... It requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand
pounds sterling to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of
success." Such an investment, he particularized, would procure and
establish as a going concern a plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100
acres each in provision crops, forage and woodland, together with the
appropriate buildings and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60
mules and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of L50 sterling
a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic
ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations of their time
for absentee investors.
[Footnote 9: Bryan Edwards, _History of the West Indies_, book 5, chap. 3.]
When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in Parliament he
learned "that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that
the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three
thousand pounds at the least."[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the
French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote: "The French colonists, whether
Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast
no wistful looks toward France.
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