Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T22:00:54.825Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Plantation societies

from Part Two - Trade, Exchange, and Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Trevor Burnard
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
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
Get access

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.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 263 - 282
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×