Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves PDF Author: Trevor Burnard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628624X
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. 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 measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. 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.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves PDF Author: Trevor Burnard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628624X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

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. 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 measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. 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.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356425
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name PDF Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher: Icon Books
ISBN: 1848314132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Between Slavery and Capitalism

Between Slavery and Capitalism PDF Author: Martin Ruef
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691173591
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
"At the center of the upheavals brought by emancipation in the American South was the economic and social transition from slavery to modern capitalism. In Between Slavery and Capitalism, Martin Ruef examines how this institutional change affected individuals, organizations, and communities in the late nineteenth century, as blacks and whites alike learned to navigate the shoals between two different economic worlds ... In the aftermath of the Civil War, uncertainty was a pervasive feature of life in the South, affecting the economic behavior and social status of former slaves, Freedmen's Bureau agents, planters, merchants, and politicians, among others. Emancipation brought fundamental questions: How should emancipated slaves be reimbursed in wage contracts? What occupations and class positions would be open to blacks and whites? What forms of agricultural tenure could persist? And what paths to economic growth would be viable? To understand the escalating uncertainty of the postbellum era, Ruef draws on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including several thousand interviews with former slaves, letters, labor contracts, memoirs, survey responses, census records, and credit reports. Through a resolutely comparative approach, Between Slavery and Capitalism identifies profound changes between the economic institutions of the Old and New South and sheds new light on how the legacy of emancipation continues to affect political discourse and race and class relations today."--Publisher's Web site.

The Making of New World Slavery

The Making of New World Slavery PDF Author: Robin Blackburn
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859841952
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
At the time when European powers colonized the Americas, the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive, why did they sponsor the construction of racial slavery in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—successfully—to batten on this commerce, and—unsuccessfully—to regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, premised on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.

The Economics of Emancipation

The Economics of Emancipation PDF Author: Kathleen Mary Butler
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469639793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The British Slavery Abolition Act of 1834 provided a grant of u20 million to compensate the owners of West Indian slaves for the loss of their human 'property.' In this first comparative analysis of the impact of the award on the colonies, Mary Butler focuses on Jamaica and Barbados, two of Britain's premier sugar islands. The Economics of Emancipation examines the effect of compensated emancipation on colonial credit, landownership, plantation land values, and the broader spheres of international trade and finance. Butler also brings the role and status of women as creditors and plantation owners into focus for the first time. Through her analysis of rarely used chancery court records, attorneys' letters, and compensation returns, Butler underscores the fragility of the colonial economies of Jamaica and Barbados, illustrates the changing relationship between planters and merchants, and offers new insights into the social and political history of the West Indies and Britain.

Slaves and Highlanders

Slaves and Highlanders PDF Author: David Alston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781474427319
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Explores the prominent role of Highland Scots in the slavery industry of the cotton, sugar and coffee plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries. Longlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize.

Forgotten Time

Forgotten Time PDF Author: John C. Willis
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813919713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas PDF Author: Robert L. Paquette
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198758815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.

The Sugar Masters

The Sugar Masters PDF Author: Richard Follett
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807132470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Focusing on the master-slave relationship in Louisiana's antebellum sugarcane country, The Sugar Masters explores how a modern, capitalist mind-set among planters meshed with old-style paternalistic attitudes to create one of the South's most insidiously oppressive labor systems. As author Richard Follett vividly demonstrates, the agricultural paradise of Louisiana's thriving sugarcane fields came at an unconscionable cost to slaves. Thanks to technological and business innovations, sugar planters stood as models of capitalist entrepreneurship by midcentury. But above all, labor management was the secret to their impressive success. Follett explains how in exchange for increased productivity and efficiency they offered their slaves a range of incentives, such as greater autonomy, improved accommodations, and even financial remuneration. These material gains, however, were only short term. According to Follett, many of Louisiana's sugar elite presented their incentives with a "facade of paternal reciprocity" that seemingly bound the slaves' interests to the apparent goodwill of the masters, but in fact, the owners sought to control every aspect of the slaves's lives, from reproduction to discretionary income. Slaves responded to this display of paternalism by trying to enhance their rights under bondage, but the constant bargaining process invariably led to compromises on their part, and the grueling production pace never relented. The only respite from their masters' demands lay in fashioning their own society, including outlets for religion, leisure, and trade. Until recently, scholars have viewed planters as either paternalistic lords who eschewed marketplace values or as entrepreneurs driven to business success. Follett offers a new view of the sugar masters as embracing both the capitalist market and a social ideology based on hierarchy, honor, and paternalism. His stunning synthesis of empirical research, demographics study, and social and cultural history sets a new standard for this subject.