An anxious pursuit : agricultural innovation and modernity in the lower South, 1730-1815 / Joyce E. Chaplin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chaplin, Joyce E., author.

Contributor:

Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.)

Series:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Agriculture--Southern States--History.

Agriculture.

Slavery--Southern States--History.

Slavery.

Plantation life--Southern States--History.

Plantation life.

Southern States--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

Southern States.

Southern States--History--1775-1865.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (430 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill, [North Carolina] ; London, [England] : Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In An Anxious Pursuit , Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.

Contents:

Cover; Contents; Preface; Illustrations and Tables; Abbreviations; Chapter 1. Perspectives on the Development of a Plantation Region; ONE: CONSIDERING MODERNΙΤΥ; Chapter 2. The Fate of Progress in the Early Lower South; The Idea of Material Progress; Local Discussion; Slavery, Sentiment, and Stasis; Chapter 3. Being Exotic; Species of Eternity; Travelers' Accounts-Science and Fiction; Chapter 4. The Local Work Ethic; Fevers and Strangers; Duties and Improvements; Work and Slavery: A Problem; Social Mobility; Chapter 5. Projects and Power; Patrons of the Exotic; The Case of Silk

The Upcountry RespondsTWO: REALIZING MODERNΙΤΥ; Chapter 6. Crisis and Response: Indigo and Cotton; An Imperial Blue; A Patriotic Fiber; The Luxury Staple; Chapter 7. Crisis and Response: Tidal Rice Cultivation; Rivers; Mills; Power; Chapter 8. Creating a Cotton South; The Geography of Opportunity; The Gin; Slavery; Chapter 9. Factories and Fields; Domestic Diversification; Final Crisis; Epilogue: Slavery, Progress, and the ""Federo-national"" Union; Statistical Method; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; Q; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y; Z

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

979-88-908647-6-5

979-88-908647-7-2

0-8078-3830-6

1-4696-0051-X

OCLC:

966868956