How did American colonists justify and rationalize the development of the plantation system?
My research and scholarship focus on answering this critical question. The system of enslaved labor and industrialized single-crop agriculture that we call the plantation emerged in the Americas in the 17th century, and it has had profound consequences that continue to shape race relations, environmental exploitation, and the capitalist system. The ideas generated by the plantation system are its bitterest fruit.
I use a wide range of sources to try to better understand the intellectual and cultural world of the women and men who built the plantation system. For too long intellectual history has overlooked the experiences of ordinary men and women who didn’t write lengthy treatises about their actions and decision-making. We have assumed that these people were driven simply by greed and economic rationality. Combining careful rereading of published sources and European writings with close study of the actions that planters took to build their estates, coerce their laborers, and market their goods, I attempt to reconstruct their worldviews. This pursuit has also led me to explore new quantitative methods for analyzing the named landscape that planters imagined in the American spaces that they appropriated from Indigenous people, as a window into their understandings of themselves.
I love to explore the past and pore over the details of old maps and inventories, but I also do this work because I believe that it is critical for contemporary society to understand the fateful steps that took Europeans down the path toward the plantation complex. We must recognize how many of our assumptions about our economy and society still bear the marks of their origins in the plantation system. But most of all we must be mindful of the way hopes and aspirations can be twisted by dangerous assumptions and claims of exigency, as much today as in the past.
My research is focused on the evolution of the idea of “plantation” through the 17th century, particularly on the way the concept was appropriated by colonists engaged in large-scale slave-powered commercial agriculture. There are a number of current components to this ongoing project…
Virginia 1619: Slavery & Freedom in the Making of English America
(UNC Press/OIEAHC, 2019)
Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake
(University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America
(Brill, 2017)
“Chesapeake planters never lost their fixation with ‘cities in the air’ because those aspirations defined who they were and everything they aspired to be.”
