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The Development of Planter Elites

Questions

To what extent was Virginia coming apart socially and politically before the rise of the great planters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century?

“Both racism and patriarchal privilege addressed the mounting demands of white servant and freemen for greater consideration of their rights by the elite planters who controlled the political system.” Discuss.

Account for the emergence of patriarchalism in the first four decades of the eighteenth century in Virginia.

To what extent was planter success in the Carolina low country predicated upon their ability to transform the landscape to their own advantage?

Readings:

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137-86.

Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 197-235

S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 92-135