Reaping Slavery’s Windfall: New England, Absentee Plantation Ownership, and the Rise of Capitalism in Early America

Despite a lack of scholarly attention, absentee plantation ownership existed in early New England and played an important role in the rise of capitalism in the region. During the eighteenth century, many wealthy New England families owned plantations in the Caribbean. These absentee owners managed plantations from afar and folded the profits of plantation and slave ownership into a larger business portfolio. Indeed, it is impossible to separate the mercantile activities of some New England merchant families from that of their plantation ownership. Nor can one divorce their ostentatious lifestyles from the immiseration of enslaved Africans abroad. Profits from these activities returned home, fueling the expansion of commerce and the rise of industry in New England.

Ultimately, then, examining absentee plantation ownership in eighteenth-century New England tells another history of slavery in the region. Going beyond how historians have studied the enslaved people who lived and labored in the region, it is important to understand the place and role of slavery in the region’s political economy and the individual fortunes of its absentee owners. That research reveals a deep entanglement with a wider world of slavery throughout the Americas. Moreover, profits from plantations were an important source of capital as the region transitioned from a mercantile to industrial and financial economy in the late-eighteenth century. The roots of New England’s capitalism were not a mythical protestant work ethic, but rather those of the cane, coffee, and cacao—all grown with the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved Africans—grown on plantations abroad.