Motives of honor, pleasure, and profit : plantation management in the colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763 / Lorena S. Walsh.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walsh, Lorena Seebach, 1944- author.

Contributor:

Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture.

Series:

Colonial Williamsburg studies in Chesapeake history and culture.

Colonial Williamsburg studies in Chesapeake history and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plantations--Chesapeake Bay Region (Md. and Va.)--Management--History.

Plantations.

Tobacco industry--Chesapeake Bay Region (Md. and Va.)--Management--History.

Tobacco industry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Summary:

Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture. Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare. Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.

Contents:

The plantation economy begins, 1607-1639

The age of the small planter, 1640-1679

An era of hard times : Virginia, 1680-1729

Strategies of adaptation and change : Maryland, the periphery, and regional divergence, 1680-1729

The Tidewater economy comes of age : Southern Virginia, 1730-1763

Managing for posterity : Rappahannock and Potomac Virginia, 1730-1763

Maryland, the periphery, and agricultural change, 1730-1763

Reassessing the Golden Age

Epilogue

Appendix I : Tobacco crop shares per laborer

Appendix II : Corn crop shares per laborer

Appendix III : Wheat crop shares per laborer.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908827-9-0

979-88-908828-0-6

0-8078-9592-X

1-4696-0040-4

OCLC:

861793358