A PLANTING AND TRADING SOCIETY

Abstract

Allan Kulikoff. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986. xviii + 449 pp. David W. Galenson. Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 230 pp. An emphasis on quantitative data and an interest in New World slavery link these two books. However, the two works are of strikingly different quality. Allan Kulikoff s study of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chesapeake is an important contribution to early American social history, while David W. Galen- son's analysis of the Royal African Company's commerce in slaves is a narrowly- conceived work that adds little to our knowledge. Kulikoff's sprawling Tobacco arid Slaves discusses the transformation of Maryland and Virginia society between about 1650 and the 1780s, and examines the impact of these changes on both whites and blacks. According to Kulikoff, the Chesapeake in the mid-seventeenth century was a region marked by the "domi- nance of small planters" (37), individuals whose farms were worked by family members and one or two white servants. However, between 1680 and 1740, this bucolic, egalitarian political economy faded, and was replaced by a society with striking extremes in wealth and a slave labor force. The region's seemingly endless need for workers prompted the turn to slaves, and the rising number of blacks soon dissuaded immigrant whites from electing the Chesapeake. A class of small farmers survived, with these yeomen now supplementing their family's labor by purchasing one or two slaves. But the dominant group politically and economically became the gentry, whose members often owned a dozen or more slaves and more than a thousand acres of land.