The Nature of Slavery : Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World

Abstract

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.