The publisher will sell few copies of Lorena S. Walsh's masterpiece—it is already available on Google Books, in the same year as its publication. This may signal an end to the print business, to which all scholars must somehow adjust. It certainly is a shame, for the book culminates a lifetime's research and reading on the part of its author, who spent nearly three decades as historian for Colonial Williamsburg, and who has published both broadly and deeply on the tobacco economy over the course of her career. Her expertise is matchless, and she leaves no stone unturned. The result is encyclopedic, but the book has a more satisfying form than alphabetic organization—Walsh provides story as well as substance. At the same time, her deep research in plantation records supports her central claim: that multiple motivations accounted for plantation development in the colonial Chesapeake. Local differences in environment structured the various strategies planters employed. Market demand and imperial institutions shifted over the colonial decades, and the response of planters in specific regions, at different times, shapes the book and its arguments.

The two halves of the book capture two phases of colonial development. From the beginning of “the plantation economy” through “the age of the small planter,” to the drop in prices before the eighteenth century turned, the first 400 pages establish settlement strategies. For a century, boom and bust fueled experimental approaches to development. Frontiers spur innovation, and the British Chesapeake was no exception. Not until the first half of the eighteenth century did production and marketing methods solidify into standard forms. Crop production and sales outlets became predictable and labor forces began to reproduce. The remainder of the book offers some surprises, however, as the established gentry began to display signs of the contradictory motives in the book's title. The Carter family, for example, outfitted sons and daughters with whole plantations, equipped with enslaved labor and brick-built Big Houses. Prestige more than profit motivated these actions, which sometimes drove parents into debt, and always required high initial returns from new enterprises. While planters often made rational decisions about their individual operations, the society they built “warped and corroded” from within, a product (according to Walsh) of the slave labor system (p. 637).

The heart of Walsh's research lies in plantation accounts, and her collection and manipulation of data from a wide range of growers—big, middling, and small, in multiple locations—illustrates the various aims each type took in different periods. She teases out revenue per worker, and the costs and returns of each crop, to demonstrate that planters made rational choices. Extensive readings in geography and environmental- and economic-history fields indicate the structural shifts that dictated planters' decisions. These disciplinary preferences mean that Walsh left certain causative mechanisms relatively unexplored. Changing European fashions lay just beyond her grasp, though they directed many of the price changes that dictated her planters' efforts. Indeed, the book tends to examine institutional shifts through price data, which rather assumes the outcomes of those transformations. Few readers of this Journal would fault this maneuver, though it points out her principal difficulty: Walsh generally sees plantation management in terms of accounting practices and resource allocation. Overseers are a cost more than a principal-agent problem. The causes of structural change—what some scholars might term the political economy—remain always somewhat vague.

Seeing forces mostly in terms of prices makes Walsh undermine one of her most important insights: that legislation marked the pivot point from the experimental seventeenth century to the Golden Age of mid-eighteenth-century tobacco production. In 1730 Virginia created an inspection system that tried to boost prices by demanding quality leaf, rather than limiting its quantity. Maryland followed suit in 1747. Walsh admits that inspection “rescued” her planters, but mostly by providing both higher returns and liquidity from circulating warehouse receipts. Better quality meant better prices, as intended, although Walsh knows that inspectors sometimes honored the law in the breach. She recognizes changing marketing methods as a result of the inspection system, and remarks the resulting “marked homogenization of the Chesapeake's premier product,” (p. 431) but only touches upon the cultivation and harvest techniques that made leaf more similar. Her treatment of agricultural technology generally concludes that early colonists synthesized methods from African, Native American, and a range of European sources. Marketing methods are better examined, but the variance between planters' estimation of their efforts and merchant descriptions of crop quality remains merely a curiosity.

Walsh concurs with both contemporaries and historians that the decades after the inspection laws were good years. The dislocations caused by the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the insults leading to the Revolution, and the loss after independence of trading rights and favored status appear in Walsh's epilogue. The revolt against imperial authority must await another volume. Walsh's fine-grained coverage of farms and plantations in a range of scales, in a variety of locations, adds significant depth to our knowledge of the tobacco coast. Had each chapter its own conclusion, the claims that shape her analysis would emerge more clearly. Future readers will likely turn to this volume more for details than for argument, more for facts than for the story. Unfortunately, this will do violence to Walsh's triumph in marshaling both her data and her erudition into a powerful and coherent form. Still, searching, rather than reading, is task splendidly suited to books available online—as this one is, in Google's expanding digital library.