The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America

The colonial plantation elite's persistent emulation of the British landed gentry has long intrigued American historians, who recently have insisted that the pursuit of this apparently outdated ideal was an impediment to the development of a distinctive American culture. In The Complete Colonial Gentleman, Michal J. Rozbicki argues that such a view misreads the legitimizing process and the history of culture. Examining the American planters' aspirations from the perspective of cultural theory and in the comparative context of a larger British world, Rozbicki asserts that for this emerging elite, the genteel quest was the only feasible route to identity and authority: it became a central dynamic of their lives, crucial to their ambitious struggles with provincialism and the metropolitan condescension toward colonial "upstarts." The author also shows how this determined quest played a vital but little-understood role in the construction of a new American identity, as the European model enabled the colonial elite to achieve sufficient maturity, confidence, and pride in their virtues and rights to defy the British in the 1770s. Originally asserting the gentlemanly ideals of liberty and equality against the British crown, Revolutionary gentry inadvertently cultivated them in the fertile ground of nonelite culture. Rozbicki's interpretation contrasts provocatively with recent studies of colonial America and demonstrates how the essentially conservative aspirations of colonial planter gentility foreshadowed distinctly American and democratic developments.