An Anxious Pursuit - Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Paperback, New edition)

In "An Anxious Pursuit," Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history.
Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.
Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.

General

Imprint:	The University of North Carolina Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Release date:	September 1996
First published:	September 1996
Authors:	Joyce E. Chaplin
Dimensions:	235 x 156 x 27mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	430
Edition:	New edition
ISBN-13:	978-0-8078-4613-1
Categories:	Books > Professional & Technical > Technology: general issues > History of engineering & technology Books > Professional & Technical > Agriculture & farming > General Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social groups & communities > Rural communities Books > History > History of specific subjects > Social & cultural history Promotions
LSN:	0-8078-4613-9
Barcode:	9780807846131

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