ABSTRACT
The family histories of slave-owners and settlers offer one route into the connected histories. While slave-owners resident in the Caribbean tended to batten down the hatches and trust that they could defeat metropolitan abolitionists, the absentees, the men and women who lived in Britain but whose wealth derived in part or in whole from the plantations. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 provided double compensation to the slave-owners. Pro-slavers segued comfortably into supporting new forms of unfree labour and defending the rights of settlers as against those of indigenous peoples. Marryat's Canadian novel, The Settlers, published in 1844, was again a blueprint for British colonialism. The ending of slavery in the Caribbean may provide another set of linkages as slave-owning families relocated their human and financial capital to new parts of the world, concerned to maximize opportunities for making money and imperial futures. The ending of slavery had to mean the development of new forms of unfree labour.
