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11 - Plantation societies

from Part Two - Trade, Exchange, and Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

Few institutions define world history in the early modern era as completely as the plantation complex. Moreover, the plantation itself was a highly distinctive innovation, especially after its transformation as an economic institution in mid-seventeenth century Barbados and the subsequent spread of the Barbadian plantation model throughout British and French America. Brazil's plantation system, the most significant early form, retained elements of feudalism, principally the usurpation by private subjects of jurisdictional rights over workers that were usually the province of the state. Barbados was the crucible in which the mature plantation system was incubated. In the 1770s, the plantation system was at its pre-industrial peak. Its economic performance was extraordinary. Produce from plantations amounted to around 40 percent of the trade of the leading European Atlantic states. It was slavery and slave-produced goods that integrated the Atlantic system and which made it so dynamic in the eighteenth century.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further Reading

Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackburn, Robin, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011).Google Scholar
Brown, Vincent, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Davis, David Brion, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).Google Scholar
Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelson, Max, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Eltis, David, and Engerman, Stanley L., ‘The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 123–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menard, Russell R., Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Miller, Joseph, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).Google Scholar
Morgan, Philip D., Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin Books, 2007).Google Scholar
Schwartz, Stuart B., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sweet, James, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Walsh, Lorena, Motives of Honor, Pleasure & Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).Google Scholar

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