At the end of the eighteenth century the Jamaican slave economy was crucial to Britain?s lucrative colonial enterprise. Slave-produced sugar had transformed the Caribbean and revolutionised British habits of consumption. However, the status and influence of Jamaican slave owners was on the wane. British imperial ambitions had shifted eastwards, and slaveholders found themselves at the centre of a transatlantic conflict over the future of slavery in the British Empire. They also faced changes in the Caribbean itself, encountering new kinds of resistance from enslaved people and their allies. Petley explores the social composition of the Jamaican slaveholding class during the era of the British campaign to end slavery, looking at their efforts to maintain control over local society and considering how their economic, cultural and military dependency on the colonial metropole meant that they were ultimately unable to avert the ending of British slavery.This book is based on extensive research in British and Caribbean archives. Petley sheds valuable new light on the lives of British West Indian slaveholders and their efforts to defend and justify an institution that has cast a dark and enduring shadow over modern notions of race, cultural authority and freedom.