Plantations, planters and slaves in the English a nd French colonies in the New World in the 17th and the 18th centuries

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Abstract:

The article deals with the problem of the rise and development of the plantation complexes in the tropical and subtropical regions in the New World. The focus is on the English and the French colonies where export products such as sugar, tobacco, cacao, coffee were cultivated in the plantations using the slaves supplied from Africa. At first in English “plantation” was synonymous to “colony” but by the end of the 17th century the word had taken on a narrow definition: an overseas settlement producing a cash crop for export through the labour of enslaved Africans. The plantation was an agricultural enterprise organized around capitalist principles but at the same time it retained many feudal features, first of all that the owners controlled the slaves and tried to have a grip on them not only during their working day but also during their free time. The planter was the main architect of the plantation complex and the power of the so called “plantocracy” was almost absolute in their estates. The planter class imitated the lifestyle of the European aristocracy and had an enormous impact on the development of such regions of the New World as Brazil, the Caribbean and the American South. Initially the labour of the local people as well as that of the European indentured workers was used along with the slaves but the plantation revolutions and especially the sugar revolution in the Caribbean led to the transformation of the so called “societies with slaves” to the “slave societies” where the master-slave relationship dominated the social, political and economic life. The article examines the heavy life of slaves in the plantations which was dominated by violence but they were allowed some independence and self-control by their masters which were reached through negotiations. Their work was organized in two different ways – gang system which was widely applied in the plantations (especially in the production of sugar) and task system which allowed the slaves more time on their own. As a result of the process of Creolization, a term introduced by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in the 1970s, new African-American cultures were formed in the New World.

Keywords:

slave trade, plantation, planter, plantocracy, plantation revolution, society with slaves, slave society

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