Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management, 1607–1763

On April 21, 2011, Lorena S. Walsh delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763." In a new account of early English America, Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland. Her scope ranges from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture. Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. An accomplished author of books on early America, Lorena S. Walsh was for twenty-seven years a historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. This lecture was cosponsored with The Society of Colonial Wars in the State of Virginia. (Introduction by Paul A. Levengood) The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.