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Sunup to sundown: Plantation management strategies and slave work routines in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia, 1776--1810.
Sunup to sundown Plantation management strategies and slave work routines in Barbados Jamaica and Virginia 17761810 Author:Justin Roberts This dissertation, "Sunup to Sundown: Plantation Management Strategies and Slave Work Routines in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia, c1780--1810" compares systems of plantation labor and agriculture within the context of the amelioration of slavery, the rise of abolitionism and an agricultural improvement movement that spread throughout the English... more » and French Atlantic. I focus on plantation work logs, which record day-to-day labor allocation on large plantations. These are a remarkably rich set of sources that have not been explored by scholars. With these records, I am able to discuss labor and agriculture on large plantations in more detail than anything existing in the scholarly literature. My chapters address a range of issues, including slave health care and sickness, skilled versus unskilled labor, seasonal rhythms of plantation work, field labor organization and the relationships between individual slave's occupations and the formation of slave identities, families and communities. My project underscores the importance of labor to slaves' lives by emphasizing that slavery was foremost a system of coerced labor. Slaves did struggle creatively and continually for more autonomy within the institution but this struggle was carried out in working environments that determined the parameters of a slave's ability to exercise personal agency. Work shaped the lives they led. Throughout the project, I explore the tension between the planters' desire for more efficient and greater labor extraction in a competitive economic environment and the movement to ameliorate slavery. By focusing on the decades immediately after the revolution, I bridge a gap in the scholarly literature between colonial and antebellum slavery, tracing the continuities between the two. Rather than depicting Barbados and Jamaica as part of a West-Indian world that was distinctly different, especially after 1783, from the thirteen colonies which formed the United States, I attempt to triangulate Jamaica, Barbados and Virginia. I demonstrate that, in some respects, Barbados shared as much in common with Virginia as it did with Jamaica.« less