The Plantation

Edgar Tristram Thompson

Description

The first complete publication of an overlooked gem in American intellectual history

A rare classic in American social science, Edgar Thompson's 1932 University of Chicago dissertation, "The Plantation," broke new analytic ground in the study of the southern plantation system. Thompson refuted long-espoused climatic theories of the origins of plantation societies and offered instead a richly nuanced understanding of the links between plantation culture, the global history of capitalism, and the political and economic contexts of hierarchical social classification. This first complete publication of Thompson's study makes available to modern readers one of the earliest attempts to reinterpret the history of the American South as an integral part of global processes. In this Southern Classics edition, editors Sidney W. Minz and George Baca provide a thorough introduction explicating Thompson's guiding principles and grounding his germinal work in its historical context.

Thompson viewed the plantation as a political institution in which the quasi-industrial production of agricultural staples abroad through race-making labor systems solidified and advanced European state power. His interpretation marks a turning point in the scientific study of an ancient agricultural institution, in which the plantation is seen as a pioneering instrument for the expansion of the global economy. Further, his awareness of the far-reaching history of economic globalization and of the conception of race as socially constructed predicts viewpoints that have since become standard. As such, this overlooked gem in American intellectual history is still deeply relevant for ongoing research and debate in social, economic, and political history.

Sujets

• Economic History
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Plantations in the American South
• The Old Plantation
• Eastland Company
• Colonial empire
• Tropical agriculture
• Plantation era
• Permanent Settlement
• Plantation economy
• Up from Slavery
• Redemptioner
• State
• General officer
• Serfdom
• South
• Peasant
• Cotton gin
• Moors
• Slavery
• History of the Americas
• Feudalism
• Colonialism
• Land grant
• General
• Agriculture
• United States
• Old South
• FL
• Lande
• Local
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 26 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611172171
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Plantation
SOUTHERN CLASSICS SERIES Mark M. Smith and Peggy G. Hargis, Series Editors
The Plantation
Edgar Tristram Thompson
Edited with an Introduction by Sidney W. Mintz and George Baca
1932 The University of Chicago New material 2010 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2010 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Thompson, Edgar T. (Edgar Tristram), 1900-1989.
The plantation / Edgar Tristram Thompson ; edited with an introduction by Sidney W. Mintz and George Baca.
p. cm. - (Southern classics series)
Summary: First full publication of Edgar Thompson s 1932 dissertation on the economics of the plantation.
Published in Cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57003-940-9 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-57003-941-6 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Plantations. 2. Plantations-Economic aspects-Southern States. 3. Plantations-Economic aspects-Virginia. 4. Land tenure-Southern States. 5. Land tenure-Virginia. 6. Southern States-Economic conditions-19th century. 7. Virginia-Economic conditions-19th century. I. Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, 1922- II. Baca, George. III. University of South Carolina. Institute for Southern Studies. IV. Title. V. Series: Southern classics series.
HD1471.A3T49 2010
307.72-dc22
2010017287
Publication of the Southern Classics series is made possible in part by the generous support of the Watson-Brown Foundation.
ISBN 978-1-61117-217-1 (ebook)
Contents
Series Editors Preface
Introduction
1 The Plantation as a Social Institution
Introduction
The Plantation Defined
The Plantation and Colonization
The Plantation as a Type of Settlement
The Plantation and Labor
The Plantation as a Political Institution
The Theory of the Plantation
The Plantation and Social Change
Virginia as a Typical Plantation Frontier
2 The Metropolis and the Plantation
The Revolution in Distance
The Trading Factory
His Majesty s Plantations
3 The Plantation in Virginia
Free Land and Plantation Settlement
Agricultural Specialization: Tobacco
4 Plantation Management and Imported Labor in Virginia
The Tide of White Labor
Negro Slavery and Its Control
The Evolution of the Planter
The Humanization of the Plantation
5 The Plantation and the Frontier
Economic Changes and the Small Farm in Virginia
The Plantation on the New Southern Frontier
6 The Natural History of the Plantation
Geographical Isolation and Culture
Ecological Changes and Race Relations
Adaptation and Accommodation to a New Habitat
Agricultural Specialization and Racial Stratification
The Organization and Control of Labor
Peasant Proprietorship and Cultural Homogeneity
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editors Preface
Edgar T. Thompson, a southerner by birth and a sociologist by training, recast childhood experiences on his father s plantation to fuel an intellectual journey that placed the plantation at the analytical center of his sociological investigations. In this, the publication of Thompson s doctoral thesis in its entirety, we come to understand plantation agriculture, southern exceptionalism, and black/white race relations as parts of the larger enterprises of European state building and global capitalism. Students of the new global South will benefit from this early attempt to link locality to global networks as they are reminded that the South s ties to a global political economy predated the Civil War.
Southern Classics returns to general circulation books of importance dealing with the history and culture of the American South. Sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies, the series is advised by a board of distinguished scholars who suggest titles and editors of individual volumes to the series editors and help establish priorities in publication.
Chronological age alone does not determine a title s designation as a Southern Classic. The criteria also include significance in contributing to a broad understanding of the region, timeliness in relation to events and moments of peculiar interest to the American South, usefulness in the classroom, and suitability for inclusion in personal and institutional collections on the region.
M ARK M. S MITH P EGGY G. H ARGIS Series Editors
Introduction
The publication in its entirety of The Plantation , Edgar T. Thompson s doctoral thesis, is particularly timely. Completed seventy-eight years ago, it constitutes a pioneering approach to the study of early capitalistic experiments in overseas export-oriented tropical agriculture that used forced labor on land taken from native peoples, with capital, plants, and technology coming from Europe and Asia. Except for its first chapter, it has never been published. As an important document in American intellectual history, as well as in the history of the so-called Chicago School of sociology, it stands on its own.
We call its publication timely because of recent radical changes in the shape of the world. The last decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first were marked by a widely shared consciousness of the growing importance of globalization. The sustained volume and, soon enough, velocity of movement-of people, of commodities, and of capital-had given rise to dubiously optimistic expectations about what might happen next. Explosive new forms of communication, barely imagined before, were beginning to overwhelm the leadership of even large and repressive states. In economic terms business decisions were being made, and then acted upon, with what seemed to be runaway speed. The growing assumption that such changes in the world were symbols of a wholesale globalization was abetted by the apparent unawareness that there had been other globalizations, not so many years earlier, that had taken shape and then broken apart. 1 Various attempts by both anthropologists and historians to compensate for widespread failings of historical memory by counseling a broader, more open world-historical approach received relatively little attention. 2
As one looks back now, a longer, less occluded historical outlook seems called for. Obviously the chances for any consensus on the fate of globalization and the significance of recent history will remain slight for at least another half century, but the realization that depressions, as well as globalizations, were actually familiar phenomena long before now-indeed that they were phenomena lived through by a great many people still alive-is helping to bring attention to this past. Long before now, some people realized that the current globalization had predecessors: they recognized, for instance, that the American South had become part of a wider world before the Civil War. Now there is a renewed inclination to look back while confronting head-on the idea that other globalities preceded this one.
Thompson s doctoral thesis, along with the articles and books that were to follow during a long scholarly life, represents one of the earliest attempts to reinterpret the history of the American South as an integral part of global processes. In what he referred to as stages toward the creation of a world community, Thompson showed how southern exceptionalism and the regional obsession with race, which took shape as early as the seventeenth century, were actually intertwined in the rise of the European state. The coalescent industrial and economic systems those states represented were not divorced from their expanding colonial policies. Thompson s grasp of this wider ensemble of forces led him to reconceptualize the plantation as a political institution. By means of the large-scale, quasi-industrial production of agricultural staples abroad-staples that served to absorb the rising buying power of consumers in the home metropolis-the plantations contributed to the international power of European states. By seeing this inside politico-economic connection, Thompson was also able to see that the plantations, lying outside Europe but lodged in European colonies and ex-colonies, were, as he wrote, race making institutions as well. 3 Put simply, plantations not only produced what were once costly foods on the cheap; their labor systems also sorted colonized and colonial peoples socially. Focusing upon the ties that bound conquest and state power to the reification of racial categories, Thompson was able to show how the plantation s existence had helped to articulate Europe, Africa, and the New World politically, economically, and largely on the colonial masters terms. As pioneering institutions in frontier areas, plantations represented the deepest penetration of European power. Once locally installed, however, the plantation regime could become antithetical to the state, even while ready to enlist its support in conniving to maintain local control. 4
Intellectual Formation
Edgar Thompson s research into the global significance of plantations clearly drew upon childhood experiences. Born in 1900, he had grown up on his father s small (and moribund) plantation in Dillon, South Carolina, just south of the North Carolina border. 5 It was years, however, before he grasped fully the relationship of the daily routines of plantation life he knew personally to the larger historical questions that motivated him intellectu