In 1807, faced with the imminent abolition of the slave trade, Simon Taylor wrote from Kingston to his nephew in England complaining that the British government had been ‘for years back using every means they have been able to ruin the colonies in the West Indies’. He remarked that he and his father had worked hard to improve the Taylor family properties in Jamaica and that they had never done business of ‘any kind whatever but what was consistent to the law by which we were inveigled by royal proclamations grants and acts of the legislature’. In Taylor's view, abolition meant that this compact between the British state and planters in the Caribbean had been torn up. In keeping with broader proslavery arguments, he presented abolition of the slave trade as an act that would sow the seeds of revolution among enslaved people in the Caribbean and damage his ability to make profits, leaving him to ‘run the risque of being massacred and have no compensation for my losses’. Taylor even contemplated leaving the British empire altogether and emigrating to the United States. His reactions clearly reflect a significant transformation in the relationship between slaveholders in Jamaica and the metropole that occurred during the era of abolition: the political influence of slaveholders in the British empire was in sharp decline, prompting a bitter and increasingly radical response from Caribbean colonists.

Men like Taylor saw the rise of British abolitionism and reformist imperial policies as threatening to their interests in a number of ways. They worried for their material investments, but they were also anxious about the ways in which metropolitan ideas and outside calls for reform could disrupt the social world of Jamaica. This helped to open up a fundamental constitutional disagreement between slaveholders in Jamaica and the government in London. As Andrew O'shaughnessy has argued, for most of the eighteenth century, West Indian colonists denied that their local legislatures had any claim to equality with the imperial parliament. Indeed, their ‘recognition of parliamentary sovereignty separated them from the mainland colonies’ during the revolutionary crisis of the 1770s.