Jim Devine wrote:
it's a mistake to generalize from one plantation to conclude anything about the Southern slave-plantation cotton & sugar complex. Jefferson introduced improvements because he was in love with the Englightenment.
An idealistic intepretation from the get go.
But most plantation-owners accumulated land and slaves rather than improving technology (which they thought wouldn't mix with slavery) and rejected the Enlightenment, clinging instead to paternalistic & nostalgic visions equating themselves to the Greek and/or Roman slave-owners. (for some reason, Eugene Genovese fell in love with these ideologies.)
What kind of technology could you possibly be talking about in the 1770s and 1780s? Computers? Diesel tractors? Fuel-injected frammuses?
