Click to look inside

An Anxious Pursuit by Joyce E Chaplin

Name: An Anxious Pursuit
Brand: WoB
SKU: 9780807846131
Price: 32.5 GBP
Availability: InStock

Checking stock...

Part of Published By The Omohundro Institute Of Early American History And Culture And The University Of North Carolina Press series

The feel-good place to buy books

Free UK delivery over £5
10% off preloved books when you join +Plus
Buying preloved emits 46% less CO2 than new
Give your books a new home - sell them back to us!

An Anxious Pursuit by Joyce E Chaplin

In An Anxious Pursuit , Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.

Joyce E. Chaplin is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807846131
ISBN 10	0807846139
Title	An Anxious Pursuit
Author	Joyce E Chaplin
Series	Published By The Omohundro Institute Of Early American History And Culture And The University Of North Carolina Press
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	1996-09-30
Number of pages	430
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable