Planters, Merchants, and Slaves
Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820
As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men – men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious "Planters, Merchants, and Slaves", Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because – to speak bluntly – it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy.
Contents:
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Plantation Worlds
1. The Rise of the Large Integrated Plantation
2. Violence, White Solidarity, and the Rise of Planter Elites
3. The Wealth of the Plantations
4".A Prodigious Mine": Jamaica
5. The American Revolution and Plantation America
Epilogue: Slaves and Planters
Appendix: An Essay on Sources
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Trevor Burnard is professor in and head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of "Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire and Creole Gentlemen", as well as co-editor of "The Routledge History of Slavery".
Reviews
"Burnard gives us a commanding work of scholarly synthesis and layers it with original research to offer a provocative meditation on the meaning of plantation societies in the early modern Atlantic world. 'Planters, Merchants, and Slaves' draws the Chesapeake, Carolina Lowcountry, and British Caribbean into a single interpretive frame and, by doing so, highlights British Plantation America's enormous dynamism and significance" – S. Max Edelson, author of Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
"In this social, economic, and demographic history, Burnard brilliantly anatomizes the British plantation system and plantation slavery. His conspectus ranges over nearly two centuries, from Guyana to the Chesapeake. It bristles with insight and even finds new meaning in the American Revolution. Novice students and grizzled scholars alike will find much to appreciate in Burnard's pages" – J. R. McNeill, author of "Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914"
