In the Shadow of the Great House: A History of the Plantation in America, by Daniel Rood
Rather than 1619, Daniel Rood proposes 1672 as the starting year of American history. In 1672, a sugar planter from Barbados, a disreputable figure called John Yeamans, transplanted himself to the Carolinas and with him, the sort of plantation system already established in the Caribbean and parts of South America. In the post-Revolution United States, Rood argues, “the plantation reached its most powerful expression,” run by “fully enfranchised citizen-planters” who occupied the seats of federal power, their plantations “fully imbricated with a modern, industrializing, and expansionist nation-state.”
With In the Shadow of the Great House, Rood, a University of Georgia history professor, looks beyond the widely understood conditions of a few owners and a large number of enslaved laborers producing cash crops. He argues that even long after slavery’s abolition, the plantation model retains “its central place in American capitalism on the basis of new forms of racinalized labor exploitation.” He cites the monocrop agrobusiness of 21ststst century America as well as the U.S. coffee and banana conglomerates dominant in several Latin American nations. The plantation is “not just a producer, but a consumer,” absorbing labor, capital and manufactured goods from other economic sectors, dependent on “worldwide market forces” with a rapacious tendency to move on from one exploited landscape to another.
Rood is especially enlightening on how the plantation model, consciously or not, informed any number of policies imposed by the U.S. on the world, including the “Green Revolution” whose mechanized farms, sustained by synthetic fertilizers and hybrid seeds, produced higher yields, social disruption and profits for American corporations. In Brazil and other countries imbued with those principles, labor conditions have been little better than those endured by the enslaved in the antebellum South. Ethanol is the new cotton.
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In the Shadow of the Great House is disturbing reading as it peels away illusions about the sources of our society’s material comforts. “The plantation builders of the twenty-first century are massive institutional investors partnering with globally dominant energy companies,” Rood writes.
Get In the Shadow of the Great House on Amazon here.
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