Tobacco and Plantations: The Making of the Old Dominion
About this episode
This episode explores how tobacco shaped the plantations of Virginia and the power dynamics of its early society.
his is the tale of how tobacco created the plantations in Virginia for which the Old Dominion is known, and how those plantations entrenched and solidified the power of the famous "Topping People" of Virginia, those First Families of Virginia and Virginia Gentry who ruled the state for decades. It is a tale of indentured servants in colonial Virginia and slave labor workforces on vast Virginia plantations. It is a tale of the Navigation Acts, of soil exhaustion, of Starving Times in Jamestown and dying gentlemen in their starched, ruffled shirts. This is the story of Virginia's shift, brought about thanks to John Rolfe of Pocahontas fame, from the blighted land Captain John Smith and Gov. George Percy knew, to that flourishing and flowering Old Virginia of Robert "King" Carter, Thomas Lee, and the others of Virginia's Golden Age. But most of all, this is the tale of tobacco and plantations in Virginia, and why they developed as they did.
More episodes of The Old World with Will Tanner
- The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe: The Birth of Virginian Chivalry
- 1622: The Indian Massacre that Almost Destroyed Virginia
- Virginia's Military Culture, and How It Created the American Military Culture with Paul Fahrenheidt
- Bacon's Rebellion and the Birth of Virginia's Golden Age
- Conservation, Conservatism, and Lurking Natural Disasters with Chris Barnard
- The Virginia Cavaliers: Myth or Reality?
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