Description
This essay discusses the development of an agricultural elite in colonial Maryland during the 17th and 18th centuries. The author uses data from a study of 460 of the wealthiest men in the colony to illustrate the development of this elite. The author compares these men to their counterparts in other parts of the British Empire, illustrating their place in the Atlantic economic network.
While much recent scholarship has examined the colonial Chesapeake's slave culture, little attention has been paid to the class of landowners who dominated this society. Trevor Burnard has corrected this oversight by undertaking the first systematic study of an agricultural elite in any British colony, examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland during this era. Burnard traces the development of this elite from a hard-living, profit-driven merchant-planter class in the seventeenth century to a more genteel class of plantation owners in the eighteenth century. This study innovatively compares these men to their counterparts elsewhere in the British Empire, including absentee Caribbean landowners and East Indian nabobs, illustrating their place in the Atlantic economic network.
Creole Gentlemen provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the men who shaped the society of colonial Maryland.
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