Jesse Foot (1744–1826).

A defence of the planters in the West-Indies; comprised in four arguments I. On comparative humanity, II. On comparative slavery; III. On the African slave trade, and IV. On the condition of negroes in the West-Indies.

London: J. Debrett. 1792.

8°, iv, 101 pp.

Later half calf with marbled sides, gold-tooled title on spine. New endpapers. 

Second edition, issued in the same year as the first, of this notorious defence of slavery in the Caribbean by the surgeon and prolific medical author Jessé Foot, later Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and biographer of Sir John Hunter.
Foot spent the years 1766–1769 on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, where he practised medicine on a plantation and later claimed to have been responsible for the “care of 2,000 negroes annually.”
Foot’s pamphlet, written amid the heated British debates on the abolition of the slave trade, seeks to justify the system of plantation slavery in moral and economic terms. His claim that one of the advantages enjoyed by the enslaved population was that they “live in a climate where the sun always shines” (p. 32) typifies the pamphlet’s level of argument and its tone of complacent paternalism.

A scarce and significant example of pro-slavery propaganda, revealing the colonial mindset that abolitionists such as Clarkson and Wilberforce were working to dismantle.

Only one copy recorded at auction (1948), also a second edition. Another issue appeared the same year under the title The Third Edition, with an altered title-page.

Condition: spine slightly rubbed. Title-page slightly discoloured along the outer margin. Otherwise in very good condition.

Reference: ESTC No.T6199; Sabin 25002 (first edition).

Michael Bevan, ‘Foot, Jesse (1744–1826)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9803, accessed 13 April 2017].