Southern Plantation History
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Phillip Curtin's The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex contextualizes the plantation by seeing it not just as a mode of life but as an institution, a complex that originated in one place and then migrated to various other places, picking up adaptations as it went. As such, Curtin's book is tremendously enlightening, going far beyond most other works on the subject in terms of its perspective, which couples the high-level view of the broad historian that explains paradigm shifts with the detailed view of the specialist that adds rich detail and deeper understanding. Curtin does a masterful job of describing the beginnings of the plantation complex and the forces that operated to move it from place to place. From his explanation of how sugar production was carried out to the cultural milieu in which it occurred, Curtin's book depicts plantation and life and the plantation system as the product of multiple forces and opportunities. It is his insights on the myriad factors that characterized and affected the plantation complex and how they operated to do so that makes this book so interesting and informative. Curtin starts by describing the origins of the plantation complex in the Mediterranean and the characteristics of the mature plantation complex, noting that its workers were slaves and it did not have a self-sustaining population and required an influx of new population from elsewhere just to maintain the status quo. In addition, he points out
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Another salient factor that Curtin examines is that of slavery, without which the plantation complex would not have survived. The plantation was predicated upon slave labor, and where slavery was outlawed, as in the new United States, the plantation system immediately began to wane. He traces the roots of slavery from their beginnings in the Mediterranean through various outposts to the New World and explains how the decline of African states fueled the pool of available slaves to populate the plantation workforce. Linking the fall of slavery to the Democratic Revolution, he shows how the loss of slave labor removed the underpinnings of the plantation complex and precipitated its decline.
Curtin's book contains another salient thread, the sociocultural effects of the plantation complex in modern society. Curtin (13) identifies several differently balanced aspects of "cultural demography" that governed the encounter of the European culture with other cultures through the migration of the plantation complex, of which the plantation complex was just one. His discussion of the cultural demography perceptively explains how the mix of cultures that is evident in today's society came about through th
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Approximate Word count = 1518
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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