Naming Plantations: Toponyms and the Construction of the Plantation System in the English Atlantic

Abstract

Abstract This essay pioneers a critical approach to place naming in early America, which offers new insight into the evolving definition of plantation. In early seventeenth-century England, planting was understood as a public effort to establish new commonwealths. Only gradually around the Atlantic world did plantations become predominantly associated with private places producing staple crops with enslaved labor. This essay uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how this slippage occurred on the ground, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to the places they called plantations reveal how they perceived the plantation and the political, economic, and social relations it structured. By analyzing data from nearly 5,000 named tracts of land patented in four Maryland counties between 1634 and 1750, this essay charts the changing popularity of distinct elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, affects of the landowner, and European place-names. It reveals there was no straightforward rush to carve up the land into privatized commercial units. Instead, individuals initially structured plantations around communal frameworks defined variously by manorialism, urban civic traditions, and shared geographic lexicons. As the tobacco economy consolidated into the hands of a slave-owning class, plantation names reframed places as subjective manifestations of planter identities. These conclusions adjust our understanding of the transition to capitalism and slavery in Maryland and they also offer a blueprint for a broader toponymy of the plantation in the Atlantic world.