] 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..

I'll agree that they were not the majority. But I did read that pamphlet, and I've read it elsewhere. Can't give you reference though..I don't own the books.Give me a week and I'll see if I can get the books on ILL again....

] 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.

That I will agree with, except that the sugar collapse wasn't caused by slavery, but by world market slumps (and the War),by genetic failure of the new "superbreed" of sugar plant that had been introduced, and by soil exhaustion (which had killed off the plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, etc, fifty years before.)

If JA meant us to consider Antigua specifically, then the Antiguan collapse should be taken into account. But that brings up the question of whether she wanted her readers to consider Antigua particularly, or whether it was just a generalisation, or even a deliberate red herring, and she was concerning herself with a different place, or no particular place at all. And we don't know the answers to those questions, do we? So far in the argument, I have been assuming that she did mean Antigua specifically (after all, she was the daughter of an Antiguan plantation trustee).If Antigua is a "generic slave island", then Sir Thomas is a "generic slave owner" and is supposed to be viewed as a stereotype. In that way, generic slave owning is bad, therefore Sir Thomas must be bad, because generic plantations must be run by generic slaves. However, I think anyone who assumes these generic connections is on very shaky ground. JA always maintained tha ther characters were her own invention, and not based on any particular person or persons, so to assume they are generic is going against what she purportedly claimed herself.

anyway, we know that there were problems with his Antigua property and its profitability...

Yes, and that is all we do know.

] 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

Can you sing the "Cane Cutter's Lament", Margaret? It starts:

"How I suffer'd Grief and Pain
On the Isis cutting cane..."

and ends:

"I'm goin' away from this lousy place,
I'll cut no more for the bugger!
He can stand in the mud that's as red as blood
And carry his own flamin' sugar!"'

] Free labour would have been a rarity, assuming it did exist in any meaningful numbers at all,

Yes, I think it was rare. But it is documented, and the main push behind ending slavery was because slaves were not as profitable as free labourers. As Linden has stated before, it was this argument that actually got the anti-slavery bill passed. How would they have known that if non-slave plantations didn't exist at all?

] ...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 ..

Right. Again, my own personal belief is that if you judge MP on the basis of slavery then you are missing the point. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Sir Thomas may be a bad man, but not because he's probably/possibly/definitely/defintely not a slaveowner who mistreated his slaves.