This volume explores the musical landscape of Georgia's colonial period, from traditional ballads and operatic productions to John Wesley's first hymn book and New England fuging tunes that took root in south Georgia in the latter half of the century.

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.

From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia, 1735-1738 considers the fascinating early history of a small group of men commissioned by trustees in England to spread Protestantism both to new settlers and indigenous people living in Georgia. Four minister-missionaries arrived in 1736, but after only two years these men detached themselves from the colonial enterprise, and the Mission effectively ended in 1738. Tracing the rise and fall of this endeavor, Scott’s study focuses on key figures in the history of the Mission including the layman, Charles Delamotte, and the ministers, John and Charles Wesley, Benjamin Ingham, and George Whitefield. In Scott’s innovative historical approach, neglected archival sources generate a detailed narrative account that reveals how these men’s personal experiences and personal networks had a significant impact on the inner-workings and trajectory of the Mission. The original group of missionaries who traveled to Georgia was composed of men already bound together by family relations, friendships, and shared lines of mentorship. Once in the colony, the missionaries’ prospects altered as they developed close ties with other missionaries (including a group of Moravians) and other settlers (John Wesley returned to England after his romantic relationship with Sophy Hopkey soured). Structures of imperialism, class, and race underlying colonial ideology informed the Anglican Mission in the era of trustee Georgia. The Wesleys and the Anglican Mission to Georgia enriches this historical picture by illuminating how a different set of intricacies, rooted in personal dynamics, was also integral to the events of this period. In Scott’s study, the history of the expansive eighteenth-century Atlantic world emerges as a riveting account of life unfolding on a local and individual level.

This history of the American Revolution in Georgia offers a thorough examination of how landownership issues complicated and challenged colonists’ loyalties. Despite underdevelopment and isolation, eighteenth-century Georgia was an alluring place, for it promised settlers of all social classes the prospect of affordable land--and the status that went with ownership. Then came the Revolution and its many threats to the orderly systems by which property was acquired and protected. As rebel and royal leaders vied for the support of Georgia’s citizens, says Leslie Hall, allegiance became a prime commodity, with property and the preservation of owners’ rights the requisite currency for securing it. As Hall shows, however, the war’s progress in Georgia was indeterminate; in fact, Georgia was the only colony in which British civil government was reestablished during the war. In the face of continued uncertainties--plundering, confiscation, and evacuation--many landowners’ desires for a strong, consistent civil authority ultimately transcended whatever political leanings they might have had. The historical irony here, Hall’s study shows, is that the most successful regime of Georgia’s Revolutionary period was arguably that of royalist governor James Wright. Land and Allegiance in Revolutionary Georgia is a revealing study of the self-interest and practical motivations in competition with a period’s idealism and rhetoric.

The eighteenth century in South Asian history is a period of great dynamism and a critical phase in the historical trajectory of the subcontinent. This book focuses on the merchants and manufacturers of Gujarat, who amidst complex political developments succeeded in preserving their autonomy and freedom in the market place. By spotting economic growth in the late eighteenth century, this study rejects the constructed dualism between a seventeenth century of great progress and an eighteenth century of chaos and decline.