Bright-Meyler Papers

The documents collected here illuminate the conduct of British trade and investments in the Caribbean when slavery was at its height and Jamaica was the wealthiest territory in Britain's Atlantic empire. Pertaining to the commercial and plantation interests of two Bristol families connected through marriage and business, the documents include correspondence, wills and inventories, partnership agreements, insurance policies and property deeds. The introduction addresses issues of the slave trade and sugar cultivation, capital accumulation, the ways in which a West India fortune was created, the risk environment of the Caribbean, and social, economic and demographic conditions in eighteenth-century Bristol and Jamaica. A valuable source for historians of the Georgian period, this volume shows that British merchants connected with the West Indies were centrally concerned with improvement, independence, and social mobility.