General Sir Edward Cust 1st Bart.

Cust is an example of one whose outlook is deeply enmeshed in the British imperial world of the C19th, because of his slave-owning, his military career, and because of his preoccupations, in the later 1830s and 1840s, with both the state and future of the West Indies including both forms of labour - indenture and immigration - and forms of colonial government. He was a contributor to debates about the questions of the appropriate forms of colonial government in the empire as a whole which followed the Durham Report (1839) and figure so largely in the mid-century. See for example his pamphlets Reflections on West India Affairs and The Colonies and Colonial Government.