The Absentee Planter and the Key Slave: Privilege, Patriarchalism, and Exploitation in the Early Eighteenth-Century Caribbean

Abstract

In late 1725 a man named Frank sailed from Nevis, destined for England. A slave accused of participation in an alleged insurrection plot, he was being sheltered temporarily in the household of his aristocratic, absentee owner, Sir William Stapleton. This remarkable incident sheds light on two obscure aspects of early eighteenth-century Caribbean plantation society. First, it reveals a particular variety of absenteeism best characterized as “aristocratic capitalism.” Elite planters, although in the vanguard of commercial development, nevertheless remained wedded to traditional forms of social organization that centered upon the extended, patriarchal household. As a skilled “key slave,” Frank was co-opted into this distinctive “family circle,” which accounts for the considerable efforts taken to shield him from Nevis's hostile white residents. Second, the story also draws attention to the dilemmas faced by a Caribbean bondsman occupying such a privileged status within the plantation system. It raises questions about how he might have understood his position in this peculiar transatlantic extended household and what might explain his trajectory from his possible participation in the 1725 plot, through his subsequent exile in England and later Antigua, to his decision to flee to Saint Kitts and then Jamaica in 1730. Central to this microhistory, then, is a fraught narrative of the perils of privilege in the midst of patriarchy and exploitation.