This site contains excerpts from the letters of Simon Taylor (1738-1813). Taylor was a sugar planter who lived in the British colony of Jamaica. In Taylor’s lifetime, Jamaica was the largest and most lucrative of several British colonies in the Caribbean. These island colonies were part of an extensive British-American colonial system that included territories stretching from the subarctic regions of the North American mainland down to the tropical zone of the West Indies.
Before the American Revolutionary War, which began in 1775, the most heavily populated and geographically extensive colonies in this British-American empire were those of North America between New England and the Carolinas, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Maryland, and North and South Carolina. The most economically and strategically significant part of the empire, however, were the Caribbean colonies, including Jamaica, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, and Barbados. Jamaica was the largest and most heavily populated of these island colonies and had the highest economic output. All of the British-American colonies were part of a wider Atlantic system of trade, migration, and exploitation, which connected the British Isles with Western Africa and the Americas. At the end of the American Revolutionary War, in 1783, Britain had lost thirteen of its mainland colonies, which became the United States. However, the Caribbean colonies, including Jamaica, were retained within the empire.
Taylor was born in Kingston, the main port and largest town in Jamaica, in 1738. He was educated in Britain and returned to Jamaica in 1760, following the death of his father. On his return to the Caribbean, he began a career as a planter, purchasing sugar plantations, otherwise referred to as ‘estates’, in the eastern Jamaican parish of St Thomas in the East and in the parish of St Mary’s in northeastern Jamaica. Apart from one short trip to England, Taylor lived in Jamaica for the rest of his life after 1760. He died at Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1813, at the age of seventy-four. At his death he was one of the wealthiest men in the British empire, and his massive personal fortune was built on the backs of the enslaved men, women, and children who laboured on the sugar estates and other properties that he owned or managed. He ‘owned’ over 2,000 slaves when he died.
Slavery was an integral part of the British-Atlantic system. Before the American Revolution, which began in 1776, there were enslaved people living in all of the British colonies in the Americas, and in Britain itself. By far the most reliant on slavery were colonies in the Caribbean. The people who were forced to work as slaves on tropical plantations in places like Jamaica originated from West Africa. Enslaved people were transported to the Americas from Africa in their millions, encountering the horrors of the Middle Passage, across the Atlantic Ocean, during which as many as one in ten died. In Jamaica and elsewhere in the Americas the slave systems dictated that slavery and freedom were tied to skin colour and ancestry. Slaves were descended from Africans, whereas whiteness was a badge of freedom. In Jamaica, enslaved people outnumbered whites by a ratio of about ten to one.
Once in colonies like Jamaica, enslaved people were forced to do a variety of tasks, but most of them ended up on sugar plantations, performing the arduous work connected with the planting, harvesting, and processing of sugar cane. The nature of the Atlantic slave system, particularly the difficulty of life and work on the plantations, ensured that enslaved people did not reproduce their numbers naturally through procreation. In other words, deaths outnumbered births, and this meant that planters – men like Simon Taylor – relied on the transatlantic slave trade to maintain the labour force on their plantations and other properties.
This site uses a blogging format to showcase excerpts from letters written by Simon Taylor from Jamaica to friends, family members, business associates, and political allies in Britain. The letters were written between the 1770s and Taylor’s death in 1813. These were years of uncertainty and change for all the inhabitants of the British Caribbean, enslaved and free, and the letters provide insights into aspects of life in Jamaica and the history of the British Atlantic from Taylor’s perspective.
Taylor’s worldview was that of a slaveholder. He perceived Africans to be inherently inferior to Europeans and believed that it was his right to treat Africans and their descendants as property, as slaves who he could buy, sell, and put to work as he pleased. He generally saw enslaved people not as human beings but as a source of labour, to be fed, managed, and replaced in the same manner as livestock. His comments can make for uncomfortable reading. Nevertheless, his letters are important sources for historical research because of the new light that they can shed on a number of themes, including transformations to empire and slavery during the Age of Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.
The original copies of these letters are held in the UK at Cambridge University Library and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library. The transcriptions appear here with the kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library and of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library. Each excerpt is accompanied by the full reference to the item from which it has been drawn in the Vanneck-Arcedeckne collection at Cambridge University Library or the Taylor Family Papers at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library. For a guide on referencing and citing the excerpts, see ‘Conditions of Use’.
The letters have been transcribed as accurately as possible, with few corrections made to style and presentation, preserving the often rough-and-ready punctuation and spelling of the eighteenth-century originals. Each excerpt is accompanied by a short paragraph placing it in its historical context, and there are occasional notes within the excerpts, given in square brackets, to explain specific words, terms, and references from the letters.