The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World [Hardcover]

A look at the extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south, this book draws on colonial historiography to take a groundbreaking approach and examines the profound impacts of the structure of the international tobacco trade on local life.Introduction: The "Chosen People": Agrarian Myths and Messier Realities Prologue: "The Interest of the County": Prince George's County Levy Court and Local Politics, Economy, and Society "The Way to Make a Huge Fortune": The Planters "One must differentiate oneself a little": Planter Gentility, Economy, Dynasty, and Politics "I Don't Stand to the Will": Yeomen Farmers and Smallholders "Being Allowed the Liberty": Tenant Farmers and Artisans "The Torment with the Servants": Wage Workers, Servants, and Slaves Epilogue: "Objects of Distress": The Poor and the Destitute Appendix: A Statistical Analysis of Wealth Distribution and Mobility

Sarson (Swansea Univ., UK) has written a meticulously researched cis-Atlantic study of wealth, power, and inequality in the early national upper South . . . In five tightly argued chapters, the author shows how the wealthy elite got richer while the poor struggled to survive. The early national tobacco South, as Sarson explicates, was a world structured by possessive-individualist ideology, vicissitudes of Atlantic market forces, inequality, and exploitation . . . Highly recommended. - Choice

The American Revolution did not fulfill its promise in Prince George's County, Maryland. Sarson's new book shows that the break with Britain failed to inaugurate an era of widespread opportunity for enterprising white families - and certainly for free or enslaved African Americans. Tracking the history of inequality in an Upper South county, this impressively researched and persuasively al32