] "Exactly. It's not explicit. Not only is it not explicit, but nobody in the ensuing centuries has actually managed to make a proper historical case for it, one way or another."

You speak of plantations in Antigua being run with free labour. I have never been able to find a verifiable reference that such places existed..

Almost every reference to Antigua speaks of the virtual collapse of the sugar industry following the abolition of slavery, and the return of most of the expatriate colonists to Britain...This does not deny that plantations run by free labour did not exist, but I think there is every reason to assume that they were not the norm...

If such plantations existed, surely it is more probable that they would have been run by resident landlords, perhaps men who had freed their slaves and chosen to pay them as free labourers? I find it difficult to imagine an absentee landlord like Sir T. managing to do this...anyway, we know that there were problems with his Antigua property and its profitability...

When I was a child in Australia, much was made of the fact that the canefields of Queensland were unique in being manned by white, free labour (although of course, attempts were made to enslave Pacific Islanders and even indigenous Australians to work them). Whether this claim of uniqueness is valid, it certainly does seem that there is an historical correlation between sugar plantations and slavery...

Free labour would have been a rarity, assuming it did exist in any meaningful numbers at all, and most freed slaves would have preferred domestic service to the back breaking work of the canefields. (Of course, the unfortunate cook to whom DeeMac refers, who had boiling water poured down her throat didn't fare any better than the field hands).

...and why should it bother readers to establish whether or not Sir Thomas owns slaves? I don't think it is necessarily to prove beyond doubt that he is a bad guy, but rather to illustrate the point that narrow personal morality and a pompous belief in one's own righteousness, the kind of certainty that will reject a daughter for ever, for example, in the belief that her character can never be redeemed, has little to do with issues of greater or more significant morality...