EBOOK
Cultivating Race
The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860
Watson W. JennisonSeries: New Directions in Southern History(0)
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From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.
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Reviews
"Makes a genuine contribution to our understanding of antebellum Georgia."
Timothy J. Lockley, author of Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record
"Jennison's thoughtful synthesis of social, intellectual, and political history will stand for some time to come as the best one-volume account we have of slavery and racism in Georgia. This is a book that students and scholars of slavery, the South, and race in American history need to read and contend with."
Anthony E. Kaye, author of Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South
"Colonial Georgia has long been known as 'the debatable land' contested by the British and Spanish crowns. That imperial conflict, as Watson Jennison shows, was the tip of the iceberg. In a sweeping account, Jennison describes the struggle between Low Country planters, Revolutionary republicans, black maroons, free people of color, and Native Americans to control the region. Georgia's violent and
Claudio Saunt, author of Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Fa