Creole Gentlemen

by Trevor Burnard

Examining the lives of 460 of the wealthiest men who lived in colonial Maryland, 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.

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 2002

Reviews

[Zachary Bennett · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Trevor Burnard's work, but unlike his later books this is quite the slog to get through--understandable since it is his dissertation. If you have a genealogical interest in colonial Maryland or want to understand the culture of early American gentility in a specific context this may be of interest, otherwise it's a very dense monograph.