Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit
Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607-1763
Lorena S. Walsh
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 12/2012
Pages: 736
Subject: History, Business and Economics
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807895924
DESCRIPTION
Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare.
Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.
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