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  • Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake by Paul Musselwhite
  • Mary S. Draper
Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake. By Paul Musselwhite. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp xii, 341. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-226-58528-4.)

In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson declared that Virginia had “‘no towns of any consequence’” (p. 251). He attributed this absence to geography. The “‘navigable rivers’” that penetrated the state’s interior enabled trade throughout the Chesapeake and devalued the importance of towns (p. 6). In Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake, Paul Musselwhite eschews this environmental determinism. Rather, he argues that Jefferson’s remark was an articulation of the Chesapeake’s political economy—one in which planters saw urbanization as a threat to their economic and political power. But what happened when this provincial political economy clashed with its imperial counterpart? Musselwhite chronicles these contested moments, including the English Revolution, the Restoration, Bacon’s Rebellion, and the imperial crises of the eighteenth century, when officials and planters alike fixated on urbanity. Rather than resulting in town building, these debates propelled the development of the Chesapeake’s plantation system. Elites came to view their rural estates—not cities or towns—as civic safeguards.

Musselwhite traces the origins of this political economy to the first three decades of the Virginia colony. Rival attempts to organize Virginia around different urban models—ranging from military garrisons to independent corporate communities—divided the colony’s leadership from the start. After the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624, the English crown aimed to bring the Virginia colony into the realm of metropolitan control. It did so by dispensing royal and proprietary grants that promoted urbanization. Planters, who routinely pursued profit and patronage through private networks, viewed these grants as inimical to their interests. They pushed for the creation of a decentralized county court system that enabled their domination of local politics and commerce. These courts, elites argued, enabled civic community just as effectively as any urban form. By granting Chesapeake elites a semblance of political and commercial freedom, Chesapeake officials aimed to cultivate planter loyalty and bring a growing rural gentry under imperial control.

In subsequent decades, elites viewed directives to urbanize as challenges to this county system and, by extension, their local authority. Their first hurdle came with Commonwealth reformers who embraced a new vision of empire that lauded urban corporate institutions. Then the Stuart Restoration ushered in yet another vision—one that was suspicious of independent cities. Conflict over urban development further escalated in 1676, when Nathaniel Bacon and his army seized control of Virginia. As elites consolidated their control of land, trade, and enslaved labor, poorer whites envisioned towns—and the industries they would support—as the solution to the Chesapeake’s economic problems. [End Page 132] In response to these complaints, elites and officials prioritized urban development throughout the region in the 1680s. But planters soon abandoned their support of town building. Rather than becoming nodes within an imperial and administrative network as envisioned by the Stuart state, Chesapeake towns became beacons of sociability and authority for the region’s landed gentry. For Musselwhite, these repeated debates over urbanity led elites to embrace a homegrown country ideology that guided their reactions to the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s. While empire had “constrained their political-economic vision,” independence did not (p. 252).

While the ideology that Musselwhite charts was peculiar to Virginia and Maryland, the metropolitan-provincial tensions behind it were not. As such, scholars interested in the political, economic, and environmental histories of plantation America will find much to praise about Musselwhite’s book. In deconstructing a well-known environmental explanation, he models how historians can recover the ideologies that bolstered plantation politics. More specifically, he reconstructs the nuanced—and constitutive—relationship between towns and plantations, suggesting to scholars working elsewhere in plantation America ways to remap our understanding of that dynamic.

Mary S. Draper
Midwestern State University
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