The Plantation Aesthetic: Political Economy and Literary Form in the British Atlantic World

This dissertation explores how British writers struggled to represent the plantation complex in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Beginning in the early seventeenth century with the tobacco farms of Virginia and the sugar estates of Barbados, the plantation complex quickly emerged as the primary engine of Britain’s colonial economy in the Western hemisphere and transformed the social, political, and economic spheres of the West Indies and southern American colonies. As staple crops like sugar, tobacco, rice, and indigo became dominant exports of the colonies, and as the plantation system expanded throughout the Caribbean and Carolina Lowcountry, the plantation became both the pride and the embarrassment of the first British empire. It was a source of enormous wealth, but it was also maintained by a reprehensible system of racist exploitation and coerced labor. The plantation’s particular combination of slave labor, intensive agriculture, and financial capital transformed Britain’s imperial project and upended ideals Britons held about their nation.

Writers on both sides of the slavery question negotiated the economic potential and moral problems of the plantation through literary representations that sought to describe the plantation not as it was but how they imagined it should or could be. From this negotiation emerges a literary perspective that I call “the plantation aesthetic,” which is an articulation of the plantation system’s logic through a tension between two dominant literary modes of the eighteenth century: the georgic and the tragic. The georgic mode celebrates industry, civil harmony, and cultivation; adapting this poetic form, writers such as Daniel Defoe and James Grainger sought to redeem the plantation and its natural environment by rewriting its exploitative practices as productive husbandry. Tragedy, conversely, serves as a vehicle of ethical critique for writers like Thomas Southerne and Edward Rushton, who directed the genre’s affective response towards the impossible position of the suffering slave. This project provides an early literary history of the plantation, one of the most significant settings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, and illuminates the dynamic relationship between colonialism and genre through the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries.