Slavocracy

A slavocracy (from slave -ocracy) is a society primarily ruled by a class of slaveholders, such as those in the southern United States and their confederacy during the American Civil War. The term was initially coined in the 1830s by northern abolitionists as a term of disparagement and subsequently used in wider senses, including as a term for the planter class of such a society itself. Slavocracies are also sometimes known as plantocracies, after "planter" used as a term for the owners of plantations.

A number of European colonies in the New World were largely slavocracies, usually consisting of a small European settler population relying on a predominantly West African chattel slave population as well as smaller numbers of indentured servants, both European and non-European in origin. In the Caribbean, the slaves were primarily used to produce sugar, while in North America the slaves were primarily used to produce cotton. These proslavery societies attempted to resist the abolitionist movement and subsequently relied on freed black and poor white sharecroppers for labor following abolition.

One prominent organization largely representing and collectively funded by a number of British slavocracies was the "West India Interest", which lobbied the British parliament on behalf of planters. It is credited with delaying the abolition of the slave trade from the 1790s until 1806–1808 and then delaying emancipation into the 1820s and 1830s, extracting reparations for the lost "property" in a policy known as "amelioration".

See also

• Confederate States of America
• London Society of West India Planters and Merchants
• Slave Power, a term used by American abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s to argue that Southern agrarian interests wielded disproportionate political power in the United States
• Slavery in Brazil
• Sugar plantations in the Caribbean
• Maroon (people)
• American gentry
• Planter class

Sources

• B.W. Higman. "The West India Interest in Parliament," Historical Studies (1967), 13: pp. 1–19.
• See the historical journal: Plantation Society in the Americas for a host of pertinent articles.
• Steel, Mark James (PhD Dissertation). Power, Prejudice and Profit: the World View of the Jamaican Slaveowning Elite, 1788-1834, (University of Liverpool Press, Liverpool 1988).
• Luster, Robert Edward (PhD Dissertation). The Amelioration of the Slaves in the British Empire, 1790-1833 (New York University Press, 1998).