Description
Book SynopsisThis book focuses on how Enlightenment ideas shaped plantation management and slave work routines. It shows how work dictated slaves' experiences and influenced their families and communities on large plantations, and examines plantation management schemes, agricultural routines and work regimes in more detail than other scholars have done.
Trade Review'In this richly researched volume, Roberts casts light on the 'lived experience of enslaved peoples' by documenting the daily life of slaves in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.' M. G. Spencer, Choice
'Justin Roberts has written a challenging and thought-provoking book. In it, he underlines the centrality of work and the conditions pertaining thereto to the lives of enslaved Africans in Barbados,Jamaica, and Virginia in the late eighteenth century … a multipolar study of their lives that sheds light on important differences not only between the Chesapeake and Caribbean worlds of slavery but also within the Caribbean world of slavery. In this respect, Roberts has written an important book, providing for the later eighteenth century the more nuanced and comparative study of sugar production, plantation life, and slave demography in the Caribbean that one has come to associate with the research of Barry Higman, among others, for the period after British slave trade abolition in 1807.' Rosalie G. Riegle, H-Peace
'Roberts' book is a fine study of how the plantocratic urge to ensure that slaves worked was the key both to profitability and to social and political calm.' James Walvin, International Journal of Maritime History
'There is a great deal that is impressive and worthwhile about this study. The book is based on a wide body of scholarship on labor, political economy, archaeology, and other fields … for scholars and students interested in slave labor in the New World and the Caribbean and North America in particular, this is a valuable text.' Frederick Knight, Agricultural History
Table of ContentsIntroduction; 1. Clock work: time, quantification, amelioration, and the Enlightenment; 2. Sunup to sundown: agricultural diversity and seasonal patterns of work; 3. Lockstep and line: gang work and the division of labor; 4. Negotiating sickness: health, work, and seasonality; 5. Labor and industry: skilled and unskilled work; 6. Working lives: occupations and families in the slave community; Conclusion.
