Forty years ago, after publication of his pathbreaking book
Sugar and Slaves," Richard Dunn began an intensive investigation of
two thousand slaves living on two plantations, one in North America
and one in the Caribbean. Digging deeply into the archives, he has
reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of
three generations of slaves on the Mesopotamia sugar estate in
Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in tidewater Virginia, to
understand the starkly different forms slavery could take. Dunn s
stunning achievement is a rich and compelling history of bondage in
two very different Atlantic world settings.
From the mid-eighteenth century to emancipation in 1834, life in
Mesopotamia was shaped and stunted by deadly work regimens, rampant
disease, and dependence on the slave trade for new laborers. At
Mount Airy, where the population continually expanded until
emancipation in 1865, the surplus slaves were sold or moved to
distant work sites, and families were routinely broken up. Over two
hundred of these Virginia slaves were sent eight hundred miles to
the Cotton South.
In the genealogies that Dunn has painstakingly assembled, we
can trace a Mesopotamia fieldhand through every stage of her
bondage, and contrast her harsh treatment with the fortunes of her
rebellious mulatto son and clever quadroon granddaughter. We track
a Mount Airy craftworker through a stormy life of interracial sex,
escape, and family breakup. The details of individuals lives enable
us to grasp the full experience of both slave communities as they
labored and loved, and ultimately became free."
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