Burnard on Smith, _Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648-1834_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (August 2007)

S.D. Smith, _Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British 
Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648-1834_. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2006. xv + 380 pp. £55/$99 (cloth), ISBN: 
0-521-86338-4.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Trevor Burnard, Department of American 
Studies, University of Sussex.


How did "people from a family no-one knows" amass a great fortune? 
Simon Smith, in this splendid examination of the Atlantic world 
context of interconnected family members of a mercantile and then 
landed dynasty that made its money (and occasionally lost it) in the 
burgeoning economies of the West Indies, especially Barbados, 
provides an engrossing answer to this question. He examines the rise 
to great wealth of the Lascelles family, a Yorkshire family who made 
money in various ways in Barbados and who established themselves as a 
leading aristocratic family in Yorkshire, prominent for their 
building of Harewood House, one of the truly great homes of northern 
England.

The Lascelles, of course, are not, nowadays, an unknown family, 
having married into the British Royal Family in the early twentieth 
century. Their current prominence was the impetus behind this 
investigation. Harewood House entered into collaboration with the 
University of York, where Smith taught until this year, in order to 
bring out of the shadows the role that slavery and the plantations 
had played in the Lascelles' acquisition of great wealth. The 
Lascelles were one of the first, and most prominent, examples of what 
was a new and, to many, disturbing phenomenon in eighteenth century 
Britain: nouveau riche men of uncertain pedigree who deployed wealth 
made in Britain's growing empire into establishing themselves as 
landed gentlemen. Like Russians today or Americans in the late 
nineteenth century, colossally wealthy West Indians (Smith outlines 
carefully just how rich the first two generations of Lascelles were, 
with wealth of nearly £900,000 at mid-century and over £1.3 million 
at 1800) joined East Indian nabobs in fundamentally disturbing 
settled English social structures by the sheer extent of their 
fortunes.

Smith tells us a great deal about the Lascelles family and their 
fortunes. His work is based on enormous research and the employment 
of extremely sophisticated methodologies designed to extract meaning 
out of resistant sources. Smith recreates the social and economic 
world of a group of super merchants in the eighteenth century British 
Empire. (Some, like the Lascelles, very successful; others, like 
Gedney Clarke, to whom he devotes an especially fine chapter, 
failures due to overreaching and an unfortunate combination of 
circumstances in Atlantic trade.) These were men who both shaped and 
also profited from the growth of plantation commerce in the center of 
British American slave economies. Because slavery is so central to 
wealth creation in the West Indies in this period, Smith devotes an 
interesting, if not entirely well integrated, chapter on the enslaved 
population, where he complicates and extends our understanding of 
slave demography.

His work adds substantially to debates on gentry capitalism and on 
how respectable and well-connected gentlemen used their commercial 
networks to flourish in the poorly regulated but expanding colonial 
economy. They helped to make that colonial economy achieve the sort 
of integration that David Hancock has outlined in his work on London 
merchants in the Atlantic trade. It is important to note, however, 
that Smith is less convinced than Hancock that integration had truly 
occurred in the Atlantic World of commerce during the eighteenth 
century. Smith's work contributes to a developing literature on 
Atlantic trade and on eighteenth-century business networks. Indeed, 
network analysis is crucial to his work. He illustrates, echoing work 
done by scholars looking at networks created by Scots in the 
Caribbean, that doing business through a complex network of business 
associates connected by kinship and other ties was the only effective 
way of reducing risk and assuring business success in a remarkably 
underinstitutionalized Atlantic world economy. But networks hampered 
merchants as much as they helped. They limited outsider involvement 
and accentuated the importance of manipulating access to political 
patronage. In the long run, as he shows, the successes of the 
Lascelles were unsustainable in a new world of tighter regulation and 
more coercive imperial policies. Here, Smith says important and 
suggestive things about institutional business deficiencies in 
Atlantic commerce that should be taken up by scholars exploring 
nineteenth century West Indian decline.

His study is the best study of a merchant-planter family since 
Richard Pares' investigations, including one on the Lascelles family, 
over a half century ago. He engages actively with the influential 
arguments Pares made concerning what we might call the "Adam Smith" 
problem. That problem concerned the extent to which the wealth of the 
sugar colonies derived from investment from England or was instead 
self-generated in the colonies. Adam Smith argued for the former; 
Pares for the latter. Simon Smith's analysis of the credit-debt 
networks of Henry Lascelles lends support to his namesake's position, 
suggesting that most of the money for plantation expansion came from 
Britain. Nevertheless, his careful research (he is brilliantly 
insightful into the little studied topic of colonial credit and debt) 
modifies significantly Adam Smith's contentions. He shows that 
mid-eighteenth century English merchants were confident enough in the 
future prosperity of West Indian property that they were willing to 
extend considerable amounts of long-term credit to planters. This 
credit extension fuelled not only plantation development in the 
older, established colonies but also remarkable growth in the regions 
of the British West Indies acquired after the Seven Years' War. 
Smith's figures cast light upon how this boom development occurred, 
thus opening up possibilities for future research in plantation 
development in the Ceded Islands. The amount of money flowing into 
the Caribbean was truly astounding but created what Smith calls a 
"labyrinth of debt" that drew creditors such as the Lascelles into 
much more direct involvement in the plantation economy as planters 
than they had wanted. The Lascelles, significantly, grew their 
fortune through trade and especially through government contracts 
gained through their connections on both sides of the water. By the 
latter part of the eighteenth century, however, foreclosures on 
over-extended planters had made them reluctant slave owners with a 
large portfolio of West Indian property that they would have 
preferred not to have. Their aim was to transform their West Indian 
interests into English property. They were able to do this reasonably 
successfully but the property they were forced to acquire meant that 
they remained tied to the West Indies. Smith's study is a useful 
reminder that the customary image that we have of the imperial center 
dictating to the colonial periphery is a misleading characterization 
of imperial trade networks. The colonies and the metropolis were 
separate places but were integrally and complexly related. The degree 
of integration can be seen in the Lascelles family itself -- neither 
West Indian nor English but a mixture of both. The degree of 
integration between metropolis (even a provincial metropolis such as 
Yorkshire) and colonies makes one wonder whether Smith is right to 
discount Pares' argument about pump-priming. If we think of the 
Lascelles family as more West Indian than British or, better, as 
transatlantic brokers, then the geographical source of capital is 
murky. If the credit that the Lascelles family gave to planters came 
from England but derived from plantation profits, who can say where 
exactly it originated?

Any doubts about the importance to England and to the empire of 
entrepreneurial merchant-planters, such as Henry Lascelles and Gedney 
Clarke, will be dispelled after reading this dauntingly well-research 
book. At times, Smith makes us work quite hard, not drawing out as 
clearly as he might the implications of the empirical research that 
he has done. It is a book that warrants close reading because of the 
many insights hidden away in tables and footnotes. But any work we 
put in will be well rewarded. No other book since Pares' work has 
illuminated so clearly the reality of gentry capitalism in the 
eighteenth century Atlantic world. To place anyone with Pares, a 
scholar of awesome erudition, is to praise effusively. Smith's work 
is a work of major scholarship by a man immersed in the sources and 
attuned to current historiographical controversies. It should have a 
transformative effect on developing scholarship in an especially 
dynamic field.


Trevor Burnard is Professor of American History at the University of 
Sussex and will be Professor of the History of the Americas at the 
University of Warwick in September 2007. His most recent book is 
_Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in 
the Anglo-American World_ (Chapel Hill, 2004).

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