Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) was a White English merchant, hatter, and animal rights activist who lived in Barbados for several years in the late 1660s. Upon his return to England, he became a sugar merchant, helping West Indian planters sell their merchandize. This chapter is a selection from his 1684 book Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies. Despite his business ties to planters, Tryon criticizes West Indian slavery incisively and argues for racial equality. The s…
Read moreThomas Tryon (1634–1703) was a White English merchant, hatter, and animal rights activist who lived in Barbados for several years in the late 1660s. Upon his return to England, he became a sugar merchant, helping West Indian planters sell their merchandize. This chapter is a selection from his 1684 book Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies. Despite his business ties to planters, Tryon criticizes West Indian slavery incisively and argues for racial equality. The selection is from the second part of the treatise, which is titled “The Negroes’ Complaint of their Hard Servitude, and the Cruelties Practised upon them by divers [i.e., several] of their Masters professing Christianity in the West-Indian Plantations.” It is written in the voice of presumably fictional, unnamed enslaved Black people who complain first to God and then to enslavers about their unjust treatment.
