Description: This first (and only) part outlines the history of Virginia and Maryland, providing a narrative of key events during early colonisation. Included are descriptions of cultivation, taxation and legislation.

"As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation in early British America was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men men who, as Trevor Burnard sees it, lacked any better options for making money. In the contentious Planters, Merchants, and Slaves, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic because to speak bluntly it worked. These economically successful and ethically monstrous plantations required racial divisions to exist, but their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Sure to be controversial, this book is a major intervention in the scholarship on slavery, economic development, and political power in early British America, mounting a powerful and original argument that boldly challenges historical orthodoxy."--

A book all Americans should read, Slave Nation reveals the key role racism played in the American Revolutionary War, so we can see our past more clearly and build a better future. In 1772, the High Court in London freed a slave from Virginia named Somerset, setting a precedent that would end slavery in England. In America, racist fury over this momentous decision united the Northern and Southern colonies and convinced them to fight for independence. Meticulously researched and accessible, Slave Nation provides a little-known view of the birth of our nation and its earliest steps toward self-governance. Slave Nation is a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the American Revolution and in the framing of the Constitution, offering a fresh examination of the "fight for freedom" that embedded racism into our national identity, led to the Civil War, and reverberates through Black Lives Matter protests today. "A radical, well-informed, and highly original reinterpretation of the place of slavery in the American War of Independence."—David Brion Davis, Yale University

White Cargo is the forgotten story of the thousands of Britons who lived and died in bondage in Britain's American colonies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 300,000 white people were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from London's streets to labor in the tobacco fields, where life expectancy was no more than two years. Brothels were raided to provide "breeders" for Virginia. Hopeful migrants were duped into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property who could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock. Drawing on letters crying for help, diaries, and court and government archives, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh demonstrate that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery alone were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. The trade ended with American independence, but the British still tried to sell convicts in their former colonies, which prompted one of the most audacious plots in Anglo-American history. This is a saga of exploration and cruelty spanning 170 years that has been submerged under the overwhelming memory of black slavery. White Cargo brings the brutal, uncomfortable story to the surface.

This is an introduction to the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, which especially focuses on the two centuries from 1650, and covers the Atlantic world, especially North America and the West Indies, as well as the Cape Colony, Mauritius, and India. -;Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history - and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation. -;...a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade - Spartacus Review