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The migration of planters' sons towards the Southwest has been one kind of dream derived from the aspiration to overcome the success of ancestors and elders, but with the transition of those who fled in search of higher grounds came massive changes, not always good changes. Those who left the seaboard to establish their independence realized the importance of the family's resources in a volatile economy, as well as the things that kinship and similar relations could offer to help attain success. Over the years, a bad taste of independence gave some men in their new male role license to manipulate others. As for the planter women, migration was but a move towards looking back to the only life they had known. This book is a story of planter migration, the divisions between generations of planter men, their gender roles, family, and races in the seaboard and the Old Southwest.

This chapter assesses whether the class structure of the South changed in the postbellum era and whether different individual and locational attributes predicted who would come to occupy preferred social positions. It suggests another source of categorical uncertainty during Reconstruction and beyond. While many Southern journalists and politicians celebrated the expansion of an entrepreneurial middle class at the time, this class actually declined numerically in the proverbial New South. Moreover, the “decaying” planter class was remarkably persistent, both in its dominance of the top of the wealth distribution and its involvement in the postwar industrialization of the region. The social categories of planters and middling Southerners that were deployed in popular discourse—and within the “New South Creed”—thus had little in common with the reality of class structure following the Civil War.

Profit and the accumulation of wealth from tobacco became the aspiration of 17th-century Virginians. The replacement of the Virginia Company with royal government is best understood as an analogue to a modern chapter eleven bankruptcy reorganization that facilitated investment in the colony from new sources, namely independent planters on the ground and merchants and other individuals in England who were willing to lend them money. To keep investment flowing, Virginia had two needs. The first was a reliable labor force, which was created by a law of servitude that combined rule-of-law features intended to induce Europeans to immigrate with harsh mechanisms of coercion contrived to insure that, once present in Virginia, they would work. The second was a law of debt, which was designed to encourage investors to advance money by promising them repayment.

Maryland was founded as a refuge for upper-class Roman Catholics, and its early law served their needs. Later, Puritans settled in Maryland, took control of its government, and attempted to impose New England law on the province. When Lord Baltimore, the Catholic proprietor, regained control, economic forces similar to those in Virginia pushed Maryland's planters to emulate the legal system of their southerly neighbor. The end result was that Maryland developed a common-law based legal order that focused on obtaining labor from servants, collecting debts, and thereby encouraging English investors to lend money to Maryland planters.

Kenya's settlers were tiny in number, always one‐third the immigrant Indian population whose interests first thwarted settler ambitions. And settlers were always divided, between farmer and planter, country and town, aristocrat and poor white. Half remained transient throughout British rule, spending five years or less in Kenya, in lives that were more imperial than colonial. Their relations with the African majority were similarly diverse and changing. Whites could meet neither of their contradictory ambitions, to be either a segregated race or the national leaders of a multiracial community. The demands of each alternative made both impossible. In particular, white leadership of African troops against the empire's enemies in both world wars incurred unwelcome debts to Africans. As the frontier of African politics advanced towards independence so most whites retreated to the English home counties, having failed to establish their segregated counterpart on the equator.

The shifting and various identities of both official and unofficial members of the British community in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) are explored in this chapter and are revealed to change according to time, place, class, and gender. Planter and administrator shared a common British identity exemplified in the need to differentiate themselves from the indigenous population through such things as dress codes, food, leisure activities all institutionalized in those most iconic symbols of colonial life – the club and hill station. This common identity did not, however, preclude conflict over competing interests and perceptions. The life of British nurses and that of planters' wives and daughters illustrate that what it meant to be white, British and female similarly diverged. Ceylon's long period of decolonization further challenged this constructed and imagined identity. What it meant to be British and colonial is shown to be ambiguous and ever changing.

This final chapter shows the continuities of life on Barbados between the mid-17th century and the early 19th century, and in the process offers a reminder of the need to revise our interpretation of these colonial planters. They were more than brutal and reckless fortune seekers. Besides achieving great wealth, these settlers sought to live in a society that resembled, as far as a tropical slave society would permit, the England they had left behind.

Closely related to Conrad's treatment of romance and the generic schizophrenia in his work is the ‘Woman Question’, which is also related to the inscription of subjectivity and the dynamics of writing. This chapter deals with ‘The Planter of Malata’, written at about the point which critics mark as the onset of Conrad's ‘decline’, and with ‘The Tale’, written near the end of his writing career. The analysis offered here is psycho-textual rather than psychoanalytic. In both stories, Masculinity is defined in relation to a Feminine Otherness; both seem to revolve on questions of reality and fiction, truth and lies, facts and illusion — turning the gender conflict into an epistemic struggle. The discussion argues that both of these stories are ultimately about the encounter of authorial subjectivity with its own blind spot.

Migration is defined by the transition of people from one specific geographical area to another. Within the process of this transfer from border to border, a lot of changes is to be undergone in all aspects of life, challenging ones capability to adapt in order to survive. This book is about the profoundly different ways that planter men and women experienced migration from the Southern seaboard to the frontiers of the Old Southwest in the years between 1810 and 1860, where the heightened sexual inequality and altered sex roles experienced within the family upon migration were revealed. It is as concerned with change over geographic space as it is with change over time, discussing a rich historiography regarding the planter family, women's history, the modernization of Southern society, and the American frontier from the personal testimonies of planter men, women, and their slaves.

The years between 1820 and 1830 in the West offered diminishing opportunities for the young men living in this humble place. With the changing environment, the new generation learned to formulate a new set of social values far different from their ancestors, that was to become independent from family and to embrace individualism, competition, and risk-taking. This era also embraced a new identity for the male role, that the fulfillment of a man's personal goals was attained at the expense of his existing obligations to others as he set off to meet greener pastures in the Southwest. This chapter shows the drive that sprung in the character of planter men's sons to leave home eliminating the traditional pact between generations with the belief that success was nowhere to be found in the seaboard. Migration then opened a lot of issues inside the members of the planter family and the seaboard.

As migration became the new measurement of a planter's son's success, planter men, women, and their slaves went on the journey towards the Southwest. Though they have moved from border to border together, the experience of leaving home and starting anew far from home and family felt different for each of them. This chapter discusses the effects of migration on the members of the planter family from the moment of departure of the young men, their experiences as they went along the journey towards their dreams of success, their arrival and settlement in the new land, as well as the difficulties they encountered with the challenges of a new home. Men retained their decision-making power as the head of the family upon the transition, while women and slaves lived a life filled with more despair and sorrow.