Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit

Download or read book Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit written by Lorena Seebach Walsh and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture. She argues that, in the mid-17th century, planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the lives of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.