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A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

Amazon.com Price:  $32.00 (as of 23/04/2019 08:01 PST- Details)

Description

Forty years ago, after publication of his pathbreaking book Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn started an intensive investigation of two thousand slaves living on two plantations, one in North The usa 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 take note 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 used to be 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 will trace a Mesopotamia fieldhand through each and every stage of her bondage, and contrast her harsh remedy 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 circle of relatives breakup. The main points of individuals’ lives enable us to grasp the full experience of both slave communities as they labored and loved, and in the long run became free.

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