Please note that this module was available
until 2010, but has since been
withdrawn and is no longer available.

---

• Tutor: Professor Trevor Burnard

• Module Handbook

• Context of Module

• Module Aims

• Intended Learning Outcomes

• Syllabus

• Illustrative Bibliography

• Assessment

 

Context of Module:

This module may be taken by students on the MA in History, the MA in Modern History, the MA in the History of Race in the Americas, the MA in Global History, the MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies, or any taught Master's student outside the History Department.

 

Module Aims:

This module will examine the growth, development, maturation and decline of the most significant class group in the plantation worlds of British America and the United States in the period of slavery. It will connect the development of plantation societies based on the labour of enslaved Africans and African Americans with the rise of a planter class, characterised by a strong shared consciousness of themselves as a political and cultural group. It will examine what were the salient characteristics of planters as a group, how planters interacted with other whites, free blacks and enslaved blacks and how these characteristics changed over time, especially after the tumults of the American Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade. It will conclude with a treatment of planters in the nineteenth century, examining their relations with capitalism and paternalism and the legacies of the plantation system once slavery was ended.

 

Intended Learning Outcomes:

• as part of their subject knowledge and understanding, recognize and evaluate the main historiographical trends in scholarly writing about race and society in British America and the United States

• as part of their critical skills, identify the context and assess the significance of contemporary source materials

• identify and evaluate the processes of historical change as they affect and inform social change and race ideologies

• demonstrate a familiarity with historical methods, concepts and use of primary and secondary historical source materials as these relate to the Americas

 

Syllabus:

 

Seminar 1	Date:	Introduction
Seminar 2		The Planter as a Social Type
Seminar 3		Planters without Slaves
Seminar 4		The Plantation Revolution?
Seminar 5		The Development of Planter Elites
Seminar 6		Planters and Slavery
Seminar 7		Planters and Power
Seminar 8		Revolutions and Abolitions
Seminar 9		The Planter as Capitalist
Seminar 10		The End of Planter Dominance

 

 Illustrative Bibliography:

 

Assessment