Paul Musselwhite is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the cultural, intellectual, and political histories of settler colonial societies in the seventeenth-century. He is the author of Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake, which reconstructs the long-running fixation on urban development schemes in the Chesapeake region and reveals their paradoxically central place in the emergence of planters’ agrarian culture and political economy. His work has appeared in journals such as Early American Studies, The William and Mary Quarterly, and The Journal of Social History. He has also co-edited two volumes of essays: Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, and Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in the Americas.
During his time at the McNeil Center, Paul will be working on his new book project, provisionally titled Plantation: Between Public Project and Private Enterprise. The book traces the evolving and ambivalent meaning of the novel English term “plantation,” from its initial use to describe English settler colonies such as Jamestown or Plymouth to its application to private, commercial, and slave-powered agricultural units. Although this appears to be a dramatic volte-face, the project argues that the connotations of plantation evolved gradually in ways that were purposefully designed by planters and merchants to weave together claims to public legitimacy and settler sovereignty with the search for private profit and racialized human commodification. The book reframes the plantation as not merely a bundle of technical, scientific, and carceral innovations, but as a novel conceptual technology. The concept of the plantation was vital to rationalizing and justifying the policing of labor and the manipulation of markets and state institutions and thereby easing the transition to capitalist slave-powered agriculture.