Mercantile communities in the Ceded Islands: the Alexander Bartlet & George Campbell Company.

• Author: Quintanilla, Mark

At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), adventurous entrepreneurs ventured out to Britain's newly acquired West Indian possessions of Grenada, Tobago, St. Vincent, and Dominica. The Ceded Islands, as contemporaries called them, represented the British Empire's first major Caribbean acquisition in a century. Ambitious settlers journeyed to this tropical frontier intent to transform these islands into hospitable localities for sugar estates. Successful colonists devoted the next half-century to such pursuits. (1) Like their seventeenth-century predecessors, migrants such as Alexander Bartlet traveled to the region seeking their West India fortunes. (2) Successful settlers were an ambitious lot who carved their riches from the rugged frontier by exacting labor from African slaves. (3) Like other Europeans, Bartlet saw the region as promising and linked his fortune with a business partner, George Campbell. The two men formed the Alexander Battler & George Campbell Company and set up offices in London, Grenada, the Grenadines, and Tobago. (4)

The Alexander Bartlet & George Campbell Company is a singular example of a common phenomenon that occurred during the late eighteenth century throughout the Atlantic World. While the rise and fall of such partnerships has received uneven treatment, they were of critical importance to the profitability of the British Empire. The trade networks that such companies founded encouraged various agricultural and trade initiatives throughout the Atlantic World. The development of regional trade in North America owed much more to private initiatives than governmental support. For example, mercantile capital in the Chesapeake transformed that region by linking resident planters with foreign markets. Such steps not only secured dependable supplies for merchants, but also gave planters dependable sources of investment capital. (5) Wherever trading partnerships were established they adapted themselves to local conditions with an eye toward generating profits for reinvestment.

The Caribbean's enormous importance to European imperialists cannot be overestimated. Seventeenth-century imperial bureaucrats estimated that Barbados was worth more than all of British North America combined. Nor is this a singular example that extols the region's importance. Before its destruction by an earthquake in 1696, Jamaica's bustling trade at Port Royal won it the distinction of being the most important British American city. (6) Such facts make it easier to understand why ambitious Europeans risked high mortality rates to accumulate riches in the tropical Atlantic. They concluded that wealth was intrinsic to the tropics. (7) In addition, the Antillean islands were important strategically for the establishment of maritime communications that connected Britain to its more distant interests. (8) Sugar planting--the primary economic activity in the region--was so important that it provided the greatest stimulus to the Atlantic slave trade which brought approximately twelve million Africans to the Americas. (9) Such trade had devastating consequences in Africa, including widespread death and famine and enormous loss of life in areas such as the Congo. (10) Yet, it also encouraged British mercantile communities to conclude that the Ceded Islands would be as successful as those established in the Caribbean during the preceding century. Consequently, settlers in the region successfully created vast trading networks linking them to North America, Europe, and Africa. Indeed, the region proved so attractive that many mercantile associations included Ceded Island investments in their portfolios. (11)

Britain's possession of the Ceded Islands promised an enormous boom to investors. Given the success of the first phase colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, there was no reason for the most skeptical critic to question the region's economic potential. Investors bought up lands at Crown auctions. (12) While some of the initial purchasers procured their estates purely for speculative reasons, others did so with an eye towards long-term development. (13) Within the Ceded Islands, successful planters such as Alexander Campbell built extensive plantations scattered throughout the region by reinvesting profits to build new agricultural estates. (14) Such economic activities fueled development and encouraged British merchants to relocate to the region.

Atlantic Trade

By 1763, it had become apparent that British trade was transforming the colonial world. Despite the lack of information concerning mercantile companies involved in such trade, it is evident by the continued economic growth and prosperity of Virginia that the availability of mercantile credit and British markets had changed these colonies from minor outposts to thriving commercial centers. Economic success, in turn, led to the ascendancy of wealthy planter classes. (15) On the eve of the American Revolution, Virginian planters had transformed their society into a prosperous agricultural community, from a frontier to a vital society, as evinced by growing tobacco exports, the demographic growth of slave populations, the continuous arrival of newcomers settling the interior of the colony, and the increasing wealth of Tidewater planters. (16) Such success fueled the confidence of the British merchant class. This success was apparent in tangible ways such as growing industrialization, the accumulation of wealth, and the ability to reinvest profits in new endeavors.

Merchants like Alexander Bartlet were shaped by a world of opportunity that they believed was secured by British rule and stability. In 1770, neither American patriots nor abolitionists had yet proposed alternative visions for the future. As a consequence, investments in sugar and slavery in the Atlantic World economy seemed secure. (17) Slavery was an institution as old as man himself and there were few people in Western society who could have foretold the radical paradigm shift that would occur in the ensuing decades as former West Indian slaves such as Ottobah Cugoano and Oladauh Equiano challenged the status quo and galvanized the abolitionist movement. Publication of Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Nature of the Slave Trade (1787) and Equiano's The Interesting Life of Oladauh Equiano (1789) shaped popular opinion by condemning slavery on moral grounds. (18) The emergence of these African authors rocked the foundations of English philosophical thought. (19) In so doing, their works altered the debate within Britain's empire as the public increasingly pressed for parliamentary reforms to repeal preferential duties benefiting West Indian planters and to abolish the slave trade. Abolitionists quickly moved from the printed word to the creation of visual sources that effectively rendered the misery of African bondage. The Wedgewood medallion, for example, depicts slaves begging "Am I not a man and a brother too." (20) Other images showed Africans densely packed aboard slave vessels like spoons in a drawer. (21) Abolitionists, who were drawn from nonconformist sects, created their own alternative culture and men. Yet, in the 1760s and 1770s, these events could not be anticipated. West Indian merchants could not have conceived of such changes in public attitudes. Accordingly, for merchants like Bartlet, the Ceded Islands promised safe returns on their investments.

By 1763, colonizers and investors in the Ceded Islands alike could draw inspiration from the success of their counterparts in the older West Indian colonies of Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Montserrat, St. Christopher, and Nevis who were the wealthiest subjects within the British Empire. The new generation of planters and merchants accepted the importance of sugar cane, slavery, and investment capital in creating the necessary conditions for prosperity. This pattern of success had been established by men like Azariah Pinney of Nevis, a merchant who became a successful sugar planter. Pinney's experience was not unique; early colonists universally dreamed of generating wealth with their trade, saving it, and then investing their money. While few actually succeeded in such attempts, colonial society recalled those examples that extolled the virtues of such a dream. Men like Pinney and his descendents accumulated wealth, obtained plantations, and filtered their way into the English gentry. (22) As a consequence, by the end of the Seven Years' War when Britain acquired Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica, potential investors assumed that these new localities would provide the same opportunities as their predecessors.

The business strategy of the Alexander Bartlet & George Campbell Company was to link its offices in Grenada, Tobago, and the Grenadines to the London metropole. Within the Ceded Islands, the partners focused their energies on St. George's, Grenada, the major commercial center in the region. The selection of St. George's proved especially fortuitous since Grenada stood at the center of the region's economic development. The port connected merchants of that island to the Grenadines to the east and Tobago to the west...