In 1786, Edwin Lascelles supported the publication of an influential treatise on proper plantation management. As the absentee proprietor of numerous West Indian plantations and the leader of one of England's most influential families, he aimed to blunt abolitionist criticism by ameliorating slaves' living conditions. Almost 50 years later, his successor, Henry Lascelles, speaking before an august gathering of London bankers, merchants, and plantation owners, insisted that “a progressive state of improvement” had been achieved. In Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834, S. D. Smith assesses the degree to which this was true with regard to the Lascelles family's own slaves.

As in every historian's dream, this project began with the discovery of a black metal box filled with long-forgotten papers. In this case, the box, hidden away for years in a dusty corner of Harewood House, the Lascelles's monumental Yorkshire country house, contained a trove of documents detailing the family's Caribbean landholdings. To make sense of this remarkable find, the trustees of the charitable organization that oversees the estate sought assistance from Smith and other historians at the University of York, launching a major research initiative into the Lascelles's history. In light of growing public interest in Britain's historical involvement with slavery, the trustees particularly sought to learn more about the family's activities as slave traders and slave owners. Although profits from the Lascelles slave plantations had helped build and furnish Harewood's grand halls, little was known about this chapter in the family's history. Although the recovered papers proved informative, Smith soon encountered an unexpected difficulty. Many of the related business records, once housed at the family's London firm, had burned during the Blitz. While candid about the fragmentary character of the extant archives, Smith resourcefully employs a range of methodologies in his book to glean as much information as possible.

Before tackling the question of how the Lascelles slaves fared over time, Smith first investigates the foundations of the family's fortune in the West Indies. In an interesting twist, he considers their tremendous economic success in light of the dismal failure of the Gedney Clarkes, their close business associates. This proves a very potent and useful comparison. Contrasting the two families' different approaches to land acquisition and capital investment over the course of several generations, Smith vividly reveals the high stakes involved in the risky, often volatile economy of the British West Indies in the eighteenth century.

Most West Indian proprietors relied on easy access to credit to buy plantations and slaves, gambling on their expectation that—with enough land and labor—the resulting crops of sugar and other tropical produce would eventually cover their obligations and yield hefty returns. As new regions in the Caribbean opened up to the British, however, easy credit also spurred a rash of land speculation. Smith's detailed investigation of the Lascelles's role as lenders sheds new light on the inner workings of the resulting “labyrinth of debt.” Launching full-bore into developing regions, the Gedney Clarkes borrowed huge sums from them and others to buy plantations and slaves in Demerara, Essequibo, and, after the Seven Years War, on the Ceded Island. Poor judgment and a series of misfortunes—including the financial crisis of 1772, weak returns on their sugar plantations, and charges of embezzlement against Gedney Clarke, Jr., in his role as a Barbadian customs inspector—contributed ultimately to the family's bankruptcy and disgrace.

The Lascelles family, meanwhile, acted more conservatively and indirectly as financiers, lending capital for others to invest and holding mortgages for them in the form of slaves and land. Gradually, they acquired vast landholdings after the default of overencumbered clients, including the Gedney Clarkes. The family immediately sold off nonviable plantations, consolidated smaller properties, and took steps to maximize the efficiency and productivity of each of their enslaved labor forces. Consequently, as Smith describes it, “the Gedney Clarkes watched their fortune slip away, [while] the Lascelles deployed theirs to buy a status that transcended wealth” (p. 138).

Given the complex, far-flung, and often multigenerational nature of eighteenth-century business, unraveling patterns of credit and capital accumulation is notoriously difficult. Along with historians such as David Hancock, Kenneth Morgan, and Trevor Burnard, Smith adds a welcome level of nuance to our understanding of the financial mechanisms and interpersonal relationships that contributed to the formation of the circum-Atlantic economy. Whereas others have emphasized the growing integration of that economy, however, Smith concludes that the Lascelles, as paragons of “gentry capitalism” who accumulated great wealth by pouring money into risky Caribbean investments, exemplify “how poorly integrated and regulated the Atlantic world remained during the first half of the eighteenth century” (p. 357).

Having contextualized the Lascelles's acquisition of slave plantations on Barbados, Jamaica, and Tobago, Smith devotes his last two chapters to the enslaved workers who lived and worked on those estates. The limitations of his sources become apparent in the first of these chapters as he uses quantitative analysis to develop a demographic profile of the Lascelles's slave populations over time, focusing on sex ratios, birth rates, and average life expectancies. Despite minor variations, his conclusions largely conform to previous studies of slavery in these colonies. Returning to the specific question of whether the Lascelles acted in any meaningful way to improve their slaves' living conditions, Smith then analyzes his data to see if any positive demographic outcomes (such as improved longevity or fecundity) might be discernable. So, for example, although the 1786 treatise recommended upgrading the health care and diet of enslaved children, he found that the Lascelles slaves in this age group nevertheless continued to suffer high mortality. The overall slave population also seemed to have relatively low life expectancies. Smith concludes that this “emphasises how limited the achievements of amelioration were in practice” (p. 286). Yet given the limited and largely circumstantial evidence, it is difficult to establish what management practices the Lascelles employed, much less what effect, if any, they may have had.

The following chapter, entitled “Between Black and White,” offers a more impressionistic view of interracial relationships during this period, focusing on the interactions of the Lascelles and their white representatives with Africans, free and enslaved, in different contexts. Most fascinating are the accounts of the Lascelles's engagements with enslaved servants brought from the Caribbean to London and, more indirectly, with their West Indian tenants, many of whom were former slaves or free persons of color. Quite apart from their role as slave holders, family members also engaged in the slave trade. This entailed close personal cooperation with African slave dealers such as John Currantee. Regarding the Lascelles's actual treatment of their slaves, or their attitudes towards them as masters from afar, frustratingly little evidence remains.

The book's main weakness is that it shifts abruptly from an intimate portrait of the Lascelles family to a very abstract discussion of their slaves. This disconnect, due in part to unavoidable evidentiary limitations, is exacerbated by the space Smith devotes to explaining his methodology (a discussion that might have been better relegated to his footnotes), rather than more fully exploring the implications of the some of the subtle, but suggestive variations uncovered by his demographic analysis.

Although much about the Lascelles slaves remains obscure—only partially retrievable from the paper scraps that recorded their existence but little about their lives—this book enhances our understanding of those often behind-the-scenes actors who helped finance the slave system in the British West Indies. The resulting micro-history is a revealing account, spanning three generations, of this very important family, their associates, and their contributions to the Atlantic economy. That slavery contributed much to the Lascelles's fortune and influence, so impressively celebrated at Harewood House, is also laid plain, sweeping away the collective amnesia that has surrounded that unassailable fact.