Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (New World in the Atlantic World) - Hardcover

"Burnard's book makes a useful and worthy contribution." -"The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography "Trevor Burnard breathes new life into the field of Maryland's colonial history by providing us with a superb portrait of its native-born, Creole elite. Deftly uncovering the various layers of reality that gave meaning to their experience, he captures the distinctive duality of their identity, split between an ardent pursuit of British cultural values, especially genteel respectability, and a rapidly growing independence coupled with a commitment to local, provincial interests .A major contribution to the scholarship on early modern British America." -Michael J. Rozbicki, Author of "The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America "This is a lucid, superbly argued study of "the lives of moderately well off gentleman at the edges of the Atlantic plantation world" that reconstructs the social and material contexts that anchored the identities and framed the behaviors of Maryland's elite. ." -S. Max Edelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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.