Book description
From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's
racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race
prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial
difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The
Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750--1860, Watson W. Jennison
explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing
that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this
transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the
plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth
century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the
decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the
"cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and
reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that
emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety
of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence,
and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the
evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.
""Colonial Georgia has long been known as 'the debatable
land' contested by the British and Spanish crowns. That imperial
conflict, as Watson Jennison shows, was the tip of the iceberg. In a
sweeping account, Jennison describes the struggle between Low Country
planters, Revolutionary republicans, black maroons, free people of
color, and Native Americans to control the region. Georgia's violent
and tumultuous first century culminated in the creation of a white
man's republic. Readers of this excellent book will know that the
outcome was neither uncontested nor inevitable."--Claudio Saunt,
author of Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an
American Family" --
Watson W. Jennison, assistant professor of African American
history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has written
for the Journal of Southern History and the North Carolina Historical
Review. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
