Trevor Burnard. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 .

Abstract

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 by Trevor Burnard is part synthesis of existing secondary literature and part overview of his own body of important work. Burnard, an eminent historian of slavery and its multiple effects on colonial society in North America and the Caribbean, is clearly well-positioned to write such a book. His main focus is on the rise and eventual economic domination of the “large integrated plantation” based on the forced labor of enslaved Africans in the British colonies in the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry of Carolina and Georgia, and the West Indies. Although each of these regions displayed similar characteristics, Burnard is careful to differentiate among these zones and makes clear that they were not all the same. Burnard persuasively argues that this integrated plantation system, once in place in these various locations, remained largely unchanged for the better part of the eighteenth century. It brought incredible wealth to planters, colonial societies, and the British imperial economy, and was key in the development of modern capitalism. It was maintained above all by extreme violence exercised by white people who had a stake in upholding the system, particularly slave owners, plantation overseers, slave traders, and colonial merchants.