follett2005

@Book{ follett2005,
	author = {Richard Follett},
	title = {The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860},
	address = {Baton Rouge},
	publisher = {Louisiana State University Press},
	year = 2005,
}

Follett presents the Louisiana sugar districts as the most heavily industrialized and technologically advanced agricultural region in the South. Sugar plantations operated as sophisticated “agrobusinesses” built on the labor of slaves and highly dependent on regimented schedules because of the dangers that weather posed to each year’s crop. Yet although the region’s plantations were highly developed, internal improvements and public works lagged behind because of the single-minded focus of planters on individual profit.

William F. Weeks appears often in the book as a typical example of the region’s elite planters, who were “shrewdly capitalist in their business affairs,” even as they “defended slavery as an organic institution” (4).