Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776

While much recent scholarship has examined the colonial Chesapeake's slave culture, little attention has been paid to the class of landowners who dominated this society. Trevor Burnard has corrected this oversight by undertaking the first systematic study of an agricultural elite in any British colony, examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland during this era. Burnard traces the development of this elite from a hard-living, profit-driven merchant-planter class in the seventeenth century to a more genteel class of plantation owners in the eighteenth century. This study innovatively compares these men to their counterparts elsewhere in the British Empire, including absentee Caribbean landowners and East Indian nabobs, illustrating their place in the Atlantic economic network.CreoleGentlemenprovides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the men who shaped the society of colonial Maryland.