The Overseers of Early American Slavery: Supervisors, Enslaved Labourers, and the Plantation Enterprise

ISBN-13: 9781032237077 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 412 str.

Laura R. Sandy

Opis

Overseers were crucial to the management of early American plantations, and defy easy categorisation: rogues and gentlemen, farmers and artisans, free and unfree. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

Spis treści

Introduction  1. One Plantation World: Overseers and Plantation Management in Eighteenth-Century Virginia and South Carolina  2. "But Where Shall We Find a Careful Overseer?": Recruitment and Duties  3. The Overseeing Class? Status, Skill, and Experience  4. "Respecting Wages & Privileges": Contracts, Terms and Conditions  5. "Unmerciful Overseers" and Conflicts of Power: Violence, Defiance, and the Practice of Authority  6. A "Good Overseer" and an "Excellent Leader": Enslaved Overseers and the Plantation Enterprise  7. "Clever Active" Women and "Mad Bitches": Overseeing Wives and Female Supervisors of Slavery  8. "The Tyranny and Villainy of Overseers": Slavery, Overseers, and the American Revolution  9. Professionals, Pragmatists, and "Horrid Hellish Rogues": Challenges, Opportunities, and Prospects of Overseeing.  Conclusion: Overseers Reassessed

O autorze

Laura R. Sandy is a lecturer in American history at the University of Liverpool and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery.