“An important and revelatory work that brings economic history to life with narrative and nuance.” ― Kirkus Reviews (starred) From an acclaimed historian, a new history of American slavery and American capitalism, told through the setting where both developed. Over the last few decades, and especially in the last ten years, our understanding of slavery has been transformed by the work of many talented scholars. We have learned a great deal about the actions of enslavers, the struggles and victories of the enslaved, and how the afterlives of American slavery persist into the present. Yet Dan Rood’s In the Shadow of the Great House is one of the first contemporary books to focus on the primary engine of slavery, race, and capitalism in this country: the plantation. The plantation was invented on the small Atlantic island of São Tomé in the 1500s, and the island also became the site, soon enough, of the first slave revolt. The brutal technology was then perfected in Barbados, where planters worked tens of thousands of African captives to their deaths in sugar factories. But it was in the United States, Rood shows, that the plantation found its most powerful manifestations. In Virginia, Carolina, and then the Deep South, successive plantation revolutions transformed slavery into a much more rigid and oppressive institution. While prejudice certainly preceded the plantation, incomparably wealthy planters now insisted on a rightless, eternally available, “increasing” source of labor, and in the process reinvented human bondage and stamped it onto a single race. In a narrative that sweeps across four hundred years of American history, Rood reveals that the plantation did not die after the Civil War. It metastasized. From the advent of sharecropping in the late nineteenth century to the rise of cotton in mid-twentieth century California to today’s chicken processing plants―which sit on the same land once occupied by plantations and are staffed largely by migrant workers―the plantation has cast a long shadow over American life. Even as he describes how the always-evolving plantation spread across much of the landscape, devouring people and nature in equal measure, Rood documents the “dark retreats” carved out of plantation life by the enslaved. It was the enslaved―those caught up in the plantation’s treadmill, those who were thrown violently into the gears of its machinery―who offered the most clear-eyed understanding of how it worked, and what these behemoths told us, and still tell us, about our country. 35 illustrations "[A] provocative history of the plantation, one that spans continents and centuries…[Rood] is an able guide, piloting us deftly through the economic and cultural intricacies of a half-dozen societies in language that is mostly brisk and well-paced. He has a knack for turning seemingly unconnected subjects into elegant prose…a powerful record of an institution that was more dynamic and resilient than history suggests." ― Fergus Bordewich, Wall Street Journal "What could have been a dry economic study becomes a far more personal and affecting account through Rood’s consistent foregrounding of the humanity, resilience, and skill of plantation laborers who introduce new crops, foodways, and agricultural techniques, and forge families and communities―even in the most dire circumstances. An important and revelatory work that brings economic history to life with narrative and nuance." ― Kirkus Reviews (starred) "No leisurely anachronism, the plantation still casts a deep shadow over American life. In this transatlantic history covering five centuries and four continents, Daniel Rood deftly explores the volatile power of plantations to reshape environments, disseminate miseries, concentrate wealth, and generate rebellions.?By creating new forms of exploitation, plantations endure even where slavery has receded." ― Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873 "In this brilliant and wide-ranging book, Daniel Rood provides us with an ecological, architectural, cultural, and, above all, economic history of one of the primary emblems and engines of American history: the plantation. As much as that of its cognates―the factory and the prison―the history of the plantation demands our attention and has now found its perfect chronicler." ― Walter Johnson, author of River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom " In the Shadow of the Great House is at once a powerfully instructive synthesis of a vast literature and archive and a brilliant reframing of the history of the plantation. Skillfully argued, eloquently rendered, and humane, this history . . . provides a much-needed antidote to the continued romanticization of the plantation and the duplicity and pain that continue as its travel companion. . . . This is a work of distinction in the best tradition of historical scholarship. A stunning achievement." ― Thavolia Glymph, author of The W