ABSTRACT

In the British North American Chesapeake, local elites stood at the apex of the region's social hierarchy, dominated provincial and local governments, and controlled a sizable share of the region's economic resources and labor force. In seventeenth-century British North America being an aristocrat was usually more a matter of ability to wrest material gain from the wilderness than of privileged birth. In growing urban areas, rising merchants and other professionals and organized groups of artisans sometimes contested aristocratic rule. But by retaining control of the all-important state governments, the Chesapeake gentry continued to dominate the political life of the region. Beginning about mid-century some gentry planters also became interested in adopting advanced European technologies and integrated land and livestock management strategies. As a whole, across the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the Chesapeake gentry managed their estates rationally and took the lead in strategies that promoted regional economic development.