An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American ... and the University of North Carolina Press)

In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas. In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according to Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provided the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas. In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impactof the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds ofAmerican planters in the colonial Lower South. She focusesparticularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress,tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia,and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern,improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practiceas indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstratesthe central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life.By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work ofcultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economichistory. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' privatepapers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cottoncultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of amodern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought toimprove their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasiveanxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. Thebasis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties,according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery.Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision ofthe modern, but the institution ultimately limited the LowerSouth's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, someof them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin arguesthat these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of theantebellum period, but she contends that they were as much areflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as anoutright rejection of those ideas Examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. Joyce Chaplin focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people.