In the shadow of the great house : a history of the plantation in America / Daniel Rood.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rood, Daniel, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plantations--Southern States--History.

Plantations.

Plantation life--Southern States--History.

Plantation life.

Slavery--Southern States--History.

Slavery.

Slave labor--Southern States--History.

Slave labor.

Enslaved persons--Southern States--History.

Enslaved persons.

Economic history.

African Americans.

Peonage--Southern States.

Peonage.

Plantations--United States--History.

Plantations--History.

Slavery--United States--History.

Peonage--United States--History.

African Americans--Social conditions.

african american.

plantations.

Physical Description:

x, 499 pages : illustrations, maps, portraits ; 24 cm

illustrations.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2026]

Summary:

"Over the last few decades, and especially in the last ten years, our understanding of slavery has been transformed by the work of countless talented scholars. We have learned a great deal about the lives of enslavers, the struggles and victories of the enslaved, and how the afterlives of American slavery persist into the present. Yet Dan Rood's In the Shadow of the Great House is one of the first books to focus on the engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. As Rood shows, the plantation revolutions, first in Barbados, then in Carolina and later on in the Deep South, transformed slavery into a much more rigid and oppressive institution. While skin color prejudice certainly preceded the plantations, planters insisting on a rightless, eternally available, "increasing" source of labor re-invented and magnified human bondage and stamped it onto a single race. Rood argues that racism itself is largely the product of the plantation. Taking us through four hundred years of history and up to our current moment, Rood demonstrates that the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth century (by 1900, the US produced three times more cotton than it had in 1860) to today's multinationals (one of the biggest sugar planters in the world is now British Petroleum), the plantation has become a central feature of the economic and social life in the US, and in many other places. Even as he traces this essential story and makes surprising connections between past and present, Rood documents the "dark retreats" carved out of plantation life by the enslaved themselves: In the Shadow the Great House is both history and counter-history. And it was the enslaved-those caught up in the plantation's treadmill, those who were thrown most violently into the gears of its machinery-who offered the most clear-eyed understanding of how it worked"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue: The false king of São Tomé

Introduction: This grand consumer

Part one. The ditch

The great gulph

Broken rice

People that can go in the ditch

The apotheosis of Johann Bolzius

Part two. Scions

Counterblaste

To dye in smoke

Crop masters

The chiefest of my estates

The colonians

Vlangbengdeng

Part three. Dwellings

The comprehensive jaws of America

The mother of slavery

Bottom rail on tops this time

Sherman's reserve

Part four. New fields

The bronze titan

The white whale

Percy's ode

Standing

Part five. Plantation futures

The slave empires of history

Sinking

In cotton's wake

From killing fields to kill lines

Caindo na cana

Coda: Burying ground.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781631498374

1631498371

OCLC:

1519447849

Publisher Number:

90104511393