even before the passage of the act coffee was usually consigned onships carrying sugar and other enumerated produce headed for British ports.Both law and practice combined to ensure that coffee was despatched toEurope via the British mainland. The necessity of reshipment raisedtransport costs and prices reducing the quantity that could be profitablysold." While coffee laboured under these difficulties, without muchcompensation from the British fiscal regime, sugar producers enjoyed theexclusive benefits of rapidly increasing British home consumption andprotection from competitive foreign producers. The home market monopolyheld by sugar may itself have burdened coffee producers further. As a resultof restrictions placed on supply stemming from the effective exclusion offoreign sugar producers, British sugar prices consistently exceeded thoserecorded in European markets, encouraging an extension of sugarproduction in the BWI. A natural consequence of this was the bidding up ofthe prices of all inputs into plantation agriculture in less than perfectlyelastic supply used by the producers of other staples.26

Naturally, not every policy measure adopted by the British governmentwas detrimental to coffee. Indeed, several initiatives were mounted thatattempted to improve prospects for the growers. In 1783, 1807 and again in1825 tariffs levied on coffee entering the British home market were cut toboost colonial production. The benefits flowing from these favourableadjustments to the tax regime, however, were transitory and the measuresthemselves were adopted more to assist the industry in times of depressionthan as part of a long-term strategy to promote coffee as an alternative tosugar." Coffee, therefore, provides a good example of the shackles ofdependency outlined by Williams. The crop benefited from imperialregulation of colonial trade less than the dominant sugar staple, while thefortunes of coffee planters were consistently undermined by high taxation,market distortion, and territorial expansion which favoured strongerimperial interests. In order to reach a definitive assessment of how coffeeplanters fared in the BWI an estimate of the profitability of the crop isrequired. An accurate calculation of the profitability of coffee planting,however, is difficult to perform because no complete set of plantationaccounts has survived. The official records of production, the accountscurrent, are also unhelpful in this context. These documents were compiledby the managers of the properties of deceased planters and the smallnumbers of absentee coffee planters; though they provide a reasonableaccount of revenue earned, they are deficient in their reporting of costsincurred.28 Nonetheless, it is possible to draw some conclusions about thecircumstances of coffee planters within the BWI by analysing two sets ofaccounts prepared by contemporaries with first-hand knowledge ofD

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agricultural conditions. The first account refers to conditions in Dominica,c.l 772, and was compiled by the planter Joseph Senhouse for his personaluse; the second relates to Jamaica and was published by Bryan Edwards in1793. Details of each set of accounts are displayed in Table I.29

TABLE 1COMPARATIVE ESTIMATES OF COSTS AND REVENUES ON COFFEE

PLANTATIONS IN DOMINICA AND JAMAICA

Dominica, c.1772

(A) FIXED COSTS293 acres woodland(surveyed and fees paid)10 acres cleared and planted in coffeecost of clearing 50 acres using hiredcutters53 slaves (50 field hands, 2 carpenters,1 mason)provisions for a fall year before slavegrounds establishedbuildings, barbecues and toolsTotal

(B) ANNUAL EXPENSESmanagerial salaryprovisions and incidental expensestools and clothing for slavesquit rentsmedical costsTotal

985121

303

1388

1134363-

4294

6191218s

6"187

Jamaica, c.l 793

(A) FIXED COSTS300 acres mountain land100 slaves20 mulesbuildings, processing equipment, andtoolsprovisions for a full year before slavegrounds establishedTotal

(B) ANNUAL EXPENSESoverseer's salaryassistant overseer's salarymedical costsprovisions and clothes for slavesmill repairssacks and saddlestaxationTotal

6435000400

1429

3577829

1435018

143715771

553

(C) ANNUAL REVENUE (after 5 years)(C) ANNUAL REVENUE (after 5 years) 112,000 lb coffee at £2.86 per cwt50,000 lb coffee at an average of (of 100 lb) 3203£1.82 per cwt (of 100 Ib) 910

Notes and Sources: Cumbria Record Office, D/Sen, 'Joseph Senhouse and the West Indies:Plantation Estimates'; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the BritishColonies in the West Indies (2 vols; Dublin, 1793), vol.ii, 286-8. The original sources give valuesin currency; the table converts to sterling at £165 Dominican and £140 Jamaican equals £100sterling.* The 10 acre plot purchased above included a dwelling house, a store and an unspecified numberof slave houses, thereby reducing the value of this item of expenditure.b This item is based on details of expenditure recorded in the plantation journal.

Neither Senhouse's nor Edwards' account by itself is comprehensive orideal: the Dominican estimate contains no allowance for the repair of millequipment, while the Jamaican account does not state the cost of forestclearance. Moreover, neither set of costs allows for slave mortality orgeneral depreciation.30 Nevertheless, a comparison of the two documents isa useful exercise, despite these limitations. Each plantation coveredapproximately 300 acres, but the Jamaican unit was far more extensively

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cultivated with half of all available land planted in coffee, whereas theDominican property had just 20 per cent of its acreage in crop.31 This is amost significant difference, for without recourse to fertiliser the planting ofa large proportion of the total area in coffee limited the scope for shiftingcultivation and could, therefore, be expected to reduce a plantation'sworking life. The cultivation strategy suggested by Edwards is also out ofline with the limited amount of material available documenting farmingtechniques on the larger Jamaican properties. A small sample of plantationsurveys collected by Higman spanning the period 1780 to 1860, coupledwith a general report of coffee acreage compiled in 1799, suggest that onlybetween 12 and 14 per cent of the area of properties were normally plantedin coffee. The assumption that coffee, like sugar, was grown on only alimited portion of the plantation may, however, need to be reviewed, sinceknowledge of practices on the majority of small plantations is limited. Byway of comparison, it is notable that the 158 coffee monoculture propertiesrecorded in a 1772 survey of Grenada had 58.2 per cent of their acreageplanted in coffee, while the 23 largest properties over 200 acres also had noless than 45.7 per cent of land under coffee.32 A strategy of boosting earlyplantation income in return for a shorter operating life would make sense ifplanters expected the booms that occurred in coffee prices during the early1770s, and during the years following the crippling of St Domingue'scapacity, to be temporary in nature. Intensive land use on Jamaicanplantations would also help explain why damage from flood erosion earlyin the nineteenth century was so serious that many planters were unable torecover." The cost schedules in Table 1 differ markedly from one another inother respects. Since the Jamaican plantation purchased nearly double thenumber of slaves as the Dominican, its accounts record higher set-up costsas well as higher annual provisioning and medical bills, plus theemployment of an additional overseer. Moreover, according to Edwards, theJamaican estimates refer to a mountainous property situated 14 miles fromthe sea requiring the use of mules for transportation. The Dominicanproperty was, in contrast, situated upon Canary Bay in the parish of StDavids and its proximity to the point of shipment and the possibility ofmoving coffee by water resulted in much lower transportation costs,advantages which are reflected by the higher land prices cited in comparisonwith Edwards' estimate. Most striking of all the differences, however, is thatof the prices of slaves on the two colonies: Jamaican slave prices in 1793averaged £50, whereas Dominican slave prices in 1773 averaged only£26.2. This is a highly significant differential, even allowing for the rise inthe general price level between the two dates in the order of 15 to 20 percent suggested by English and North American price indexes.34 Allowingfor differences in scale and situation, and harmonising the tax levels, theD

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annual running costs appear to have remained roughly constant between1772 and 1793, but the Jamaican fixed costs are much higher owing to thehike in slave prices.

Edwards and Senhouse set out very different methods of establishing anew plantation. In Edwards' estimate the planter expends the full fixedoutlay immediately and also assumes all the running costs in the first year.Returns appear only after four years of cultivation, when the 150 acres arepredicted to yield 45,000 lb, before reaching full production of 112,000 lbin the fifth year.35 Senhouse's account spreads the set-up costs over alengthier time period. Only the carpenters and a mason, plus 20 additionalslaves, are purchased in the first year, followed by further purchases of 10slaves in each of the three succeeding years. Had it not been for the ten acresof coffee land already cleared and in production that Senhouse was able topurchase at the same time as the rest of the property, it is likely that evenfewer slaves would have been acquired in the first year. The plantationjournal records the hire of three woodcutters who carried out land clearanceat an average rate of £5.5 sterling per acre. The existence of the plot alreadyin cultivation explains the projected crops of 2,000 lb in the first year and5,000 lb in the second. Expected output thereafter rises to 20,000 lb in thethird, 40,000 lb in the fourth, and 50,000 lb in the fifth year, when fullcapacity is attained. In Senhouse's example, payments for land are alsospread out over a five-year period, with a deposit of 20 per cent followed bytwo annual instalments each of 10 per cent and three annual instalments of20 per cent.36 Although the task of setting up plantations on Dominica,therefore, appears to have been an easier business than in Jamaica 20 yearslater, the effort expended in clearing land and resources required to tide theplantation over before the appearance of the first crop remainedconsiderable. High set up costs explain the differences between thevaluations of a fully established Jamaican plantations and these estimates.An inventory of the estate of William Haldane of Westmoreland drawn upin 1812, for example, valued the plantation's 100 acres of coffee of differentages at £3,047 (currency), compared with values of £2,711 for 527 acres ofpasture and woodland, £1,000 for the mill buildings and barbecues, and£5,775 for the slaves. Though a much smaller unit, the inventory of RobertDalhouse, in 1815, valued the plantation's 16 acres of coffee land at £210,the 188 acres of provision grounds and woodland at £734, the coffee worksat £100, and the slaves at £2,700." The ratio of land values to total sunkcapital in these inventories, of between 25 and 45 per cent, is much closerto the 33 per cent suggested by Senhouse than it is to the eight per cent inEdwards' schedule, indicating how forest clearance and the planting ofcoffee led to strong appreciation in the value of agricultural land.38

The revenue estimates presented in each account appear to have

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been founded on a solid basis at the time they were written, but theassumptions written into the accounts regarding the future were to proveless realistic. Edwards' account has each slave tending 1.5 acres with anaverage yield of 747 lb per acre, whereas Senhouse's slaves cared for 1.2acres with an average yield of 833 lb per acre. These figures are consistentwith other sources detailing cultivation practices elsewhere in theCaribbean. In Essequibo-Demerara, for example, the normal ratio on coffeeplantations at the beginning of the nineteenth century was two slaves forevery three acres, while an early promotional tract written c.1730 statedgenerally that 'after the land is cleared and planted, six or eight Negroes,who are incapable of any labourious Employment, are sufficient to manageten or twelve Acres, and to raise Provisions sufficient for their ownsubsistence'." Coffee was, therefore, a crop that featured a land and labourratio similar to sugar and tobacco. If coffee could not quite match sugar'sconventional formula of one slave per acre (or even three slaves to two acresin some areas), it's land-labour ratio was comparable with the one or twoslaves per acre characteristic of tobacco planting. In consequence, thedensity of labour on the parts of a plantation planted in coffee was highrelative to cotton or rice.40 Dominica's higher yield per acre undoubtedlyreflected the fact that it was feasible to plant trees closer together, since theplantation was situated on lower lying ground, a circumstance whichreduced the risk of erosion. If Senhouse had planted trees at seven feetintervals it would have resulted in 888 bushes per acre, whereas Edwards'account states that coffee was planted at eight feet intervals, giving 680 treesper acre. The amount of coffee a tree could bear depended primarily on thefertility of the soil and amount of shade given it. A coffee bush might quiteeasily be made to yield 6 or even 8 lb in an average season, but such a yieldwould quickly deplete soil nutrients unless fertiliser was applied. In theeighteenth-century Caribbean, fertiliser was usually only applied at the timeof planting seedlings and supplies were largely restricted to animal dung,though coffee husks and soil deposits washed down hillsides and trapped inspecially planted hedges and trees called 'pois-doux' in Dominica were alsoemployed to replace nutrients.41 Spreading fertiliser was considered toolabour intensive and planters preferred to adopt extensive methods ofcultivation, whereby smaller yields were compensated for by planting moreseedlings. Shade-giving trees were planted in between the coffee rows andplantations established at altitude to make use of cloud cover in order tobring crop production into equilibrium with available soil nutrients. A yieldof between 1 lb. and 1 lb. 8 oz. was, in consequence, the norm in mostcoffee regions.

Turning to consider the revenue side of the accounts, it is not clearwhether the prices realized for coffee in the two accounts are net of all

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charges, but they seem low enough to be treated as farm prices.42 In decidingwhether their respective enterprises were viable, Senhouse and Edwardstook into account two considerations: the number of years before eachproject would show a return on the initial investment and the annual rate ofreturn, once the plantation had attained full capacity, relative to the capital'sunk' into the project at it's outset. Senhouse envisaged that his Dominicanplantation would show a return on investment after ten years, whileEdwards envisaged that the Jamaican concern would move into profit afterjust seven years. The data sets also predict that on attaining maturity theproperties would earn a return on capital of 17.0 per cent and 33.9 per centrespectively for Dominica and Jamaica, where profit is defined as revenueminus costs expressed as a rate of return on fixed capital invested. Edwardsmade an allowance of expenses and interest on capital foregone during thethree years prior to the first crop, which reduces the expected Jamaican rateof return to 24.7 per cent. Senhouse and Edwards, as well as othercontemporary commentators, also used the projected earnings per slave, orper acre, as a guide to the attractiveness of the investments. The Dominicaplantation was expected to yield a net revenue of £13.6 per slave and £12.1per acre planted in coffee; the Jamaica plantation £26.5 per slave and £17.7per cultivated acre. These estimates of potential returns may be comparedwith both contemporary and modern accounts. Moseley noted that the netprofits earned planting coffee in Jamaica, c.1785, lay between £10 and £12per acre, whereas Higman reports that in 1832 the coffee monoculture listedin the accounts produce earned £19.2 currency (£13.7 sterling) per slave.

According to the estimates, coffee cultivation was a very attractiveinvestment during the 1770s and 1790s, particularly on Jamaica. Themethodology of assessment adopted by Senhouse and Edwards, however,was flawed. To put the projected rates of return of 17 per cent and 24.7 percent in context it should be noted that estimates of the profits earned onsugar estates in Jamaica and the ceded islands, calculated by Ward from asmall sample of surviving accounts, averaged only 7.6 per cent and 11.4 percent respectively between 1750 and 1832. Moreover, out of the 54 estates inWard's sample there is only one instance of a property generating a rate ofreturn in excess of 20 per cent.43 In appraising'an investment, modernaccounting practice compares the discounted flow of costs and benefits overthe whole life of a project in order to calculate the present value of theinvestment and the expected returns. Two measures are routinely calculated:the cost benefit ratio and the net-present worth, defined as follows:

cost-benefit ratio = s —^— (1)<-i (i+ / y

v C"£ u+o"

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net-present worth = „ R*-Cn (2)2 (I+7jn

In the above formulae, Rn is revenue each year, Cn cost each year, n thenumber of years the plantation operates, and i the interest or discount rate.In applying these formulae, important decisions must be taken concerningthe life-span of the project and the appropriate discount rate. Once theground was cleared and planted in coffee, a well-tended coffee tree wascapable of yielding a commercial crop for up to 30 years. A plantationcould, therefore, in theory be expected to have a long working life, providedthat the mill equipment was regularly maintained and the slave labour forceremained in good health. In view of this, the investment and returns set outby Senhouse and Edwards were discounted over a 25-year period.44 Fixingthe rate with which to discount revenues and costs is the next problem.During the later eighteenth century, the peacetime rate of return on secure,real estate mortgages in England averaged approximately 4.5 per cent. Theaverage return from holding the almost risk-less government consols was3.5 per cent. These rates are of relevance in discounting the social value ofan investment return, but are too low for use in appraising a project financedfor private gain where the risks are greater. A guide to business interest ratesis provided by both the legal ceiling of six per cent that prevailed throughoutBritish Colonial America and the evidence of Benjamin Franklin thateffective market rates in Philadelphia (the largest commercial centre in thecolonies) during the second half of the eighteenth century ranged from sixto ten per cent. These rates, and the profits of sugar planting reported byWard, suggest plausible upper and lower bounds within which theappropriate discount rate should be located.45 Accordingly, two estimates ofthe cost-benefit ratio and net-present worth were calculated, using discountrates of five and ten per cent respectively. The results are presented in Table2.

In Table 2 the first four columns report the results of cost-benefitappraisal using the data provided by Senhouse and Edwards. Thecalculations reveal that both undertakings were viable on the basis of thedata submitted by each author, but that conditions on Jamaica during the1790s were far more favourable than they had been on Dominica 20 yearsearlier. In both cases, however, the gestation period before each plantationgenerated a positive return was higher than that anticipated by eitherSenhouse or Edwards. The assumption that normal growing conditions andattractive prices would prevail over a long run of years, therefore, exposedeach project to risks. In practice, cultivators had to face both climaticvariation and price volatility that could cripple production and saddle aplantation with debts. Drought, for example, was a major worry that could

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TABLE 2COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF SENHOUSE'S AND EDWARDS' PLANTATION

PROPOSALS

Present value ofgross costsPresent value ofgross revenueCost-BenefitratioNet presentvalueYears to achieve

Dominica

(A) 5%discount

rate

£6,422

£10,633

1.66

£4,210

11positive incrementalbenefits

Dominica

(B) 10%discount

rate

£5,148

£6,256

1.22

£1,092

15

Jamaica I

(A) 5%discount

rate

£15,250

£34,853

2.29

£19,601

9

Jamaica I

(B) 10%discount

rate

£12,138

£19,806

1.63

£7,573

11

Jamaica II

(A) 5%discount

rate

£17,012

£46,202

2.72

£29,395

7

Jamaica II

(B) 10%discount

rate

£13,254

£27,780

2.10

£14,517

8

Sources: see textNote: Jamaica I utilises Edwards' data from Table 1; Jamaica II includes an estimate of slavemortality and substitutes market prices for Edwards' expected average annual price.

reduce the coffee harvest and also result in short provisions, obliging theoverseer to purchase necessities for the support of the workforce from offthe property. Spencer McKay described how droughts in Demerara, at theclose of the eighteenth century, ruined the coffee blossom and wrecked theplantain harvest, obliging him to expend £2,500 on provisions for his twoplantations. It could take several seasons for a property to recover from asetback like this.46 Senhouse's failure to consider risks of this nature were tocost him dear. Lowther Hall Plantation proved a grave disappointment to itsowner and by the end of 1777 Senhouse was reflecting that in view of 'theconstant expense attending it, without any tolerable return, I am almostinclin'd to wish I could in any reasonable way get rid of the wholeconcern'.47 Even before Senhouse had finished laying out his capital, a risein European food prices, combined with the imposition of importrestrictions in the single largest market of the German territories, plungedthe coffee trade into depression. Apart from a brief interruption during thelatter stages of the Seven Years War (1756—63), coffee prices had beengenerally favourable since the late 1740s. French coffee imported intoNantes from Martinique and St Domingue, for example, consistentlyfetched above 50 sols per lb between 1740 and 1765. During the later 1760s,the price rose above 60 sols and between 1770 and 1772 prices increasedfurther and breached 75 sols. This peak, however, was succeeded by aprecipitous decline. By the end of 1773, coffee had slipped to 45 sols, and

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prices kept on falling to record 35 sols in 1775. In the same year localconditions on Dominica proved diabolical: violent gales and torrential raindestroyed half of the island's coffee crop. Prices hit rock bottom at 31 solsper lb, in 1776, and failed to recover to above 50 sols until 1783. On top ofthese woes, Dominica was reoccupied by the French from 1778 until theend of the War of the American Revolution (1776-1783). The appraisedvalue of Lowther Hall tumbled in step with these events. On 1 January 1776the plantation was still valued at £4,500, but by 1782 its worth had morethan halved to a mere £2,000.48 Senhouse's bitter experiences were sharedby other planters on the colony who had similarly miscalculated. A petitiondrawn up seeking government relief during the depression of the 1770srecounted how 'many of your subjects led by the most favourable accountsand opinions of the fertility of the soil were induced to become purchasersbuoyed up with the flattering hopes that they were thereby laying afoundation for benefits to themselves and the commercial interest of theircountry'. This account goes on to emphasise how settlers under-estimatedthe costs of clearing land and constructing roads, bid up land values tounprofitable levels in the expectation of continuing high coffee prices, andexperienced further difficulties in cultivation that arose out of inadequateland surveys and a basic unfamiliarity with the crop itself. The hardshipexperienced by planters are reflected in the decline in coffee works andswitch to sugar cultivation on the ceded islands in the aftermath of theSeven Years War and which became more marked during the 1770s.'1'

Edwards' estimate was also compiled in the anticipation of an especiallyfavourable period for Jamaican coffee producers. In contrast to Senhouse,however, his predictions of a continuing boom were to prove betterfounded. The average London sale price of Jamaican ordinary coffee(exclusive of duty) rose from 142s. per cwt, 1790-94, to 239s., 1795-1800,and remained at or above 200s. for more than five years. After 1809,however, prices collapsed to average just 66s, 1810-14, as the ContinentalBlockade cut off European markets and caused a chronic glut of coffee.Though prices briefly revived between 1814 and 1823, the long-term trendwas downwards because of competition from newly acquired colonialpossessions. Jamaican producers, moreover, began to suffer from soilexhaustion and erosion and between 1805 and 1815 some 78 plantationswere abandoned.50 During periods of depression the coffee planters mostlikely to survive were those able to raise mortgages on their properties or tofall back on alternative sources of income. In the case of both Dominica andJamaica, many small producers were driven out of the industry and theirslaves redeployed on to sugar estates, with all the attendant upheavals forthe slave population.51 A planter who established his property in 1793,however, escaped the worst of these woes. The final two columns of TableD

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2 adjust the farm price supplied by Edwards by an index of London marketprices in order to obtain a more realistic flow of discounted revenue duringthe period 1793 to 1818. The rest of the data is the same as in Table 1,except that the calculation has been modified to incorporate an estimate ofthe cost of replacing slaves under the assumption of an annual slavemortality rate of 2.5 per cent.52 Table 2 reports a rise in both the cost-benefitratio and net-present worth, as well as a reduction in the number of seasonsrequired before the property generated a positive benefit. Though still anapproximation of actual performance, these estimates reiterate howpropitious a time the early nineteenth century was to establish a coffeeplantation. Nonetheless, the review of prices above emphasises that thewindow of opportunity was short-lived and after 1810 the Jamaican coffeeindustry moved from boom to bust with remarkable swiftness.

Coffee planting in the British West Indies during the period of slaverywas an uncertain and quasi-permanent secondary activity that was capableof heaping riches or ruin upon its practitioners. Senhouse's plan wasconceived on the eve of a calamitous slump; Edwards' at the start of apowerful upswing. The boom and bust nature of the industry reflected thefact that growth was largely the outcome of a response to opportunitiesgenerated by war and revolution within the Caribbean region as a whole. Inthe case of the ceded islands of Dominica, Grenada and St Vincent coffeegrowing attracted relatively few British white settlers. According to theGrenada census of 1772 and a map of Dominica produced in 1776 givingestate details, the coffee cultivators were for the most part made up ofFrench settlers choosing to remain on the islands after they passed toBritain, many of whom held their land as small-holding tenants.53 Theacquisition of the ceded islands was rapidly accompanied by a shift in thecomposition of their exports away from coffee towards sugar, though theprocess was slower on Dominica where the knowledge that Dominicawould be a key target in any future war held back heavy investment insugar.54 In Jamaica, following the revolution in St Domingue, the greaterpart of the coffee cultivators consisted of whites of lesser social standing,many of whom derived income from serving the sugar complex.55 Coffee'srelatively low set up costs provided an opportunity for persons of modestmeans to establish plantations far more easily than was the case with sugar.In contrast to the ceded islands, a sample of planters' inventories reveals noinstances of coffee growers with French surnames, indicating that the roleplayed by refugees from St Domingue in building up Jamaican productionwas small.56 A strong commitment by elements of the island's whitepopulation to the crop, however, was insufficient to sustain Jamaican coffeeboom. In view of the tax system in place and the body of commercial lawsthat regulated imperial trade, the position of coffee as a British CaribbeanD

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staple was bound to remain precarious. The experiences of coffee plantersin the BWI, therefore, lends support to William's sugar-orientated model ofCaribbean development during the two centuries after 1640 and provides agraphic illustration of the extent to which the cultivators of a minor staplewere heavily influenced by the system of navigation laws that grew uparound the dominant staple.

NOTES

Research for this article was carried out with the assistance of a British Academy Small PersonalResearch Grant (BA-AN 1392/APN 2170). An earlier version of the paper was presented to theLSE Business History Unit seminar and the XXIX Conference of the Association of CaribbeanHistorians, Martinique. The author acknowledges the comments of an anonymous referee, butaccepts responsibility for any remaining errors.

1. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (London, 1973), p.261. Davis does not givehis source, but the figures are similar to those reported in Edward Long, The History ofJamaica (3 vols., London, 1774), vol.i, p.517.

2. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1964), pp.85-97; Hilary McD. Beckles,"The Williams Effect": Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery and the Growth of WestIndian Political Economy' in Barbara L.Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), BritishCapitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge, 1987),pp.303-12; B.W. Higman, 'Economic and Social Development of the British West Indies,From Settlement to ca. 1850', in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (eds.), TheCambridge Economic History of the United States, volume 1, The Colonial Era (Cambridge,1996), pp.300, 307, 310-15, 324-26.

3. The description of sugar enjoying a 'golden age' and 'silver age' was originally made inRichard Pares', 'Merchants and Planters', Economic History Review, Supplement No.4(Cambridge, 1960), p.40. For an analysis of rising demand for sugar in eighteenth-centuryBritain, see David Richardson, 'The Slave Trade, Sugar and Economic Growth, 1748-1776',Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol.XXIV (1987).

4. The best general explanation of the rise of sugar remains Robert C. Batie, 'Why Sugar?Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples in the English and French Antilles, 1624-54',Journal of Caribbean History, Vols.8-9 (1976). Jamaican historians have argued thatlinkages generated between sugar and other sectors, particularly livestock farming, may havebeen more extensive than Williams and others have suggested; see Verene Shepherd,'Livestock and Sugar: Aspects of Jamaica's Agricultural Development from the LateSeventeenth to the Early Nineteenth Century', Historical Journal, Vol.34 (1991), pp.631-3.

5. Jürgen Schneider, 'The Effects on European Markets of Imports of Overseas Agriculture: theProduction, Trade and Consumption of Coffee (15th to 18th Century)', in José C. Pardo (ed.),Economic Effects of the European Expansion (Stuttgart, 1992), pp.293-4.

6. House of Lords Record Office, Large Parchment Collection, B31-42, customs ledger forChristmas 1693 to Christmas 1694. This source records an isolated shipment of 28 lb.

7. James Douglas, Arbor Yemensis fructum Cofe ferens, or, a Description and History of theCoffee Tree (London, 1727), pp.20, 22.

8. D.W. Rodriquez, Coffee: a Short Economic History with Special Reference to Jamaica(Ministry of Agriculture and Lands, Commodity Bulletin No.2; Kingston, Jamaica, 1961),p. 13. According to Rodriquez, the coffee seedlings originated from Martinique, but ClintonV. Black gives their origin as Hispaniola in his History of Jamaica (London, 1965), p.82.

9. 'Petition of Several Planters...of Jamaica', 2 March, 1731, reprinted in F.R. Augier andShirley C. Gordon, Sources of West Indian History (Longman; London, 1962), p.62;Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise Concerning the Properties and Effects of Coffee (1785; 5th

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(ed.), J. Sewell, London, 1792), p.xv; Leo Francis Stock, (ed.), Proceedings and Debates ofthe British Parliament Respecting North America, 5 vols, (Carnegie Institution ofWashington; Washington D.C., 1927-1937), Vol.iv, pp.149-152, 166 Romney Sedgwick,The House of Commons, 1715-1754 (HMSO, London, 1970), Vol.ii, p.341; Jacob M. Price,Perry of London: A Family and a Firm on the Chesapeake Frontier, 1615-1753 (Cambridge,Mass., 1992), pp.75, 169.

10. Stock, Proceedings and Debates, pp.151-2.11. John J. McCusker, Rum and the American Revolution: The Rum Trade and the Balance of

Payments of the Thirteen Continental Colonies (New York, 1989), p.712.12. See Lawrence H. Gipson, The British Isles and the American Colonies (3 vols., New York,

1936), Vol.2, pp.191-2.13. 5 Geo. II. C.24. The act originally granted the preferential rate of duty for a period of four

years, but the legislation was subsequently renewed and extended.14. Patrick Browne, The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (London, 1756), p.14. Rodriguez,

Coffee, p.24, gives export figures of 53,225 lb, 1737-44, and 37,343 lb, 1745-1751, withoutspecifying a source. Possibly his export figures are derived from Browne using a conversionrate of 200 lb to the cask.

15. Thibault de Chanvalon, Voyage à la Martinique (Paris, 1753), p.17; Louis-Philippe May,Histoire Économique de la Martinique, 1635-1763 (Paris, 1930), p.22; Michel-RolphTrouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore, 1988), p.54;Cornelius Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680-1791(Maastricht, 1985), pp.327-8; R.M.N. Pandy, Agriculture in Surinam, 1650-1950: anEnquiry into the Causes of its Decline (Amsterdam, 1959), pp. 19-20; Johannes Postma, 'TheFruits of Slave Labour: Tropical Commodities from Surinam to Holland, 1683-1794', inMaxine Berg (ed.), Oceanic Trade, Colonial Wares and Industrial Development, 1600-1800,Eleventh International Economic History Conference [n.p.] (mimeo, Milan, 1994). TheJamaican export figures are from Rodriquez, Coffee, p.24 (where again no source is given),and PRO CO 142/15, 18, Jamaican naval officer's lists.

16. E.B. Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1696-1808 (Oxford, 1960), p.60.17. L.J. Ragatz, Statistics for the Study of British Caribbean Economic History, 1763-1833

(London, 1927), p.14.18. The Abbé Raynal [A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the

Europeans in the East and West Indies (4 vols; Dublin, 1776; originally published inFrench, Paris 1774) estimated Caribbean output c.1775 at 88 million lb and exports fromJamaica and the Ceded Islands at 4.6 million lb. Raynal's estimates are convenientlytabulated in Peter B. Brown, In Praise of Hot Liquors: The Study of Chocolate, Coffee andTea-Drinking, 1600-1850 (York, 1995), p. 101. Shipments from British colonies, however,included an unknown amount of coffee that originated from the French Antilles and whichpassed through the free port system (see also next note). Raynal's data tallies with modernestimates of exports from Surinam, Martinique, St Domingue and with the British customsaccounts.

19. PRO CO 137/69, 'Copy of a Memorial to the Lords of the Treasury'; Berkshire RecordOffice, Trumbull Add. MSS, 141, 'Present State of the British Colonies in America; RichardB. Sheridan, 'From Chattel to Wage Slavery in Jamaica, 1740-1860', Slavery and Abolition,Vol.14 (1993), pp.14-15.

20. B.W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth andNineteenth Centuries (Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1988), pp.159-91.

21. PRO CO 142/15, 18, Jamaican naval officer's lists. In comparison, North American demandaccounted for a mere 7 per cent of Grenada's exports of 1.5 million lb between 1766 and1767 (PRO CO 106/1, Grenadian naval officer's lists).

22. See S.D. Smith, 'Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in HistoricalPerspective', Journal of Interdisciplinary History, VoI.XXVII (1996), pp.212-14.

23. House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, fol.2493-2494.24. The analogy of the 'level playing field' has a long history of use by lobbyists. Robert Nicol,

for example, argued it was not until Huskisson's duty reduction of 1825, 'that Coffee wasadmitted in this country to the field of fair competition: that field which in Germany, France,

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and other parts of the Continent, it has held for more than a century', A Treatise on Coffee(London, 1831), p. 17.

25. This aspect of the navigation system has been intensively studied, mainly from theperspective of the tobacco trade. For a summary of the debate, see Larry Sawyers, 'TheNavigation Acts revisited', Economic History Review, Vol.XLV (1992), pp.262-84.

26. Phillip R.P. Coelho, 'The Profitability of Imperialism: the British Experience in the WestIndies', Explorations in Economic History, Vol.X (1972), pp.260-7; Smith, 'Accounting forTaste', pp.203-5.

27. It is likely, however, that much of the rise in the price of sugar was capitalized into the priceof cane fields which were not used to grow coffee, but any extension of sugar production onto marginal land suited to minor staples would have affected coffee. For further elaborationof these themes see, Smith, 'Accounting for Taste', pp.183-214. In addition to the loweringof duties by the British parliament, the Jamaica legislature experimented with bounties toencourage production in 1773 and 1776, Edward Braithwaite, The Development of CreoleSociety in Jamaica. 1770-1820 (Oxford, 1971), pp.80-1, 147.

28. Jamaica Archives, 1B/11/5, Accounts Current. As well as the problem of representativeness,these accounts record only contingencies (such as the purchase of provisions in times ofscarcity) or certain regular payments (such as mortgages). Expenditure maintaining buildingsand the works are excluded, as are costs incurred extending cultivation on to new grounds.

29. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the WestIndies (2 volumes, Dublin, 1793), Vol.ii, pp.286-8; Cumbria Record Office, SenhouseMuniments, D/Sen, Joseph Senhouse and the West Indies, 'Plantation Estimates'. JosephSenhouse was appointed comptroller of customs at Roseau, in 1774, and customs collectorat Barbados, in 1776. As a customs official Senhouse was barred from engaging in trade, butwas permitted to ship produce from his own properties. Senhouse's plantation was named'Lowther Hall' in honour of the family patron Sir James Lowther, for whom he acted aspolitical agent on his return to England, in 1782. For further biographical details see, EdwardHughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 1952-1965), Vol.II,pp.334-54; Richard B. Sheridan, 'Material Relating to the West Indies from the SenhousePapers, 1762-1831', in W.E. Minchinton (ed.), British Records Relating of America inMicroform (Wakefield, 1977); James C. Brandow, 'The Senhouse Papers', The Journal of theBarbados Museum and Historical Society, Vol.XXXVII (1985).

30. The overseer William Adlam wrote from Hermitage Plantation, in April 1820, that the worksbadly needed a new mill, mill house, kitchen and wash house: 'the old mill is in a very badcondition, scarcely able to take off the crop, and having no house over it; when it rains andsome time after it, we cannot make use of it'. The appears to have been no general fund setaside to meet the task of rebuilding, however, for Adlam conceded that the tasks, 'must bedone as the property can afford the means and time' (National Library of Jamaica, MS. 250,Hermitage Plantation Letter book [n.p.], Adlam to Wemys, 12 April 1820.

31. Financial constraints, rather than ecological considerations, may have prevented a greaterproportion of the Dominica plantation from being planted in coffee, as Senhouse wrote inJuly 1772 that 'I intend cultivating as much of it as I possibly can, as far as my finances willgo.' Later, in August, he noted that 50 acres were being cultivated, 'with this additionaladvantage that as I am able to settle the above with my own money, I can therefore send theproduce to what market I please', Carlisle Record Office, D/Sen, Joseph Senhouse Letter andMemorandum Book, fols.12-13.

32. PRO CO 101/18, 'State of the Parishes in the Island of Grenada', April, 1772. The 158monoculture covered a mean area of 114.5 acres and possessed a mean coffee acreage of 66.7acres; the 23 largest properties covered a mean area of 302.5 acres and possessed a meancoffee acreage of 138.2 acres. Land not planted in coffee was mostly left in woodland or usedfor pasture.

33. B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834, p.224.34. John J. McCusker, 'How Much is That in Real Money? A Historical Price Index for Use as

a Deflator of Money Values in the Economy of the United States', Proceedings of theAmerican Antiquarian Society, Vol.101 (1991), pp.342-3.

35. Edwards also notes that bushes raised from old roots yielded on average 300 lb per acre in

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their second year, 500 lb in their second and between 600 and 700 1b in their fourth andsubsequent years. Coffee raised from seedlings, however, yielded nothing in the first threeyears, 700 lb in the fourth and 750 lb in the fifth year, Edwards, History, Civil andCommercial, Vol.11, pp.279-281; P.J. Laborie, The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo(London, 1797), p. 152.

36. These were the standard payment terms set by the Crown Commissioners charged withdisposing of lands by public sale, Thomas Atwood, The History of the Island of Dominica(1791; rpt. Frank Cass, 1971), pp.2-3.

37. Jamaica Archives, IB/11/4, Inventories, libers 119 fol.80, libers 126 fol.191.38. Coffee land was reported to vary in value in 1807 from £20 per acre for best land to 6-8s. an

acre for land lying distant from established roads, House of Commons Sessional Papers, III(1807), pp.41-2.

39. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: the Demerara Slave Rebellion of1823 (Oxford, 1994), 47; Henry Bolingbroke, A Voyage to Demerary, 1799-1806 (1807; rpt.Demerara, 1947), p. 177; John Lowndes, The Coffee-Planter (London, 1807), p.70; Laborie,Coffee Planter, p. 152; Moseley, Treatise, pp. xvii-xviii; Browne, Natural and Civil History,p. 162; Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, Vol.ii, pp.279-281; Chetham's Library,Manchester, MS. 2,168 (bound with A Narrative of Affairs Lately Received from HisMajesty's Island of Jamaica), 'A Letter on the Advantages of Cultivating Coffee and Cocoaon the British Sugar Islands' [n.d.]. The ratio in the latter tract is repeated in Moseley,Treatise, XVIII. Long states that, 'eight Negroes are equal to clean and gather from fifty tosixty acres, and upwards, according to the bearing of the trees ... I have known a man, withtwo assistants, manage a walk of thirty acres, besides attending other work', History ofJamaica, p.685. This estimate may not be far out of line with the others, given the smallpercentage of total acreage planted in coffee.

40. The data presented here question the placing of coffee (with cotton) between the limits setby sugar and rice in staples cultivation by Philip D. Morgan, 'Task and Gang Systems: TheOrganisation of Labour on New World Plantations', in Stephen Innes (ed.), Work and Labourin Early America (North Carolina, 1988), p.205.

41. Lownes, Coffee-Planter, pp.17-18. Another practical account of planting in the FrenchAntilles, not based on Laborie, notes that, 'l'opinion général des Iles de France et deBourbon, est que l'on doit placer les plants de Café à sept pieds et demi de distance en toutsens; mais cette distance doit cependant être subornnée à la nature du sol et à la force qu'ildonne à la végétation (M. Buc'hoz, Dissertations sur l'Utilité et les Bons et Mauvais effectsdu Tabac, du Café, du Cacao, et du Thé [Paris, 1788], p.53).

42. Between 1770 and 1774 the free on board (fob) price of coffee imported into Great Britainwas £3.4 per cwt of 112 lb, whereas in 1779 Dominican coffee was being sold in Londonexclusive of taxation, but inclusive of insurance and freight, at £3.06 per cwt of 112 lb. Overthe period 1791-96 Jamaica ordinary coffee sold in London net of duty, inclusive ofinsurance and freight, for £7.62 per cwt of 112 lb, The London Price Current, GuildhallLibrary, London; A.D. Gayer, W.W. Rostow, A.J. Schwartz, The Growth and Fluctuation ofthe British Economy, 1790-1850 (Oxford, 1953), microfilm supplement, p.777; ThomasTooke, A History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation (2 vols; London, 1838), Vol.ii,p.399.

43. Moseley, Treatise, p.xix; Higman, Slave Population, p.217; J.R. Ward, 'The Profitability ofsugar Planting in the British West Indies', Economic History Review, Vol.XXXI (1978),pp.210-13. The highest recorded rate of return was 28.4 per cent for Hillsborough,Dominica, and Cane Garden, St Vincent.

44. Laborie, Coffee Planter, p. 108. Senhouse took out a 40-year lease on his property, indicatinga long time horizon.

45. R.P. Thomas, 'The Sugar Colonies of the Old Empire: Profit or Loss for Great Britain?',Economic History Review, Vol.XXI (1968), p.34; Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates(New Brunswick, 1963), pp.274-9. In 1775 Senhouse took out a mortgage of £700 onLowther Hall at 6 per cent interest.

46. National Library of Jamaica, MS 250, Hermitage Plantation Letter book, William Adlam toJohn Wemys, 30 January 1822; Library of the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica,

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Copybook of business letters written from Demerera-British Guiana, 1798-1800, McKay toGordon and Hamilton, August 1798, fols. 39, 42. Drought reduced the size of the Hermitagecrop to just 40 casks, from its normal 80 to 100 casks, while McKay predicted that droughtwould reduce the coffee crop in Demerara to a quarter of its ordinary level.

47. Carlisle Record Office, D/Sen, Letter and Memorandum Book, fol.101.48. Jean Tarrade, Le Commerce Colonial de la France (2 vols; Paris, 1972), Vol.11, pp.771-2;

Carlisle Record Office, D/Sen, Waste Book, 1776-1778. The inventory values the estate at£11,607 15s. in 1776, but this figure includes Senhouse's salary as customs controller of£500 sterling, capitalised at 25 year's purchase (£4,125 currency). In late December, 1775,60 acres were planted in coffee, but only 10 seasoned slaves and a Malayan boy were livingon the property. As noted earlier, by this time the estate was carrying a mortgage of £700(sterling).

49. PRO, CO 71/6, 'The Address, Memorial and Humble Petition of the Representatives of thePeople of Dominica', fol.42. On the decline of coffee in the ceded islands, see Smith,'Accounting for Taste', p.204.

50. Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Fluctuations, pp.777-8; Tooke, History of Prices, p.399; B.W.Higman, 'Jamaican Coffee Plantations, 1780-1860: A Cartographic Analysis', CaribbeanGeography, Vol.2 (1986), p.74.

51. A few examples of coffee planters raising mortgages from London merchants aredocumented. William Mackintosh, owner of Digue and Richmond plantations on Grenadavalued at £21,600, raised a montage of £4,000 from John Crawley in November, 1772(Bedford County Record Office, Crawley Muniments, C1526). Absentee Jamaica proprietorArchibald Ingram raised £4,000 from John Mills and Sherland Swanson in 1776 bymortgaging two coffee plantations in St Patrick's of 90 and 53 acres, containing 53 slaves(Essex Record Office, D/DA/T575).

52. Price data are from Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Fluctuations, pp.777-8; the estimate ofslave mortality is taken from Higman, Slave Population, p. 123.

53. Patrick L. Baker, Centring the Periphery: Chaos, Order and the Ethnohistory of Dominica(University of the West Indies, 1994), pp.62-5.

54. Dominica was occupied by French forces under the Marquis Duchillean during the AmericanRevolutionary War.

55. S.D. Smith, 'Coffee and "the Poorer Sort of People" in Jamaica during the Period ofSlavery', Plantation Society in the Americas (forthcoming).

56. This finding is consistent with the view that refugees settling permanently in Jamaica werefew in number and mainly composed of the more affluent planters from the south coast whoalready had links with Jamaica. See David P. Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: TheBritish Occupation of Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford, 1982), pp.272-4.

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Documents

Sugar's poor relation: Coffee planting in the British West Indies, 1720–1833