Absentee ownership gave managers brutal autonomous power over slaves

Evidence

Philipeau’s letters highlight the paradoxes of life on the plantations of absentee owners. Although such plantations were not the majority—in the north, where they were most numerous, slightly less than half of those producing processed sugar were owned by absentees—they were among the largest and wealthiest. Absentee owners generally had a procureur in the colony to whom they had given their power of attorney to oversee their plantations, and who hired the gérants, or managers. The procureurs rarely visited the plantations, leaving the managers with enormous autonomy, which many exploited. One planter opined that of 100 plantations being run by managers, 95 were in ruins, while their managers had grown rich. Managers could steal plantation commodities, use the slaves for their own profit, and often get away with it. Slaves sometimes protested, as did Philipeau, and one group of slaves on a sugar plantation in the south declared in creole to an official: “We know we have to work for our master on his plantation, but we don’t have to work on our manager’s plantation.” But it took courage to complain, for masters were all too likely to take the word of a manager over that of a slave, and a manager who discovered such complaints had little to restrain him from inflicting brutal punishment. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 136

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Multinational managers disowned responsibility while their workers were beaten. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 545