"Students need to understand how market demand for certain staple crops created plantations and the slave- and then indentured-labor system, and this book explains it. The third entry in the Cunliffe Series, it examines the cultivation of American tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton in the context...

"This is the first study to systematically explore similarities, differences, and connections between the histories of American planters and Irish landlords. The book focuses primarily on the comparative and transnational investigation of an antebellum Mississippi planter named John A. Quitman...