An anxious pursuit agricultural innovation and modernity in the lower South, 1730-1815 /
Joyce E. Chaplin.
- Chapel Hill : Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, (c)1993.
- 1 online resource (xiv, 411 pages) : illustrations, maps
- Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Ch. 1. Perspectives on the Development of a Plantation Region -- 1. Considering Modernity. Ch. 2. The Fate of Progress in the Early Lower South. Ch. 3. Being Exotic. Ch. 4. The Local Work Ethic. Ch. 5. Projects and Power -- 2. Realizing Modernity. Ch. 6. Crisis and Response: Indigo and Cotton. Ch. 7. Crisis and Response: Tidal Rice Cultivation. Ch. 8. Creating a Cotton South. Ch. 9. Factories and Fields -- Epilogue: Slavery, Progress, and the "Federo-national" Union.
In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according to Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provided the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212
9781469600512
Agriculture--History.--Southern States Slavery--History.--Southern States Plantation life--History.--Southern States