Questions:

What were the principal obstacles preventing the rapid development of a planter class in Virginia and Barbados in the first half of the seventeenth century?

Why did Barbadian planters take up African chattel slavery so enthusiastically?

How did indentured servitude in seventeenth century Virginia differ from indentured servitude in England?

To what extent did planters in various seventeenth century British American colonies learn from each other in deciding how to employ Africans in the period before the rise of large scale plantation agriculture?

Readings:

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The rise of the planter class in the English West Indies 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 46-83.

James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 251-92.

April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Inter-colonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 137-68