Tobacco And Slaves

Download or read book Tobacco and Slaves written by Allan Kulikoff and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tobacco and Slaves is a major reinterpretation of the economic and political transformation of Chesapeake society from 1680 to 1800. Building upon massive archival research in Maryland and Virginia, Allan Kulikoff provides the most comprehensive study to date of changing social relations--among both blacks and whites--in the eighteenth-century South. He links his arguments about class, gender, and race to the later social history of the South and to larger patterns of American development. Allan Kulikoff is professor of history at Northern Illinois University and author of The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism.

Download or read book The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism written by Allan Kulikoff and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Kulikoff's provocative new book traces the rural origins and growth of capitalism in America, challenging earlier scholarship and charting a new course for future studies in history and economics. Kulikoff argues that long before the explosive growth of cities and big factories, capitalism in the countryside changed our society- the ties between men and women, the relations between different social classes, the rhetoric of the yeomanry, slave migration, and frontier settlement. He challenges the received wisdom that associates the birth of capitalism wholly with New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and show how studying the critical market forces at play in farm and village illuminates the defining role of the yeomen class in the origins of capitalism.

Download or read book White Cargo written by Don Jordan and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-03-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain's American colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock. Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history. This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.

Download or read book Slave Counterpoint written by Philip D. Morgan and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--their social relations, their family and kin ties, and the major symbolic dimensions of life: language, play, and religion. He provides a balanced appreciation for the oppressiveness of bondage and for the ability of slaves to shape their lives, showing that, whatever the constraints, slaves contributed to the making of their history. Victims of a brutal, dehumanizing system, slaves nevertheless strove to create order in their lives, to preserve their humanity, to achieve dignity, and to sustain dreams of a better future.

Download or read book Capitalism and Slavery written by Eric Williams and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

Download or read book Foul Means written by Anthony S. Parent Jr. and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the generally accepted belief that the introduction of racial slavery to America was an unplanned consequence of a scarce labor market, Anthony Parent, Jr., contends that during a brief period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a small but powerful planter class, acting to further its emerging economic interests, intentionally brought racial slavery to Virginia. Parent bases his argument on three historical developments: the expropriation of Powhatan lands, the switch from indentured to slave labor, and the burgeoning tobacco trade. He argues that these were the result of calculated moves on the part of an emerging great planter class seeking to consolidate power through large landholdings and the labor to make them productive. To preserve their economic and social gains, this planter class inscribed racial slavery into law. The ensuing racial and class tensions led elite planters to mythologize their position as gentlemen of pastoral virtue immune to competition and corruption. To further this benevolent image, they implemented a plan to Christianize slaves and thereby render them submissive. According to Parent, by the 1720s the Virginia gentry projected a distinctive cultural ethos that buffered them from their uncertain hold on authority, threatened both by rising imperial control and by black resistance, which exploded in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730.

Download or read book Tobacco Culture written by T. H. Breen and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Tidewater planters of mid-eighteenth-century Virginia were fathers of the American Revolution. Perhaps first and foremost, they were also anxious tobacco farmers, harried by a demanding planting cycle, trans-Atlantic shipping risks, and their uneasy relations with English agents. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries lived in a world that was dominated by questions of debt from across an ocean but also one that stressed personal autonomy. T. H. Breen's study of this tobacco culture focuses on how elite planters gave meaning to existence. He examines the value-laden relationships--found in both the fields and marketplaces--that led from tobacco to politics, from agrarian experience to political protest, and finally to a break with the political and economic system that they believed threatened both personal independence and honor.