Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.

Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.

Under the plantation system, slaves were often subjected to brutal working conditions. Many also saw their families torn apart and were prevented from learning to read and write or owning property. Yet they also helped create a distinctive African-American culture. Author Richard Worth describes how these prisons beneath the sun transformed the lives of African-American slaves. Book jacket.

This bold and precedent-setting study details numerous slave rebellions against white masters, drawn from planters' records, government petitions, newspapers, and other documents. The reactions of white slave owners are also documented. 15 halftones.

This book details the living conditions of plantation slaves, examining house, field and artisan work, food and clothing, marriage, and more.

Caitlin Rosenthal explores quantitative management practices on West Indian and Southern plantations, showing how planter-capitalists built sophisticated organizations and used complex accounting tools. By demonstrating that business innovation can be a byproduct of bondage Rosenthal further erodes the false boundary between capitalism and slavery.

"Until 1865, millions of slaves worked on plantations and small farms throughout the southern United States. The most common image is of slaves forced into difficult labor on cotton or tobacco fields. However, some plantation slaves were proficient craftsmen, trained in metalworking, carpentry, or other specialized skills. Others were house servants, who cooked and cleaned for their white masters. This book will give readers a better understanding of the daily lives of plantation slaves, along with the oppression and challenges that they faced"--Back cover.