DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
MODULE HANDBOOK
2010-2011
PLANTERS AND PLANTATION SOCIETIES IN BRITISH
AMERICA AND THE UNITED STATES, 1607-1865
Convenor: Professor Trevor Burnard
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Table of Contents
Context of Module
3
Module Aims
3
Intended Learning Outcomes
3
Syllabus
Seminar 2: The Planter as a Social Type
4
Seminar 3: Planters Without Slaves
5
Seminar 4: The Plantation Revolution
6
Seminar 5: The Development of Planter Elites
7
Seminar 6: Planters and Slavery
8
Seminar 7: Planters and Power
9
Seminar 8: Revolutions and Abolitions
10
Seminar 9: Planters and Capitalism
11
Seminar 10: The End of Planter Dominance
12
Illustrative Bibliography
13
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Context of Module
This module may be taken by students on the MA in Race in the Americas, the MA in
History, the MA in Global History, the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies, or by any
taught Master’s student outside the History Department.
Module Aims
This module will examine the growth, development, maturation and decline of the
most significant class group in the plantation worlds of British America and the United
States in the period of slavery. It will connect the development of plantation societies
based on the labour of enslaved Africans and African Americans with the rise of a
planter class, characterised by a strong shared consciousness of themselves as a
political and cultural group. It will examine what were the salient characteristics of
planters as a group, how planters interacted with other whites, free blacks and
enslaved blacks and how these characteristics changed over time, especially after the
tumults of the American Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade. It will
conclude with a treatment of planters in the nineteenth century, examining their
relations with capitalism and paternalism and the legacies of the plantation system
once slavery was ended.
Intended Learning Outcomes

as part of their subject knowledge and understanding, recognize and evaluate
the main historiographical trends in scholarly writing about race and society in
British America and the United States

as part of their critical skills, identify the context and assess the significance of
contemporary source materials

identify and evaluate the processes of historical change as they affect and
inform social change and race ideologies

demonstrate a familiarity with historical methods, concepts and use of primary
and secondary historical source materials as these relate to the Americas
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Seminar 2: The Planter as a Social Type
Questions:
To what extent was the planter class in British America a New World innovation and to
what extent was the concept of the planter copied from British and Iberian
precedents?
Compare and contrast planters in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century
British America and the United States.
“The Plantocracy constituted the most crudely philistine of all dominant classes in the
history of Western slavery.” Discuss.
To what extent was John Adams right when he commented on southern planters that
“these Gentlemen are accustomed, habituated to higher People than We are”?
To what extent did the pursuit of gentility “validate planter power, provide a sense of
personal improvement and create existential order in a chaotic world”? (Rozbicki)
Readings:

Trevor Burnard, “The Planter Class,” in Gad J. Heuman and Trevor Burnard,
eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

Michal J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in
Plantation America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1998), 28-75.

Michael Craton, “Reluctant Creoles: The Planters’ World in the British West
Indies,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the
Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina, 1991), 315-62.
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Seminar 3: Planters Without Slaves
Questions:
What were the principal obstacles preventing the rapid development of a planter class
in Virginia and Barbados in the first half of the seventeenth century?
Why did Barbadian planters take up African chattel slavery so enthusiastically?
How did indentured servitude in seventeenth century Virginia differ from indentured
servitude in England?
To what extent did planters in various seventeenth century British American colonies
learn from each other in deciding how to employ Africans in the period before the rise
of large scale plantation agriculture?
Readings:

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The rise of the planter class in the English
West Indies 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972),
46-83.

James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth
Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994),
251-92.

April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Inter-colonial Relations in the Seventeenth
Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 137-68
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Seminar 4: The Plantation Revolution
Questions:
Assess the importance of violence in the transition to the plantation period of British
American history.
“The most degraded period in African American history.” Discuss.
Was there such a thing as “the sugar revolution”?
“The rise of the slave colonies took place in and through economic, military and social
competition.” (Blackburn). Discuss
To what extent can the origins of African slavery in the New World be attributed solely
to European racial distaste for Africans?
Readings:

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North
America (Cambridge, Mass.: 1998), 93-141

B.W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53 (2000),
213-36

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery from the Baroque to the
Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 307-72
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Seminar 5: The Development of Planter Elites
Questions:
To what extent was Virginia coming apart socially and politically before the rise of the
great planters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century?
“Both racism and patriarchal privilege addressed the mounting demands of white
servant and freemen for greater consideration of their rights by the elite planters who
controlled the political system.” Discuss.
Account for the emergence of patriarchalism in the first four decades of the eighteenth
century in Virginia.
To what extent was planter success in the Carolina low country predicated upon their
ability to transform the landscape to their own advantage?
Readings:

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996), 137-86.

Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in
Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003),
197-235

S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 92-135
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Seminar 6: Planters and Slavery
Questions:
“Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of slaves.” (Samuel
Johnson). Discuss.
“Early colonial Jamaica was much more than a failed settler society; it was an
abundant garden of power and terror.” Discuss
To what extent can the relations between whites and blacks in antebellum Virginia be
considered through the prism of paternalism?
Readings:

Jack P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in
the Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition, 21 (2000), 1-31.

Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic
Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 17-59

William Dusinberre, Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in
Antebellum Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 73120
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Seminar 7: Planters and Power
Questions:
What difference did it make to the multiple interactions between whites and blacks in
colonial North America that slaves were both property and humans?
“No authentic human relationship was possible where violence was the ultimate
sanction. There could have been no trust, no genuine sympathy, and while a kind of
love may sometimes have triumphed over the most perverse form of interaction,
intimacy was usually calculating and sadomachostic.” (Orlando Patterson). Discuss
How was rank and status defined in colonial Virginia?
How did planters exert power over dependents – women, children, slaves, employees
– and to what extent did the exertion of such power achievable the results they
desired?
Assess the importance of whiteness as a shared value uniting all whites, whatever
their social position, against all blacks.
Readings:

Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth Century
Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998), 257-317

Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1992), 115-142

Timothy J. Lockley, “Race Relations,” in Gad J. Heuman and Trevor Burnard,
eds., The Routledge History of Slavery (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
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Seminar 8: Revolutions and Abolitions
Questions:
To what extent did the American Revolution raise questions about the position of
slavery within the British Empire that had not previously been thought important?
To what extent were the beginnings of the abolition campaign in part a response by
evangelicals to the excesses of planter culture?
Compare and contrast the attitudes to the American Revolution of planters in the
British West Indies and planters in South Carolina
To what extent was the American Revolution a profound crisis for the plantation
system
To what extent did the American Revolution entrench slavery and the plantation
system within the social and political structures of the United States of America?
Readings:

Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: British Concepts of Emancipation in
the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 209-58.

Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the
South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1998), 221-70

Christer Petley, “`Home’ and `this country’: Britishness and Creole identity in
the letters of a transatlantic slaveholder,” Atlantic Studies 6 (2009), 43-61.
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Seminar 9: Planters and Capitalism
Questions:
“Only by tracing the powerful influence of liberal capitalism within the South can we
understand, first, how the slaveholders exercised and negotiated their extraordinary
powers and, second, how the capitalist economy, the liberal state, and western
political culture placed equally extraordinary limitations on the slaveholders’ power.”
Discuss.
Account for the political power of southern slaveholders in the half century before the
American Civil War
Compare and contrast slave-based agricultural capitalism and free-labour industrial
capitalism in antebellum America.
“Men of sense have discovered that when they desire to get extraordinary exertions
from their slaves, it is better to offer them rewards than to whip them; to encourage
them rather than to drive them.” (Frederick Law Olmsted) Discuss.
Readings:

James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New
York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990), 40-79

William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 387-416.

Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane
World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 151-94
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Seminar 10: The End of Planter Dominance
Questions:
To what extent was the decline of the plantation economy in post-emancipation
Jamaica a consequence of the abolition of slavery?
To what extent did the end of slavery in Jamaica mean new labour practices on the
plantation?
How did whites in the post-bellum American South create and enforce new boundaries
of race?
To what extent did planters continue to monopolise social, economic and political
power in the post-bellum American South in the generation following the American
Civil War?
Readings:

Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica
and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 115-40

James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and
Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 156-210

J. William Harris, Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 55-82
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Illustrative Bibliography
Ira Berlin, Many Generations Come
Ira Berlin, Generations in Captivity
David B. Davis, Inhuman Bondage
Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves
S.D. Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic
Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint
William K. Scarborough, Masters of the Big House
Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen
Anthony S. Parent, Foul Means
Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects
Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina
Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom
Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters
William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days
John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds
Eugene Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class
David Blight, Race and Reunion
Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom
Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire
Christopher L. Brown, Moral Capital
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