Plantation societies

Burnard, Trevor

Abstract

Few institutions define world history in the early modern era as completely as the plantation complex. Initiated in Europe; realised in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the Americas; involving both Asia as a source of capital and Asians as labourers; focused strongly on Africa, from where the great majority of plantation labourers came; and extending eventually in the nineteenth century into the Pacific and into Australia - the plantation complex and the social forms it engendered was a global phenomenon. The development of the plantation system had far-reaching consequences. It was the imperative force behind the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, especially during the mature period of that trade. Through that trade, 12.5 million Africans left Africa, primarily for the Americas, and 10.7 million captives arrived to become chattel slaves in a large geographic region that ultimately stretched from Rio Grande do Sol in southern Brazil to the Mason - Dixon Line of southern Pennsylvania in the United States between 1500 and 1866, 7.3 million of whom arrived before 1800, the great majority disembarking in Brazil or in the Caribbean. There have been larger migrations subsequently, but in the pre-industrial age this was the most significant forced migration of people across a long distance over a relatively short period. At its height, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, nearly 75, 000 Africans arrived each year in the Americas, transforming the demographic make-up of the Americas and making plantation America a cultural offshoot not so much of Europe but of West Africa. Prime plantation regions such as the British and French Caribbean, Bahia and Pernambuco in Brazil, and Virginia and South Carolina in the United States had populations in which a majority or near majority were enslaved people of African descent, making these areas more like what a Swiss newcomer to South Carolina in 1737 termed ‘Negroe countries’ than European-like societies.

Citation

Burnard, T. (2015). Plantation societies. In J. H. Bentley, S. Subrahmanyam, & M. E. Wiesner-Hanks (Eds.), The Cambridge World History Vol.6 The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, Part 2: Patterns of Change (263-282). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022460.012

• Online Publication Date: May 5, 2015
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Sep 16, 2021
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Pages: 263-282
• Book Title: The Cambridge World History Vol.6 The Construction of a Global World, 1400–1800 CE, Part 2: Patterns of Change
• Chapter Number: 11
• ISBN: 9781139022460; 9780521192460
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139022460.012
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3579650