William Hardin Burnley - State of the Experiment of Negro Emancipation - 1842 (Signed)

Title

Observations on the Present Condition of the Island of Trinidad and the Actual State of the Experiment of Negro Emancipation 

Author

William Hardin Burnley

Year

1842

Publisher

Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London 

Description

Only known existing presentation copy signed by the author available for private acquisition.

First edition of an exceptionally scarce and controversial work by William Hardin Burnley (1780–1850), the largest slave owner in Trinidad and one of the most powerful figures in the British Caribbean during the transition from slavery to free labour. A wealthy sugar planter and member of the island’s Council of Government, Burnley here offers a revealing and unapologetic defence of planter interests in the aftermath of emancipation - merging economic argument, political advocacy, and racial ideology in one of the most forthright articulations of colonial planter thought ever printed.

Written amid the crisis years following the 1834 Abolition Act and the failure of apprenticeship, Observations captures a pivotal moment as the West Indian economy pivoted toward indentured immigration. The work remains a key primary source for scholars of slavery, British imperial reform, and the moral contradictions of post-emancipation policy.

This book is inscribed to Lord Eliot, M.P., who - based on parliamentary records and contextual evidence - is believed to be Edward Granville Eliot (1798–1877), later 3rd Earl of St Germans, a Treasury minister and future Colonial Secretary deeply enmeshed in the political debates over emancipation. Eliot publicly presented anti-slavery petitions, his voting record consistently opposed measures condemning colonial brutality, including the notorious Jamaican slave trials and the Demerara missionary case. Such positions aligned him with the moderate Tory establishment that sought to balance moral reform with protection of imperial economic interests.

At the time Burnley was in London representing the Trinidad plantocracy, lobbying Parliament and seeking allies among figures like Eliot - men of influence who were receptive to the planter cause. The presentation of this book would therefore have been a strategic gesture: a planter’s direct appeal to a sympathetic policymaker at the very heart of Britain’s imperial conscience. This book is a crucial primary source that not only illuminates the lived realities of plantation slavery and the debates surrounding abolition in the British Empire, but also itself played a role in that history, serving as a link between the principal actors shaping this pivotal period in history.

177 pp.

Condition

Newly rebound with fresh endpapers showing light abrasions; pages generally well-preserved, with minor edge wear mainly to the final leaves which do not affect content; minor paper residue on second page.