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Abstract:This article is about the wealth and material culture of the Jamaican elite during the age of abolition. The At Lyssons in eastern Jamaica it is still possible to find the broken remains of the grave of one of the wealthiest men to have lived in the British West Indies, or indeed in the whole of the British Empire. A marble plaque declares:Here lie the remains of the Honourable Simon Taylor, a loyal subject, a firm friend, and an honest man, who after an active life -during which he faithfully and ably filled the highest offices of civil and military duty in this island -died April 14th, 1813, aged 73.This epitaph was once part of a large and ornate monument, which stood on Taylor's Lyssons sugar estate and was arranged and paid for in 1814 by Sir Simon Richard Brissett Taylor, the British-based nephew of the deceased and the principal heir to his uncle's huge West India fortune.1 At around the same time, at the opposite end of Jamaica, the heirs to another plantation fortune were burying their father, John Cunningham. They also saw fit to create an epitaph, on a mural tablet in the parish church at the port town of Montego Bay.Cunningham's three surviving sons proclaimed that the 'Hon. John Cunningham' had 'lived in the greatest domestic happiness' and attained huge wealth along with 'exalted stations' of high office in Jamaican public life. Cunningham had died on 27 September 1812, aged 74. 2These monumental inscriptions offer telling, if heavily biased, impressions of the parallel lives and public stature of two of the most economically successful sugar magnates of their generation. The deaths of these two men also generated other sources, which offer further insights into their personal wealth and the material worlds that they had created and inhabited during the course of their lives. While preparations for interment and memorialisation went ahead, the executors appointed by their wills set about the task of putting the full extent and cash value of their personal property down on paper in two lengthy probate inventories. This article uses these documents to examine the extent, value and composition of the estates that Taylor and Cunningham left behind. Using other sources, including letters from the large surviving collection of Taylor's correspondence, it explores aspects of the material culture of a slaveholding society, examining some of the practices and attitudes that sustained and defined the Jamaican 'world of Atlantic slavery'. 3We still know surprisingly little about planter material culture in the Caribbean. To be as 'wealthy as a West Indian' was a proverbial saying by the end of the eighteenth century. 4 The material gains that allowed for the 'lavish personal consumption' of slaveholders and merchants were the ultimate raison d'être for British West Indian slavery, but our detailed understanding of white colonial wealth has tended to focus more on the methods of its creation than the modes of its consumption. 5 This article looks at elements of both but with emphasis on the latt...