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Author Johnston, Katherine (Katherine M.), author.

Title The nature of slavery : environment and plantation labor in the Anglo-Atlantic world / Katherine Johnston
Published New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022]
©2022

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Description 1 online resource
Contents Labor in hot climates : the seventeenth century -- A colony "on fire" : the Georgia experiment, 1732-1750 -- "An excellent & healthfull situation" : colonial patterns of settlement -- Atlantic bodies : health, seasoning, and race -- A climatic debate : the transatlantic slave trade in Parliament, 1788-1791 -- The place of Black Americans : rhetoric and race in the nineteenth century
Summary "In response to abolitionist efforts to end the transatlantic slave trade in the late eighteenth century, plantation owners in the Caribbean, Britain, and the American South insisted that only Africans and their descendants could labor in warm climates. Black bodies, they argued, were especially suited for cultivating crops in the heat, while white bodies were incapable of such work. By examining personal correspondence regarding bodily health and the environment in the context of plantation labor in the Anglo-Atlantic world, this book argues that defenders of slavery made these claims about people's ability to labor despite their experiences, not because of them. At the same time, the book shows how planters' claims contributed to historical myths about the transition to enslaved labor on seventeenth-century plantations. Finally, this book argues that the language about climate contributed to the construction of race in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Atlantic world. By linking climate, race, and the ability to labor, planters categorically separated Black and white bodies from one another. Their arguments permeated a public imagination and, through the language of climate and bodily difference, became accepted as natural. Following a story from the Caribbean to the colony of Georgia through debates over the abolition of the slave trade and, finally, to the antebellum South, this book demonstrates the pervasiveness of a groundless theory about climate, labor, and bodily difference that ultimately contributed to notions of race"--Publisher's description
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed on August 11, 2023)
Subject Environmental racism -- South Atlantic States
Slavery -- Justification -- 18th century
Human beings -- Effect of climate on -- South Atlantic States -- History
Human beings -- Effect of climate on
Slavery -- Justification
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780197514627
0197514626
9780197514610
0197514618
9780197514634
0197514634