in any other Anglo-American plantation community, largely because none of
the other staples required so much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing
the crops for market. As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793: "the business of
sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must
engage deeply.... It requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand
pounds sterling to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of
success." Such an investment, he particularized, would procure and
establish as a going concern a plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100
acres each in provision crops, forage and woodland, together with the
appropriate buildings and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60
mules and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of £50 sterling
a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic
ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations of their time
for absentee investors.

[Footnote 9: Bryan Edwards, _History of the West Indies_, book 5, chap. 3.]

When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in Parliament he
learned "that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that
the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three
thousand pounds at the least."[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the
French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote: "The French colonists, whether
Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast
no wistful looks toward France.... In our colonies it is quite different;
... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they
must sojourn in sugar and molasses till their mortgages will let them live
elsewhere. They call England their home though many of them have never
been there.... The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the
Englishman never."[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment. Many
and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in