Today we step back inside the enterprise while it ran, the plantation, and we begin, as this series keeps beginning, with a document. It is the most complete record we possess of the men who actually ran the plantations, the middle managers of the system. Because here is what the plantation actually was, in business terms, the largest and most sophisticated private enterprise of its age. There were printed management manuals, Thistlewood’s own papers include a copy of Richard Beckford’sInstructions for overseers of sugar plantations. Caribbean sugar ran high throughput and high mortality, replacing the people it consumed.