planter class
Slaveholding agricultural elite
The planter class was the wealthy elite of slaveholding agricultural societies, particularly in the American South before the Civil War.
Planters owned large estates worked by enslaved people, growing cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and sugar.
The term carries connotations of aristocratic pretension and the brutal economics of slavery: The planter class built their mansions on the labor of hundreds of enslaved workers.
- big houseInformal term for prison
- antebellumBefore a war's start
- aristocracyRule by hereditary elite
- landed gentryLandowning class living on rents
- slaveholderOwner of enslaved persons
slave labor · cotton · King Cotton · cash crop · tobacco · overseer · magnolia · Gone with the Wind · Southern · gentry · landed · mansion · elite · wealth · Confederate · hierarchy · bondage · columns
- Antebellum Southcotton kingdom, overseer, slave quarters, big house, cotton field
- Caribbean historyJamaica, Haiti, Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad
- plantationcotton field, sugar cane, tobacco barn, slave quarters, overseer
- plantation ownersslaveholder
- Gilded AgeGilded Age, robber baron, robber barons, Carnegie, Rockefeller
- MalayaKuala Lumpur, Penang, sultans, tin mining, colonial administration
planter classslaves
Persons owned by others
peasantry · working class · field hands · poor whites · lower classes
planter classbondsmen
Persons in servitude
chattel · plantation workers · indentured servants · servant class · bonded labor
planter, class, plant, plants, planted, planting, plantings, plantation, plantations