Plantation Society in the Age of Revolution: Edward Long, Pierre-Victor Malouet and the Problem of Slave Government

This essay surveys the proposals of slavery reform advanced by two important figures of British and French imperial developments between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries: the administrators, planters, and proslavery thinkers Edward Long and Pierre-Victor Malouet. Long and Malouet applied modern political theory to the government of plantation society in Jamaica and Saint- Domingue. Their concerns about the practical difficulties of plantation management in an age of increasingly recurring revolts by the enslaved led them to formulate schemes of slavery amelioration which, by transforming the slaves into perpetual servants, would preserve the order of colonial society.