![]() Admirably, he analyzes the society from top to bottom - from planters to small farmers to the landless majority of the population, consisting of tenants, wage workers, servants, and slaves. "Sarson digs deeply in a rich cache of historical archives and records to reconstruct life in a large swath of the Upper South. Instead, tobacco plantations, slavery, and landlessness persisted in Prince George's County, along with a social reality of deepening impoverishment." - Cathy Matson, The University of Delaware, USA Sarson offers a compelling challenge to the enduring myth that political independence paved the way to more widespread property ownership and, with it, egalitarianism. "The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World provides a deeply researched and strongly narrated analysis based on the extensive local records of Prince George's County, Maryland, a place marked across the years by Revolutionary crisis and post-war adjustments to independence. Tracking the history of inequality in an Upper South county, this impressively researched and persuasively argued study offers a fresh perspective on the formative era of the new nation's history." - Peter S. Sarson's new book shows that the break with Britain failed to inaugurate an era of widespread opportunity for enterprising white families - and certainly for free or enslaved African Americans. "The American Revolution did not fulfill its promise in Prince George's County, Maryland. The early national tobacco South, as Sarson explicates, was a world structured by possessive-individualist ideology, vicissitudes of Atlantic market forces, inequality, and exploitation. In five tightly argued chapters, the author shows how the wealthy elite got richer while the poor struggled to survive. "Sarson (Swansea Univ., UK) has written a meticulously researched cis-Atlantic study of wealth, power, and inequality in the early national upper South.
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