The Curse of Provincialism
Negative Perceptions of Colonial American Plantation Gentry
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10240437 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michal J Rozbicki (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1997 |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 727 |
| Publication date | 1997-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Southern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-4642 • E-ISSN: 2325-6893 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2211718 |
| OpenAlex | W2509565358 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 2 |
toward colonists in the New World was a persistent theme in British writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Derogatory stereotypes appeared in a wide cross section of English publications, from scientific treatises and travel accounts to journals, belles lettres, and graphic images. This barrage of hauteur and ridicule struck those colonists who, by the eighteenth century, aspired to legitimate status as gentlemen. For several reasons, the cultural ambitions of slaveholding planters in particular were vulnerable to the patronizing attitudes of the British upper classes. First of all, the great planters lived more like the English landed gentry than did any other group in British America. Also, their accumulations of wealth and power-and consequently their educational and cultural attainments-defined them as elites. And then, in their desire for social status, many of them disavowed the primarily commercial roots of their families and of their own wealth, striving instead to identify themselves with the values of the British landed gentry; one recalls the contempt for commercial wealth and for order of men that [stand] behind counters expressed by William Byrd II, himself the grandson of a London goldsmith. Yet Byrd and others like him were frequent objects of ridicule and contempt from the refined British public. Because the great planters were a new eliterarely going back more than two generations-dependent on European genteel style and values in their quest for cultivation and authority, they were unwilling to abandon their reliance on the approval of the metropolitan gentry. Thus their pursuit of gentility amounted to a paradox: the criteria of refinement were prescribed by British arbiters of culture, but these same arbiters refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the colonial gentry. The frustration of the colonials was magnified because
Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Curse · Economics · Gentry · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2019 (17) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |