The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World

"Republican" writing and its historians portray the early republic in broadly egalitarian, communalistic, pre-market terms. Yet this book shows that census, tax, probate, land, court, and planters' records reveal vigorous markets and extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south. Landownership, for example, was limited to 25 percent of free households by 1820, and the book explores complex relations between planters, yeomen,...
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"Republican" writing and its historians portray the early republic in broadly egalitarian, communalistic, pre-market terms. Yet this book shows that census, tax, probate, land, court, and planters' records reveal vigorous markets and extensive inequality and individualism in Prince George's County, Maryland, and the wider tobacco south. Landownership, for example, was limited to 25 percent of free households by 1820, and the book explores complex relations between planters, yeomen, artisans, tenants, wage-workers, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and men and women on a uniquely detailed local level. Yet it also draws on colonial historiography to take (for early national studies) a groundbreaking cis-Atlantic approach, examining the profound impacts on local life of the Revolutionary War, non-intercourse and embargoes, the War of 1812, and the structure of the international tobacco trade.