Thomas J. Wertenbaker's The Planters of Colonial Virginia offers a forceful rethinking of early Virginia, challenging the familiar image of a colony ruled from the start by vast estates and an oppressed laboring mass. Instead, it presents a society first shaped by opportunity: abundant land, high wages, and the chance for freemen and former servants to become independent small landowners. Through tobacco, trade, and the rise of the Virginia yeomanry, the book traces how this hopeful social order took root and then unraveled. Wertenbaker follows the colony's evolution from England's first ambitions in America through the Restoration, world commerce, and the Navigation Acts, showing how labor shortages, land grants, headrights, and imperial policy shaped everyday life. He argues that the spread of African slavery lowered costs for planters but devastated the independent farmer class, widened inequality, and redirected Virginia toward a slaveholding elite. Rich in historical detail and anchored by a broad chapter-by-chapter argument, the book portrays colonial Virginia as a place of self-reliance, economic frustration, and profound social upheaval. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.