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This book looks at the the colony of Virginia and the underlying tensions and insecurities that characterized it from the beginning. This includes a work force dominated by bound laborers; planter aristocrats who had neighter the wealth nor leisure of English country squires; and increasing inequalities that produced great social and economic stratification. These uncertainties were eventually replaced by the wealth of the tabacco trade. Yet this industry forced the colony's dependence on a large unfree labor force. It also made the colony more susceptible to increasing British pressures, from creditors and Parliment alike. By the mid-eighteenth century, these tensions spurred Virginia into the Revolutionary fray, in which the colony's leaders (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and others) played a major role.