Myths of the Plantation Society

Myths of the Plantation Society PDF Author: Nathalie Dessens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813026824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
"A provocative explanation of how differences in slavery and later abolition movements produced different responses in post-abolition societies and contributed significantly to the creation of the southern myth."--Sylvia Frey, Tulane University Providing new insights into the origins of benevolent myths about the Old South, Nathalie Dessens compares slave systems of the Caribbean and the American South from the early days of European colonization to the abolition of slavery. Her uncommon combination of historical and literary scholarship in a broad comparative framework explains why these two slave societies of the Americas developed so differently. She shows that underneath apparently obvious similarities, evolution of southern society and its West Indian counterpart diverged markedly, notably during debates over the existence of slavery. In both regions, climate and soil conditions favored the development of plantations that relied almost exclusively on the cultivation of such crops as cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar and on the importation of other consumer goods. These agricultural economies required extensive manpower, and all colonial societies experienced a constant labor shortage. Both regions readily adopted the system of slavery. Dessens contrasts the institution in the West Indies and the American South, from codification and implementation to abolition and its aftermath. She also describes differences in both regions connected to their geography and varying status as territories. Her examination illuminates the emergence of a cultural distinction of the American South. Both before and after emancipation, southerners found themselves defending their entire civilization, and the myth of benevolent plantation life--complete with paternal masters and contented slaves--was born. Southern fiction writers added their voices to the defense and wrote historical novels that glorified the Golden Age of the South. Dessens asserts that no parallel mythologizing existed in West Indian society, where plantation life was debunked rather than celebrated. In addition to primary sources such as diaries and slave narratives, scholars will be especially fascinated by Dessens' use of travel narratives, a fashionable genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, some written by American colonists visiting other colonies of the Western hemisphere and others written by Europeans visiting the American colonies. Nathalie Dessens is professor of American history and civilization at the University of Toulouse, France.

Myths of the Plantation Society

Myths of the Plantation Society PDF Author: Nathalie Dessens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813026824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A provocative explanation of how differences in slavery and later abolition movements produced different responses in post-abolition societies and contributed significantly to the creation of the southern myth."--Sylvia Frey, Tulane University Providing new insights into the origins of benevolent myths about the Old South, Nathalie Dessens compares slave systems of the Caribbean and the American South from the early days of European colonization to the abolition of slavery. Her uncommon combination of historical and literary scholarship in a broad comparative framework explains why these two slave societies of the Americas developed so differently. She shows that underneath apparently obvious similarities, evolution of southern society and its West Indian counterpart diverged markedly, notably during debates over the existence of slavery. In both regions, climate and soil conditions favored the development of plantations that relied almost exclusively on the cultivation of such crops as cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar and on the importation of other consumer goods. These agricultural economies required extensive manpower, and all colonial societies experienced a constant labor shortage. Both regions readily adopted the system of slavery. Dessens contrasts the institution in the West Indies and the American South, from codification and implementation to abolition and its aftermath. She also describes differences in both regions connected to their geography and varying status as territories. Her examination illuminates the emergence of a cultural distinction of the American South. Both before and after emancipation, southerners found themselves defending their entire civilization, and the myth of benevolent plantation life--complete with paternal masters and contented slaves--was born. Southern fiction writers added their voices to the defense and wrote historical novels that glorified the Golden Age of the South. Dessens asserts that no parallel mythologizing existed in West Indian society, where plantation life was debunked rather than celebrated. In addition to primary sources such as diaries and slave narratives, scholars will be especially fascinated by Dessens' use of travel narratives, a fashionable genre in the 18th and 19th centuries, some written by American colonists visiting other colonies of the Western hemisphere and others written by Europeans visiting the American colonies. Nathalie Dessens is professor of American history and civilization at the University of Toulouse, France.

The First Black Slave Society

The First Black Slave Society PDF Author: Hilary Beckles
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766405854
Category : Barbadians
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Book describes the brutal Black slave society and plantation system of Barbados and explains how this slave chattel model was perfected by the British and exported to Jamaica and South Carolina for profit. There is special emphasis on the role of the concept of white supremacy in shaping social structure and economic relations that allowed slavery to continue. The book concludes with information on how slavery was finally outlawed in Barbados, in spite of white resistance.

Plantation Society and Race Relations

Plantation Society and Race Relations PDF Author: Thomas J. Durant
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Analyzes the social organization of slave plantations and its influence on race relations and social inequality in Southern plantation society and in today's America.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves PDF Author: Trevor Burnard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022663924X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
"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."--

Persistent Poverty

Persistent Poverty PDF Author: George L. Beckford
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789766400743
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
This is a revised edition of a seminal work on the nature of underdevelopment. It includes a new foreword and appendixes on the significance of plantations to Third World economies and the contribution that George Beckford made to Caribbean economic thought.

What is a Slave Society?

What is a Slave Society? PDF Author: Noel Emmanuel Lenski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107144892
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527

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Book Description
Interrogates the traditional binary 'slave societies'/'societies with slaves' as a paradigm for understanding the global practice of slaveholding.

Sugar in the Blood

Sugar in the Blood PDF Author: Andrea Stuart
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030796115X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex PDF Author: Philip D. Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521629430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Over a period of several centuries, Europeans developed an intricate system of plantation agriculture overseas that was quite different from the agricultural system used at home. Though the plantation complex centered on the American tropics, its influence was much wider. Much more than an economic order for the Americas, the plantation complex had an important place in world history. These essays concentrate on the intercontinental impact.

American Sugar Kingdom

American Sugar Kingdom PDF Author: César J. Ayala
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807867977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Engaging conventional arguments that the persistence of plantations is the cause of economic underdevelopment in the Caribbean, this book focuses on the discontinuities in the development of plantation economies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. Cesar Ayala analyzes and compares the explosive growth of sugar production in the three nations following the War of 1898--when the U.S. acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico--to show how closely the development of the Spanish Caribbean's modern economic and social class systems is linked to the history of the U.S. sugar industry during its greatest period of expansion and consolidation. Ayala examines patterns of investment and principal groups of investors, interactions between U.S. capitalists and native planters, contrasts between new and old regions of sugar monoculture, the historical formation of the working class on sugar plantations, and patterns of labor migration. In contrast to most studies of the Spanish Caribbean, which focus on only one country, his account places the history of U.S. colonialism in the region, and the history of plantation agriculture across the region, in comparative perspective.

Generations of Captivity

Generations of Captivity PDF Author: Ira Berlin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020832
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a singular vision of slavery, one fixed in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew cotton, resided in the deep South, and subscribed to Christianity. Here, however, Berlin offers a dynamic vision, a major reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, forced migration, war, and ultimately, emancipation. Berlin's understanding of the processes that continually transformed the lives of slaves makes Generations of Captivity essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of antebellum America. Connecting the Charter Generation to the development of Atlantic society in the seventeenth century, the Plantation Generation to the reconstruction of colonial society in the eighteenth century, the Revolutionary Generation to the Age of Revolutions, and the Migration Generation to American expansionism in the nineteenth century, Berlin integrates the history of slavery into the larger story of American life. He demonstrates how enslaved black people, by adapting to changing circumstances, prepared for the moment when they could seize liberty and declare themselves the Freedom Generation. This epic story, told by a master historian, provides a rich understanding of the experience of African-American slaves, an experience that continues to mobilize American thought and passions today.