Russell R. Menard – författare

By the American Revolution, the farmers and city-dwellers of British America had achieved, individually and collectively, considerable prosperity. The nature and extent of that success are still unfolding. In this first comprehensive assessment of where research on prerevolutionary economy stands, what it seeks to achieve, and how it might best proceed, the authors discuss those areas in which traditional work remains to be done and address new possibilities for a 'new economic history.'

Intending at first simply to do further research on the mid-seventeenth-century ""sugar revolution"" in Barbados, Russell Menard traveled to the island. But once there, he quickly found many discrepancies between the historical understanding of the way in which this ""revolution"" fueled the institution of slavery and the actual, quotidian, records documenting the prominence of slavery on the island even before sugar spurred its economic growth. In Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados, Menard reveals that black slaveryís emergence in Barbados actually preceded the rise of sugar; in doing so he both reverses the long-held understanding of slavery as a consequence of the islandís economic boom and repositions the impact that this surge of slavery had on Americaís slave trade.Based on fresh archival research conducted on the island and in England, Sweet Negotiations shows that Barbados was well on its way to becoming a plantation colony and a slave society before sugar emerged as the dominant crop. Menard sheds new light on the origins of the integrated plantation, gang labor, the slave economy, agricultural productivity, the organization of commerce, and the character of the planters who built the sugar industry. Despite its small size (166 square miles) and distant location, Barbados loomed large in England's American empire. With Menard's findings, the islandís importance becomes that much more pronounced: because Barbados was a major site for the development and dissemination of the slave plantation system in the Americas, Menard's correction of the historical record has implications that reach far beyond the tiny island's shores.

In 1652 Robert Cole, an English Catholic, moved with his family and servants to St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Using this family’s story as a case study, the authors of Robert Cole’s World provide an intimate portrait of the social and economic life of a middling planter in the seveneenth–century Chesapeake, including work routines and agricultural techniques, the upbringing of children, neighborhood relationships and community formation, and the role of religion.The Cole Plantation account, a record that details what the plantation produced, consumed, purchased, and sold over a twelve-year period, is the only known surviving document of its kind for seventeenth–century British America. Along with Cole’s will, it serves as the framework around which the authors build their analysis. Drawing on these and other records, they present Cole as an exemplar of the ordinary planter whose success created the capital base for the slave-based plantation society of the eighteenth century.