Simon Taylor of Jamaica

Major resident slave-owner in Jamaica, dying there in 1813. Brother of Sir John Taylor bart. and uncle of Simon Richard Brissett Taylor and Anna Susanna Taylor (each of whom q.v.). His personalty at death of £806,337 would have placed him among the top two dozen or so richest Britons dying in the first half of the 19th century.

Simon Taylor contributed £10 to the University of Pennsylvania following Dr John Morgan's fundraising tour of the West Indies in 1772-1773.

Simon Taylor has been the subject of extensive work by Christer Petley, including 'Plantations and homes: the material culture of the early nineteenth century Jamaican elite', Slavery & Abolition vol. 35 issue 3 (September 2014) pp. 437-457 (his personalty is shown at p. 440); the Slavery and Revolution website which carries the Letters of Simon Taylor, https://blog.soton.ac.uk/slaveryandrevolution/category/the-letters/ [accessed 03/03/2017]; Christer Petley, ‘Taylor, Simon (1739–1813)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2013 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/104876, accessed 7 March 2017]; and Christer Petley, White Fury: a Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford: OUP, 2018), which includes at p. 53 a summary of the number and value of the enslaved people attached to each of 12 estates or pens included in Simon Taylor's probate inventory, on which LBS has drawn under each of the estates associated with Taylor at the time of his death. Of the 12 estates or pens shown in the probate inventory, 8 are recorded as under Taylor's ownership, Batchelor Hall Pen (St Thomas-in-the-East) belonged to the Arcdeckne family) and three have not been identified in the Accounts Produce, Slave Registers or the compensation records: Morant Bay Pen (St Thomas-in-the-East); Anderson Pen (St Mary, which was reported with Flint River in some years); and Prospect Pen (St Andrew, described by Petley as Taylor's home outside Kingston) (the two Prospect Pens in St Andrew currently captured by LBS do not appear to fit with the size of the enslaved labour force - 70 enslaved people - in Simon Taylor's probate inventory for Prospect Pen). W.D. Rubinstein Who were the rich? Vols. 1 and 2 (second edition, 2017) shows 15 millionaires dying in Britain between 1809 and 1859.

William Smith, Joseph Hopkinson, and Plunket Fleeson Glentworth, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Minute Books, Volume 2, 1768-1779 p. 76, entry for 13/12/1773. Note amounts are in Jamaican currency.