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The American gentry were wealthy landowning members of the American upper class in the colonial South.
Historians generally use the term "gentry" to refer to the moneyed planter class in the American South prior to the American Revolution. Typically, large scale landowners rented out farms to white tenant farmers. North of Maryland, there were few large comparable rural estates, except in the Dutch domains in the Hudson Valley of New York.[1][2]
- ^ See François-Joseph Ruggiu, "Extraction, wealth and industry: The ideas of noblesse and of gentility in the English and French Atlantics (17th–18th centuries)." History of European Ideas 34.4 (2008): 444-455 online[dead link]
- ^ Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Aristocracy in Colonial America.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 74, 1962, pp. 3–21. online