From the late eighteenth century the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions war the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807 parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the âfall of the planter classâ offering a variety of new approaches to the topic encompassing economic political cultural and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies. . Language: English