HIST 2010
February 11, 2014
Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800.
In “Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake 1680- 1800” the main theme is the outcome of a long-term economic, demographic, and political transformation that replaced the farmsteads of the first Chesapeake settler with the kind of slave society described by modern historians. After a brief study of the social structure of the region in the seventeenth century, this work analyzed the economic and demographic change between 1680 and 1750. The change that took place described how men and women, and blacks and whites bogus new social relations in the mid-eighteenth century slowly changed. Including economic and social changes, such as, disruptive events as the transition from tobacco monoculture to diversified farming and the massive out-migration of whites and their slaves. With this transformation, it related the history of impersonal shifts in demography and economic life to the rise of new forms of power and understanding. 1 The Chesapeake had a lot of opportunities in the seventeenth century. Thousands of English men arrived in the region as indentured servants. Many of these immigrants fell ill and died before completing their term of service, and others lived only a few years as free men or women. Those who survived, would serve their term, work a few years for other planters, and then obtain their own land and servants. Since the tobacco price remained high, once the indentured servants became free men they were wealthy. The men on the rise refused to accept the permanent authority of any group of rulers, and those who migrated to the Chesapeake region died off rapidly. Rapidly following, tobacco prices downcast white immigration and created conditions contributing to the beginnings of white natural population increased. Planters turned to African slaves to replace the