Englishmen Transplanted

The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660

• Author(s): Larry Dale Gragg,
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 217
• ISBN_10: 0199253897
  ISBN_13: 9780199253890
  
• Language: en
• Categories: Business & Economics / Economic History , History / Europe / Great Britain / General , History / United States / State & Local / South (AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, NC, SC, TN, VA, WV) , History / World , History / Europe / Renaissance , History / Caribbean & West Indies / General , History / Social History , Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General , Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism ,

Description:... Larry Gragg challenges the prevailing view of the seventeenth-century English planters of Barbados as architects of a social disaster. Most historians have described them as profligate and immoral, as grasping capitalists who exploited their servants and slaves in a quest for quick riches inthe cultivation of sugar. Yet, they were more than rapacious entrepreneurs. Like English emigrants to other regions in the empire, sugar planters transplanted many familiar governmental and legal institutions, eagerly started families, abided traditional views about the social order, and resistedcompromises in their diet, apparel, and housing, despite their tropical setting. Seldom becoming absentee planters, these Englishmen developed an extraordinary attraction to Barbados, where they saw themselves, as one group of planters explained in a petition, as 'being Englishmentransplanted'.