The London Society of West India Planters and Merchants was an organization established to represent the views of the British West Indian plantocracy, i.e. the ruling class who owned and ran the slave-based plantations in what is now the Caribbean. The organization played a major role in resisting the abolition of the slave trade and that of slavery itself. The Society was formed in 1780, and brought together three different groups: British sugar merchants, absentee planters and colonial agents.