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Towns in Plantation Societies in Eighteenth-Century British America

There is a long-standing historiography that the plantation system of the American South and the British West Indies was inimical to urbanization. If we focus on towns in the Lower South and the West Indies, however, rather than the Chesapeake, we see urbanization as central to plantation development. The slave trade was vital to this urbanization, forming the dynamic trade that allowed for entrepreneurial decision making. It allowed towns like Kingston, Charleston, and Bridgetown to become more than shipping points. They became places of deep linkages between different economic sectors. In addition, they had an independent, autonomous existence in which growth was endogenous and in which people found multiple opportunities for wealth creation and the pursuit of pleasure.