Tale of Two Plantations

Forty years ago, after publication of his pathbreaking book Sugar and Slaves, Richard Dunn began an intensive investigation of two thousand slaves living on two plantations, one in North America and one in the Caribbean. Digging deeply into the archives, he has reconstructed the individual lives and collective experiences of three generations of slaves on the Mesopotamia sugar estate in Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in tidewater Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery could take. Dunn’s stunning achievement is a rich and compelling history of bondage in two very different Atlantic world settings.From the mid-eighteenth century to emancipation in 1834, life in Mesopotamia was shaped and stunted by deadly work regimens, rampant disease, and dependence on the slave trade for new laborers. At Mount Airy, where the population continually expanded until emancipation in 1865, the “surplus” slaves were sold or moved to distant work sites, and families were routinely broken up. Over two hundred of these Virginia slaves were sent eight hundred miles to the Cotton South.In the genealogies that Dunn has painstakingly assembled, we can trace a Mesopotamia fieldhand through every stage of her bondage, and contrast her harsh treatment with the fortunes of her rebellious mulatto son and clever quadroon granddaughter. We track a Mount Airy craftworker through a stormy life of interracial sex, escape, and family breakup. The details of individuals’ lives enable us to grasp the full experience of both slave communities as they labored and loved, and ultimately became free.

A remarkable achievement. By tracking the enslaved populations on Jamaica’s Mesopotamia estate and Virginia’s Mount Airy plantation in minute detail, Dunn explores major themes in the history of slavery through the experiences of particular people and their social networks. His meticulous research, considered analysis, and unparalleled authority on the subject have set a new benchmark for histories of Anglo-American slavery., A Tale of Two Plantations is the first book to describe with vivid detail the lived realities of the radically different slave societies of the Caribbean and North America. Based on deep research in plantation records, Dunn’s comparison explains how the lives of slaves in different parts of the Anglo-Atlantic world could be so different. By illuminating the family lives of enslaved people like Sarah Affir and Winney Grimshaw, he has breathed life into the old account books that listed people as nothing but property., A Tale of Two Plantations reads beautifully, is argued persuasively and provides a wealth of insights into a world that flourished until little more than a century ago and which, thankfully, is lost forever.

Richard S. Dunn is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. Among his publications are Sugar and Slaves in 1972; The Papers of William Penn, edited with Mary Maples Dunn, in four volumes published in 1981–1987; and The Journal of John Winthrop, edited with Laetitia Yeandle, published in 1996. He also designed the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and was its founding director.