Slave Owner and Paternalist: Sir William Young (1749-1815) in England and the Caribbean

An account of the life and ideas of Sir William Young, a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery, who used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system.

This book charts the life and ideas of Sir William Young, owner of enslaved people on Antigua, St Vincent and Tobago and a leading opponent of the abolition of slavery. It outlines how he used the rhetoric of paternalism to argue that slavery could be ameliorated to become a benign system, akin to the paternalism which he worked towards in rural England, and contrasts his aims width his failure to implement them. It considers his place in the British elite - country gentleman, active back-bench MP and a man of learning - and examines his activity in attempting to improve conditions for the rural English poor. It explores his eventual financial failure, which included the loss of both his West Indian and his English estates, and his last years as Governor of Tobago. William Young was a considerable figure in both the world of the Caribbean, source of his wealth, and the world of London and the English countryside, where he spent that wealth. Young’s doctrines of paternalism, unreal and self-serving as they may have been, were widely accepted by the British upper classes.

P. J. Marshall was Lecturer, Reader and Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College, London, 1959-93 and President Royal Historical Society, 1996-2000. Books published include: East India Fortunes (1976); Bengal: The British Bridgehead (1988); edited, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii, The Eighteenth Century (1998); The Making and Unmaking of Empires (2005); Remaking the British Atlantic (2012); and Edmund Burke and the British Empire in West Indies (2019).