Robert Cole's world

In 1652, Robert Cole, an English Catholic, brought his household to St. Mary's County, Maryland, bringing family members and servants with him. Through this one family, the book looks closely at everyday life for a middling planter in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. It covers the rhythm of work and farming methods, how children were raised, how neighbors related to one another and formed a community, and what role religion played in all of it.

At the center of the study is the Cole Plantation account, which tracks what the farm produced, used, bought, and sold across twelve years. Scholars regard it as the only surviving document of its kind from seventeenth-century British America. Cole's will serves alongside it as the structure on which the analysis rests.

Drawing on these papers and many other records, the authors present Cole as a typical planter whose modest success helped build the capital that later supported the slave-based plantation society of the eighteenth century.