Should we have a category for people who helped finance plantations?

Question

I have found details of a number of wealthy people in London who were prepared to offer mortgages to plantation owners when they got into financial difficulty.   They may not have been owners themselves and they may have never left London but they made a profit from their investments.   Could we have a category for them,  perhaps  England: Financier of Slavery?   Details of mortgages are on the UCL database https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/

Comments

What would be the purpose of such a category?

---

I'm not an expert but I do note, with accuracy, that the term Plantation didn't always mean that the northern colonies Plantations were managed using slave labor. For example in the Province of Maine, before it became a State in 1820, tens of thousands of acres were sold to investors as "Plantations" in preparation for natural resource exploitation. The Plantation designation remained even after state-hood was granted and I believe it remains today. I've seen the same arrangements in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after the British assumed control but those northern provinces weren't anti-slavery like Maine so they might serve as relevent examples; but, detailed investigation is probably warrented.

---

It is quite easy to research New Brunswick and Nova Scotia history especially with regard to slavery.

Yes slavery had been permitted by the French government prior to their 1759 defeat. And continued until the early 1800s.

https://archives.gnb.ca/exhibits/forthavoc/html/Slave-in-Canada.aspx?culture=en-CA

However there were no 'plantations' as seen in many parts of the American colonies, and in the United States at later dates.

Most of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have a very short growing season, the ground is mostly rock and even today farming is difficult due to climate and lack of soil. The practicality of housing, feeding and clothing slaves during lengthy winters meant that the costs of slave owning made it unprofitable in such a cold climate.  

Plantation can also refer to the plantation of Ireland in the 1600s.

Answer 1

Any categories we create for slavery should point us to people or documents that help us connect enslaved ancestors to their descendants--anything that will help us put people into community groups. I'm not sure a category like this would be of benefit since it wouldn't lead directly to a document or document set for anyone in direct contact with the slaves. However, if there is a list of names out there of people who were involved in financing, a space page might be a good way to go and categorize the space page by location. There were a lot of people in the USA who gave out loans, using other people's slaves as collateral. That person is only significant to us if they ended up taking the slave as payment on a defaulted loan and we would only know that if someone scours through county level legal documents. So really, it's more benefit for us if we go through an entire county's legal books front to back. I imagine for England, it's going to be the same story.

Comments

Exactly right. Slaves are often mentioned in financial, tax, and insurance records. For example, I was once going through a county deed record book and found mention of a tax lien on a particular slave.  In other words, if the person didn't pay his taxes, they were going to take his slave and auction him off to pay the tax bill.

---

Yes, I upvoted this answer because categories are meant to group people for a genealogical research purpose. They're not meant as tags to make a statement about the person. Some existing categories are debatably useful, but that's another discussion.

Just because a category isn't a good public category doesn't mean a topic isn't interesting, or worth studying. But a space page is possibly better suited to the use case.

And if you're doing a particular piece of research  for yourself (not as part of an existing project for example) you can also create personal categories: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Personal_Categories

Answer 2

Sounds like this is something that bankers, investors and merchants would have done in the course of their business.  The profile you link just states he was part owner of 6 mortgages in the West Indies.  So I wouldn't even consider him for a category as you describe, bankers and insurers did this sort of thing routinely.

Answer 3

As others have said in this & other threads - both the purpose of the category and the boundaries for it would need to be crystal clear. What time period, is it only relevant to slavery, etc. Plantations existed (still exist) in many locations and in many time periods and many had no connection to slavery. And financing of slavery related activity was not restricted to plantations.

Answer 4

Of course there were also plantations in Ireland, some also financed from London. Would you include these? If not, you need to be more precise in your terminology.

And what about Dutch financers of Dutch colonies where slavery was also widespread? Would they be included?