Welcome to the Slavery and Revolution site.
The first batch of selections, uploaded this month, is taken from letters sent by Simon Taylor in Jamaica to his friend and fellow plantation owner Chaloner Arcedeckne, who lived in Britain. The excerpts presented are from letters written between 1781 and 1793, a period that saw the ending of the American Revolutionary War, the rise of the campaign in Britain to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, and the outbreak of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Arcedeckne entrusted the management of his Jamaican properties to Taylor, and the letters that Taylor sent to him therefore contain discussion of plantation management as well as of other topics, including war, politics, family, religion, weather, and trade.