They rationalized slavery by claiming a free society (for themselves) could only be brought about if a certain majority group did all the work and absorbed all of the suffering. So the English aristocrats mimicked labor relations in the Caribbean, and started to buy slaves from Africa. You tell my soul 'It is well', oh (It is well) Chorus: Danny Gokey, Evan Craft And everything will be alright. But the European population couldn’t fare as well in the hot weather many of them would die from malaria. In its nearly 900 pages, Fischer convincingly argues that folkways are functioning systems of high complexity that remain operative in today's advanced civilizations, where they are augmented by. Fischer estimates that nearly 75 percent of Virginia’s initial population were indentured servants. As these elites were unaccustomed to performing agrarian labor themselves, they paid (sometimes blackmailed or kidnapped) other people to work for them.

Growing Old in America (1977), Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), Paul. Fischer's Albion's Seed the North England and South Scotland Border area as the cultural source of the American backwoods constitutes a novel, but questionable thesis. When King Charles I was killed in 1649, they fled an England now ruled by Oliver Cromwell and his rebel army.įischer details how the first governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, styled the new colony as a friendly land for English noble people. Historian David Hackett Fischer participated in a three-hour discussion of his life and work. David Hackett Fischer, Albions Seed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). These immigrants, who also went by the name The Cavaliers, tended to be loyal to the British monarchy. These people travelled from scattered towns throughout the south of England from about 1624 to 1675. Part 2 centers around those immigrating to Virginia.

Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer