Download Full Version ebookmass - Visit ebookmass.

com

Global Plantations in the Modern World:

Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives Colette Le
Petitcorps

https://ebookmass.com/product/global-plantations-in-the-
modern-world-sovereignties-ecologies-afterlives-colette-le-
petitcorps/

OR CLICK HERE

DOWLOAD NOW

Discover More Ebook - Explore Now at ebookmass.com

 Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) ready for you
Download now and discover formats that fit your needs...

Global Taxation : How Modern Taxes Conquered the World

Philipp Genschel

https://ebookmass.com/product/global-taxation-how-modern-taxes-
conquered-the-world-philipp-genschel/

ebookmass.com

Sources for Latin America in the Modern World Nicola Foote

https://ebookmass.com/product/sources-for-latin-america-in-the-modern-
world-nicola-foote/

ebookmass.com

Seapower in the Post-modern World 1st Edition Basil

Germond

https://ebookmass.com/product/seapower-in-the-post-modern-world-1st-
edition-basil-germond/

ebookmass.com

Fuzzy Graph Theory: Applications to Global Problems John

N. Mordeson

https://ebookmass.com/product/fuzzy-graph-theory-applications-to-
global-problems-john-n-mordeson/

ebookmass.com
Love from Scratch Kaitlyn Hill

https://ebookmass.com/product/love-from-scratch-kaitlyn-hill-2/

ebookmass.com

The Politics of Place Naming: Naming the World Frederic

Giraut

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-politics-of-place-naming-naming-the-
world-frederic-giraut/

ebookmass.com

Advances in Steam Turbines for Modern Power Plants Tadashi

Tanuma

https://ebookmass.com/product/advances-in-steam-turbines-for-modern-
power-plants-tadashi-tanuma/

ebookmass.com

List en bedrog Hannah Hill

https://ebookmass.com/product/list-en-bedrog-hannah-hill-2/

ebookmass.com

Essentials of Oceanography 8th Edition, (Ebook PDF)

https://ebookmass.com/product/essentials-of-oceanography-8th-edition-
ebook-pdf/

ebookmass.com
The Bible and Feminism: Remapping the Field Yvonne
Sherwood

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-bible-and-feminism-remapping-the-
field-yvonne-sherwood/

ebookmass.com
Global Plantations
in the Modern World
Sovereignties,
Ecologies, Afterlives
Edited by Colette Le Petitcorps
Marta Macedo · Irene Peano
 Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors
Richard Drayton, Department of History, King’s College London,
London, UK
Saul Dubow, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge,
UK
The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a well-
established collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world
history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and chal-
lenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative
and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which
particular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its formative
years, the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, but
there is now no imperial system, period of human history or part of the
world that lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome
the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies
by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong
thematic focus that help to set new research agendas. As well as history,
the series includes work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, liter-
ature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most
exciting new scholarship on world history and to make this available to a
broad scholarly readership in a timely manner.
 Colette Le Petitcorps · Marta Macedo ·
Irene Peano
Editors

Global Plantations
in the Modern World
Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives
Editors
Colette Le Petitcorps Marta Macedo
Institute of Social Sciences Institute of Contemporary History
University of Lisbon NOVA School of Social Sciences
Lisbon, Portugal and Humanities
Lisbon, Portugal
Irene Peano
Institute of Social Sciences
University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal

ISSN 2635-1633 ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic)

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-08536-9 ISBN 978-3-031-08537-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further
details see license information in the chapters.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Kanok Sulaiman

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Foreword

It is a pleasure and an honour to welcome you to this volume. I can

promise your labour in reading will be rewarded as creative connections
emerge from the book’s plethora of case studies, analytic suggestions and
conceptual discussions that will surely lead to further valuable questions.
You are about to step into a collection of state-of-art research that takes
the plantation as an analytic tool with which to confront the present,
address the legacies of the past, and think about the future, while bringing
together what anthropology, history, science and technology studies and
other disciplines can do to outline the transient equations with which we
attempt to frame, understand, and act upon our collective endeavours.
This is a book about the plantation-institution, about the plantation as
a machine of production and devastation, the plantation as a device that
generates inequalities and invents hierarchies, the plantation that persists
in embodied memories and post-memories of violence for some and of
entitlement for others. It is about the plantation and its afterlives of
dispossession, exclusion, containment, and detention, of racialized exis-
tences, exhausted environments, improbable re-assemblages of species,
and combinations of capital and labour that are increasingly about
fictional capital and non-human labour. This is a book that lengthens
the compact temporality of a symposium intersecting past and future—a
symposium that emerged from the creative interactions between Colette
Le Petitcorps, Marta Macedo, and Irene Peano while team members of
the The Colour of Labour project, plus the enthusiastic respondents to

v
vi FOREWORD

the call for contributions—and a volume that will bind them through the
afterlives of that original temporality.
The Colour of Labour: The Racialized Lives of Migrants was a daring
concept that I thought might fit the “high-risk high-gain” profile of the
European Research Council grant programme. I was fortunate enough
to be awarded an advanced grant (ERC AdG 695573), one that enabled
me to gather a team of talented young scholars interested in analysing
the ways in which plantation and plantation-like economies and societies
produce racialized lives in different ethnographic and historic contexts,
with a focus on post-abolition contexts. The aim was to examine how the
plantation as a race-making machine persisted beyond its quintessential
American-Caribbean format, with its centuries of de-humanizing enslaved
and trafficked Africans, in which blackness and whiteness were generated
first as positional categories and later ascribed properties of nature. What
other classifications and racialized hierarchies came with new arrange-
ments in plantation labour? How did new systems of classification coexist
with the established ones? We looked beyond the Atlantic trade, to the
Indian and Pacific oceans, to the forced, semi-forced, and contracted
routes of labour traffic and the related dynamics of diversifying and hier-
archizing the labour force—whether in Hawaii, the Guianas, Mauritius,
or São Tomé or in contemporary agribusiness in Europe.
In the process, we went beyond the original questions and raised
new ones. With the privilege of a slow-science framework that counter-
acted, even if only for a while, the current trend of squeezing research
outputs into a predefined spreadsheet, we were able to not only engage
in actual empirical and conceptual research but also to cross-fertilize lines
of research in enduring ways. It was in this environment of academic
freedom that the editors of this volume called for an open-ended
symposium exploring plantations and their afterlives along the lines of
materialities, durabilities, and struggles. Despite the misfortunes of the
year 2020, the pandemic-related postponements and the cyberization of
academic meetings, it was a most accomplished venture, as this volume
ably demonstrates.
In their introduction, the editors Le Petitcorps, Macedo, and Peano
guide you through a comprehensive discussion of the critical literature
on plantations, raise the relevant questions, and present the clusters of
problems and theory that structure the volume, while also dissecting the
different contributions and bringing them into dialogue with one another.
 FOREWORD vii

They will guide you along the axes of sovereignties, ecologies, and after-
lives and into the geopolitical clusters that form the sections of the book.
In the end, Deborah Thomas leaves us with the perfect coda, one that
at once settles the matter and makes us want to start all over again, go
back to the subject, expand the clusters and themes with a new refrac-
tion and its new kaleidoscopic combinations: modernities, mobilities, and
mutualities.

Cristiana Bastos

Cristiana Bastos is a research professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social

Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently leading the project “The
Colour of Labour”, awarded with an Advanced Grant by the European Research
Council.
 Acknowledgments

The volume springs from a symposium titled “Plantations and their after-
lives: Materialities, durabilities, struggles” organized by the editors and
held virtually in September 2020, but hosted by the Institute of Social
Sciences at the University of Lisbon. Participants addressed plantations
from multiple angles (labour, race, technologies, environments, subjec-
tivities, resistance, ruination, memory) across different geographies and
chronologies, ranging from the seventeenth century to the present. In
this volume, we gathered a selection of the papers presented at the confer-
ence, together with others, revisiting some well-established themes on
plantations pasts and presents under a new light. We are grateful to all
the conference presenters, commentators, and audience who joined our
conversation and, in many cases, kept it going well past the event. We also
wish to thank Cristiana Bastos and Deborah A. Thomas for their deep
engagement with this project and for their contributions to this volume.
The symposium, and the editors’ work, was supported by the European
Research Council-funded project “The Colour of Labour: The Racialized
Lives of Migrants” (Advanced Grant n. 695573, PI Cristiana Bastos). We
thank our colleagues in the project research team for the lively discussions
and especially Mari Lo Bosco, Project Manager, who provided invaluable
help during the entire process.

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for commentaries and

suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. Finally, we owe our
appreciation to Palgrave Macmillan, and particularly to Richard Drayton,
together with the other editors of the “Cambridge Imperial and Post-
Colonial Studies” series, who welcomed our proposal since its early stages
and supported us all the way, making this book possible.
 Praise for Global Plantations in the
Modern World

“The plantation is a distinctive global institution, vital to the making of

the modern world. It is hugely creative in its wealth-making potential and
massively destructive in what it does to the environment and to planta-
tion workers. This highly stimulating and provocative set of essays help
us redefine and rethink what the plantation means, offering great insights
into slavery and emancipation.”
—Trevor G. Burnard, Professor and Director of the Wilberforce Institute
for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, UK

“A rare and relevant rethinking of plantations and their afterlives, this

book powerfully intervenes in some of the most important debates of our
time. The authors and editors brilliantly weave together ethnographic,
archival and archaeological case studies that layer into productive critiques
of colonialisms, racisms, environmental destructions, and im/mobilities.
Through prisms of plantations and counterplantations and the unex-
pected human and more-than-human actors buttressing and resisting
them, the book provides unanticipated insights into the Anthropocene,
slavery, racial capitalism, industrial agriculture, migrant labour and – most
importantly – possibilities for alternative futures.”
—Seth M. Holmes, Chancellor’s Professor, UC Berkeley, USA

xi
xii PRAISE FOR GLOBAL PLANTATIONS IN THE MODERN WORLD

“The common elements of plantations are the linear arrangement of

monocrops and the deployment of labour on a massive scale. The other
elements – racial, political, embodied, affective – are specific to their
historical and geographic milieu. By placing diverse plantation worlds
in conversation, the authors expose the worlds that made plantations,
and the worlds plantations made and continue to make through their
multivalent entanglements. The results are revelatory.”
—Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto, Canada
 Contents

1 Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection

of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times 1
Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps

Part I Revisiting the Caribbean: Genealogies for the

Plantationocene
2 From Marrons to Kreyòl: Human-Animal Relations
in Early Caribbean 35
Rodrigo C. Bulamah
3 The Rise and Fall of Caporalisme Agraire in Haiti
(1789–1806): Labor Perspectives Through
the Plantation Complex 59
Martino Sacchi and Lorenzo Ravano
4 Cacos and Cotton: Unmaking Imperial Geographies
on Haiti’s Central Plateau 77
Sophie Sapp Moore
5 Nostalgia for Oranges: Plantations as a Development
Promise in Socialist Cuba 99
Marie Aureille

xiii
xiv CONTENTS

Part II Continental and Pacific Americas: Multiple

Subjectivities Between Control and Resistance
6 ‘[A] Continual Exercise of…Patience and Economy’:
Plantation Overseers, Agricultural Innovation,
and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century North
America 129
Tristan Stubbs
7 Inside the Big House: Slavery, Rationalization
of Domestic Labor and the Construction of a New
Habitus on Brazilian Coffee Plantations During
the Second Slavery 155
Mariana Muaze
8 Plantation Colonialism in Late Nineteenth-Century
Hawai‘i: The Case of Chinese Sugar Planters 177
Nicholas B. Miller

Part III West Africa and Its Diasporas: Excavating

Forgotten Pasts and Haunted Presents
9 The Materialities of Danish Plantation Agriculture
at Dodowa, Ghana: An Archaeological Perspective 217
David Akwasi Mensah Abrampah
10 “Sweet Mother”: The Neoliberal Plantation in Sierra
Leone 255
Nile Davies
11 “New Slavery”, Modern Marronage and the Multiple
Afterlives of Plantations in Contemporary Italy 285
Irene Peano

Part IV South and South-East Asia: Indigenous Labor,

More-Than-Human Entanglements and the
Afterlives of Multiple Crises
12 The Multispecies World of Oil Palm: Indigenous
Marind Perspectives on Plantation Ecologies in West
Papua 315
Sophie Chao
 CONTENTS xv

13 Colonial Plantations and Their Afterlives: Legal

Disciplines, Indian Historiographies and Their
Lessons. An Interview with Rana Behal 339
Marta Macedo, Irene Peano, and Colette Le Petitcorps

Part V Afterword
14 Afterlives: The Recursive Plantation 353
Deborah A. Thomas

Index 365
 Notes on Contributors

David Akwasi Mensah Abrampah is a lecturer in the Department of

Archaeology and Heritages Studies, University of Ghana. He has interest
in both anthropology and historical archaeology, including linguistic
anthropology, the archaeology of salt mining/trading and culture contact
in Ghana.
Marie Aureille is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Laboratoire d’Anthro-
pologie Politique. Drawing on multispecies ethnography, her dissertation
examines changing power relations in farming within decollectivization
policies in Cuba and the production of the State through farmers and
cooperatives inclusion in the planned economy.
Rodrigo C. Bulamah is a postdoctoral researcher at the Social Sciences
Graduate Program, Federal University of São Paulo, working at the inter-
face between history and anthropology. His main field is the Caribbean
and he deals with themes such as colonialism, plantation legacies, religious
formations, kinship, historicity, and political ecology.
Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellow
and lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney.
Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capi-
talism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is the author of In
the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua

xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

(Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of The Promise of Multi-

species Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) with Eben Kirksey and Karin
Bolender. She previously worked for the human rights organization Forest
Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling
Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and livelihoods.
Nile Davies is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and the Institute for
Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His disser-
tation examines the politics and sentiments of reconstruction and the
aftermaths of “disaster” in post-war Sierra Leone.
Colette Le Petitcorps holds a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University
of Poitiers (France). She worked as a postdoctoral researcher affiliated
with the ERC Project “The Colour of Labour: The Racialized Lives of
Migrants” (ICS, university Lisbon) and as a lecturer at the University of
Western Brittany in Brest, and is associated with the Centre d’études en
sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques (Centre
for social studies on African, American, and Asian worlds) in Paris. She
works on gender, labour relations, and the economy of the poor in the
post-plantation, with the case of contemporary Mauritius.
Marta Macedo is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History,
NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, affiliated with the ERC
Project “The Colour of Labour: Racialized Lives of Migrants”, Insti-
tute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Her current work focuses
on the circulation of coffee and cocoa plantation systems (Brazil, São
Tomé, Belgium Congo), mixing approaches from the history of science
and technology, environmental history and labor studies.
Nicholas B. Miller is an assistant professor of History at Flagler College
and Marie Curie individual fellow at the University of Cologne. His
current Marie Curie research project adopts a history of knowledge
approach to the global history of the plantation. He is also writing a
global history of Hawai‘i. His publications include John Millar and the
Scottish Enlightenment: Family Life and World History (Oxford, 2017).
Sophie Sapp Moore is a Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow at
the Humanities Research Center and the Center for Environmental
Studies, Rice University. Moore is a broadly trained political ecologist
with a background in critical geography, comparative literature, and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

postcolonial theory. Her interdisciplinary research examines how inter-

secting processes of political and socio-ecological transformation shape
the agrarian environments of the postcolonial Caribbean.
Mariana Muaze is an associate professor in the History Department
at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO),
with a postdoctorate at University of Michigan, and author of the book
“Memórias da Viscondessa: família e poder no Brazil Império” (Zahar,
2008), which won the National Archives Research Award.
Irene Peano obtained her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Univer-
sity of Cambridge. Since 2012, she has been researching the processes of
migrant farm-labour and agribusiness organization in contemporary Italy,
also with reference to multiple genealogies and particularly to histories of
racialization that relate, among others, to earlier plantation economies.
Lorenzo Ravano specializes in the history of black political thought,
modern political philosophy, and the history of slavery and abolition.
He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Bologna with a disserta-
tion on black abolitionism, and he is currently based in Paris. He was
visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown
University and postdoctoral scholar at the Université Paris Nanterre.
Martino Sacchi is currently based in Paris and holds a co-tutored PhD
in the history of political thought from the University of Bologna and
the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. His research interests include
mobility, identity formation and nineteenth-century labour history in
metropolitan France and the Antilles. He held a postdoctoral position
at the Université Paris Nanterre (ESNA-Mondes Américains).
Tristan Stubbs is the author of Masters of Violence: The Plantation
Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia,
published by the University of South Carolina press. The book won the
Hines prize for the best first book on the history of the Lowcountry.
He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge and
is currently an affiliate faculty member of the Carolina Lowcountry and
Atlantic World Program at the College of Charleston. He previously held
appointments with the University of Oxford and the University of Sussex,
the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Virginia Historical Society,
and the University of South Carolina.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Deborah A. Thomas is a professor of Anthropology in the Department

of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She authored Polit-
ical Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair
(2020), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational
Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and
The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004) all for Duke University Press.
She co-directed the films Bad Friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens and
Four Days in May.
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 “Celebration of 200 years of the Bois-Caïman,

1791–1991”, Jean-Baptiste Jean, 1993. Author’s
collection 52
Fig. 7.1 Big house, slave quarters, and coffee patios. Campo
Alegre Farm, Marc Ferrez, 1880s (Source Instituto
Moreira Salles Collection) 156
Fig. 7.2 Ubá Plantation, Vassouras, 1860, by Revert Henrique
Klumb. José Pereira de Almeida, his wife, their relatives
and two domestic servants (Source Instituto Moreira
Salles Collection) 167
Fig. 8.1 Map of Hawai‘i, with principal locations discussed
indicated (Map by the author) 187
Fig. 9.1 Site map of Frederikssted plantation excavations (Map
by the author) 222
Fig. 9.2 Ruins of Frederikssted plantation house 224
Fig. 9.3 Excavations under way in Unit 1, Locus 2 224
Fig. 9.4 Students from Ghanata Senior High School in Dodowa
touring the site 225
Fig. 9.5 Drinking and Eating (1: Wine glasses (a) and tumblers
(b); 2: Fragments of wine decanter; 3: Barrel hoops
exposed in-situ in Unit 1, Locus 2) 228
Fig. 9.6 Drinking and Eating (1: Royal Copenhagen porcelain
(teacup); 2: Fragments of Stoneware bottles; 3: Windmill
printed pattern on creamwares; 4: Creamware deep bowl
vessels) 229

xxi
xxii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.7 Drinking and Eating (1: Willow pattern on pearlware; 2:

Malkin Bell semi-porcelain saucer; 3: Sardine tin keys; 4:
Corned beef keys) 231
Fig. 9.8 Drinking and Eating (1: Mineral water bottles
and a tumbler; 2: Sauce bottles (A&D) and pickle
bottle (B) while (C) is a stopper; 3: Club sauce stopper;
4: Square bottles: gin/schnapps; 5: Wine/champagne
bottles) 233
Fig. 9.9 Building Implements (1: Machine-cut iron nails
and screws with washers; 2: Strap hinge; 3: strap hinge
and lock plate; 4: Brick hammer; 5: Splitting maul; 6:
Cast-heart Padlock; 7: Keys) 235
Fig. 9.10 Farming Tools: Machete blade 236
Fig. 9.11 Ornamentation (1: Whieldonware vase; 2: Pierced-edge
porcelain; 3: Perfume bottles; 4: Bedknobs) 238
Fig. 9.12 Entertainment (1: Ceramic dolls. Shoulder-head (A)
and leg (B); 2: Steel reeds of mouth organ: Harmonica,
musical instrument) 239
Fig. 9.13 Domestic/industrial chemicals (Victorian poison bottles) 241
Fig. 9.14 Rural telephony (Telegraph wire insulators) 242
Fig. 9.15 Cottage industry (beads and sewing) (1: Local beads; 2:
Vertical bead moulds; 3: Imported beads: Wound beads
with polka dots; 4: Bed shaft of Singer sewing machine) 244
Fig. 9.16 Smoking at the plantation site (1: European-imported
smoking pipes; 2: Locally made smoking pipes_A and B) 245
Fig. 9.17 Household tools/items (1: A: Fork B: Knife with horn
core handle, C: Folding knife; 2: Local pottery: bowl
with everted rim and carinated shoulder; 3: Local pottery:
Jar with flaring everted rim) 246
Fig. 9.18 Faunal remains (Lower jaw of a pig) 247
Fig. 9.19 Currency (Cowrie shells) 247
Fig. 9.20 Accounting/bookkeeping/writing (Slate pencil
and a piece of slate) 248
Fig. 10.1 Billboard highlighting Chinese cooperation in the SLPP
government’s “Presidential Infrastructure Initiative,”
Freetown, Sierra Leone (Photo by author) 264
Fig. 10.2 Workers at the Magbass Sugar Complex circa 1990
(Photographer unknown) 265
Fig. 10.3 View from the factory grounds at Magbass (Photo
by author) 271
Fig. 10.4 Satellite imagery of the grid at Magbass (Google Earth) 278
 LIST OF FIGURES xxiii

Fig. 10.5 View from the factory grounds at Magbass (Photo

by author) 280
Fig. 11.1 “Solo braccia” (arms only), an installation by visual artist
Alessandro Tricarico, commissioned by medical NGO
InterSOS in 2020 to commemorate the death of 16
West African farm workers returning from a day’s work
in tomato farms, in two separate road accidents that took
place in the district of Foggia in the summer of 2018.
The 32-m-high paper print was glued upon the dismissed
wheat silos that tower over the railway line at Foggia’s
northeastern end (Photograph by Marta Selleri) 290
Fig. 11.2 “No slaves”—Unknown author, mural painting spotted
outside the train station in Rosarno, Plain of Gioia Tauro,
2018 (Photograph by the author) 291
Fig. 11.3 Layers of drawings and writings on a shack
in the slum of “Mexico”, district of Foggia, 2018.
The shack has since gone through several alterations,
and the inscriptions are no longer visible (Photographs
by the author) 305
 List of Tables

Table 9.1 Materials and the period they existed at the Frederikssted
plantation site 226
Table 9.2 Material inventory according to their utilitarian functions 227

xxv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Viewing Plantations

at the Intersection of Political Ecologies
and Multiple Space-Times

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps

As monocultural complexes aimed at the intensive production of cash

crops for the global market, plantations have played an indisputably
central and persistent role in shaping the economic, socio-political,
cultural and ecological setup of the modern world. Their foundational

Present Address:
I. Peano (B) · M. Macedo · C. Le Petitcorps
Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]
M. Macedo
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
C. Le Petitcorps
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
M. Macedo
Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA School of Social Sciences and
Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal

© The Author(s) 2023 1

C. Le Petitcorps et al. (eds.), Global Plantations in the Modern World,
Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08537-6_1
2 I. PEANO ET AL.

character is reflected in (if by no means exhausted by) the plethora of

discourses that have invested plantations’ workings since the inception
of European economic and sovereign expansion across continents. These
have addressed a vast range of themes and processes—from land appro-
priation to production, processing and trade, through labor recruitment
and management for profit extraction, taxation and regulation, polit-
ical conflict and morality, sovereign rule and instruments of control and
subversion, and many more—adopting multiple positions and perspec-
tives, with disparate aims. Among such discourses, as far as scholarly
engagements are concerned, over the course of the last century (and
earlier), a significant number of important critical works have been
produced, which it is impossible to summarize in this introduction.
However, a few core bodies of literature can be identified, that have
shaped our own approach in conceiving of this edited volume.
In broad strokes, we build upon conceptualizations of plantations as
race-making institutions, from the publication of pioneering works such
as Edgar Thompson’s (1932, 1939, 1975), W.E.B. DuBois’ (1899, 1911,
1935) and C.L.R. James’ (1980 [1966]) onwards, also and especially
in relation to political-economic frameworks, that have contextualized
the role of plantations in the development of capitalism (Braudel 1992;
Williams 1944), the world-system (e.g. Mintz 1960, 1968, 1985; Rubin
1959; Tomich 2004; Wolf 1982; Wallerstein 1974), colonial and post-
colonial dependency and underdevelopment (Beckford 1999 [1972]; Best
1968; Rodney 1981; Smith 1967). At the same time, we are attentive
to the imbrication of racism in unequal class relations investing also the
spheres of gender, sexuality and intimacy (e.g. Casid 2004; Chatterjee
2001; Fox-Genovese 1988; Morgan 2004; Stolcke 1988; Stoler 1985a)
and to the role of migration and its governance, its differential exclusions
and segregations (e.g. Bastos 2018, 2020; Behal 2012; Moulier-Boutang
2016; Northrup 1995), in relation to the organization of plantations
as productive apparatuses. Overall, such approaches have contributed to
outline the role of plantations as crucial foci for both the expansion of
imperial and post-imperial projects and for opposition to them—from
the first slave revolts and flights to contemporary peasant, worker and
community struggles.
Drawing on such established fields of critical inquiry, in recent
years scholars’ attention is increasingly turning to plantations’ ecolog-
ical dimensions, on the one hand, and on the other, to the long-term
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 3

material, affective, and symbolic imprints they have left on the environ-
ments that they contributed so heavily to mold—even after seemingly
epochal transformations and in some cases plantations’ very demise. These
stand out as particularly innovative axes of research, promising to shed
light on current predicaments also by querying time-honored historical
truths, their making and unmaking. In dialogue with recent scholar-
ship on post-plantation politics and its affective archives (Thomas 2019;
cf. her Afterword in this volume), on the afterlives of multiple plan-
tation pasts (Adams 2007; Hartman 2007; McInnis 2016; McKittrick
2011, 2013; Sharpe 2016), and on eco-materialist perspectives (Alle-
waert 2013; Haraway 2015; Haraway et al. 2016; Haraway and Tsing
2019; Tsing 2015; Li and Semedi 2021), we seek to further articu-
late a nexus between plantations’ more-than-human dimensions and their
all-too-human (modern, imperial) dynamics of control, extraction and
subversion, all the while exploring their “durabilities” (Stoler 2016). In
this sense, our approach builds on reflections recently put forth by other
scholars on the need to “methodologically, conceptually, and politically
placing political violence and non-human entities side by side” (Navaro
et al. 2021: 2), and being attuned to what Navaro and her co-authors
call “reverberations” —“the lingering effects (and affects) of violence
[…] including its echo, cyclical recurrence, and sporadic reoccurrence in
different guises, shapes, and dimensions” (Ibid.: 10).
It is in this vein that we have identified this volume’s three main
axes to analyze plantations and their workings as those of ecologies,
afterlives and sovereignties. While, as mentioned, both eco-materialist
approaches and analyses of plantations’ durabilities, hauntings and ruina-
tions have been developed by recent scholarly works, the third theme—
that of sovereignty—is perhaps the least explored in relation to planta-
tions, despite some promising, early engagements with such nexus (cf.
Thompson 1932). If currently the political philosophy underlying West-
phalian, modern sovereignty is being questioned not only by reference
to a present in which the nation-state appears to be giving way to new,
complex and multilayered formations of power, but also by problema-
tizing the very foundations of the modern state, no critical work has
approached the theme specifically in relation to plantations. And this
notwithstanding the acknowledgment, by such scholarship, of the role
private (mercantilist, capitalist and industrial) enterprise played at the
height of modernity in pre-figuring and effecting imperial and colonial
forms of sovereignty across continents. What better context than that of
4 I. PEANO ET AL.

plantations, among the first (together with mining) extractive projects

associated with European expansion across the globe, to analyze the
imbrications of political and economic power away from reified, mono-
lithic and preempted conceptions of the modern state? Furthermore,
while important work has been produced on the first two themes, very
few scholars have addressed the intersections between one and the other,
let alone of those two with the theme of sovereignty.
In the following sections, we engage with all authors’ contributions to
explore such topics through a transdisciplinary and global approach. The
broad range of case studies collected here analyzes the techniques that
have allowed plantations to function on multiple levels, spanning across
spatiotemporal frames from a number of disciplinary perspectives. On
the one hand, the very proliferation of plantations across chronologies,
geographies and specific political contexts precludes universal categoriza-
tions, calling into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation.
On the other hand, common features accrue to the different processes
examined in the present book. All chapters speak to the emergence
and transformation of modern sovereignties, productivist labor regimes,
their attendant subjectivities and environmental dimensions, defining and
nuancing the contours of plantations as institutions whose internal rela-
tions have pervaded whole societies, spilling over the bounds of individual
estates. These case studies thus also broaden the scope beyond the sole
instance of agricultural/agro-industrial production, by including the sites
and types of labor that have developed in the evolution and restructuring
of plantation economies, such as those pertaining to tourism, heritage,
or domestic service. At the same time, the excesses, contradictions, resis-
tances and ruinations of mechanisms of extraction and (and by means
of) control are made apparent. Through the heterogeneity of plantations,
we also consider mutations, failures and deviations, providing an insight
into the afterlives, specters and remnants of these systems of production,
extraction and authority, also in their subjective and affective dimensions.
The book is organized into four geographical sections—the Caribbean,
the Americas, West Africa and its diasporas and finally South and South-
East Asia—that highlight the planetary dimension of the plantation
system and its expansion through differently paced and timed political-
economic and ecological projects, across the modern and post-modern
period. Such breadth allows to expand the focus beyond analyses of
plantations that very often have dealt with individual empires through
human-centered lenses, and with the singular geographies of the slave
trade or of indentured labor. This also grants for an in-depth, granular
exploration of plantation ecologies, subjectivities and afterlives on the
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 5

ground. The choice of this broad chronology and planetary outlook on

plantations provides for an accurate assessment of how local specificities
are enmeshed in transnational and trans-imperial movements, resulting
from “frictions” (Tsing 2004) with global processes.

Plantation Ecologies: Environmental

Degradation, Segregated Human
Relations and Racial Injustice
Plantations were shaped as much by political, economic and social
dynamics as by specific ecological assemblages. While sustaining and
promoting imperialist projects, capitalist ventures, racialized labor regimes
and anti-colonial resistances, plantations were, on a very physical level,
agro-ecological systems that altered and were altered by biological
processes. As such, several contributors in this volume start from the
acknowledgment that plantation environments cannot be seen as mere
background scenarios to human action but must be reckoned with as
acting forces in their own right (see Bulamah; Moore; Stubbs; Davis;
and Chao). Building upon a robust and decades-old literature attentive
to environmental transformations, the centrality of individual plant species
for plantations’ very existence, as well as the importance of soil, air, water,
fungi, insects and other animals in all their multiple interactions is consid-
ered for its role in configuring the contingent socio-ecological relations
established inside and beyond plantations, past and present (Dean 1995;
Fiege 2012, Ch. 3; Grove 1997; MacLennan 2014; McCook 2019; Soluri
2006; Uekötter 2014). Thus, plantations are perfect laboratories to bring
together environmental and labor dimensions, as explored by inspiring
early works in cultural ecology (Steward et al. 1956). Many chapters in
this book make it clear that what happened “on the ground” was co-
producing modern plantations’ social hierarchies and power relations (cf.
Bray et al. 2019; Brown and Lubock 2014; Rogers 2010; Stewart 1996;
White 1996). As the breadth of collected case studies testifies, the effects
of the plantation mode of agricultural production run deep in our present
and are global in scope. While many regions bear the imprint of histor-
ical plantation experiences, contemporary plantations, that span across the
planet, keep reproducing and feeding on imperial matrices of ecological
disruption and racial inequality.
6 I. PEANO ET AL.

Such processes, legacies and durabilities also put the volume’s case
studies in dialogue with recent discussions on the notion of the Anthro-
pocene. The term, which signals the emergence of a new geological
era resulting from human activities, has gained currency in the social
sciences, but the undifferentiated notion of the “Anthropos” on which
it is founded also spurred criticisms for its erasure of racialized and
gendered power dynamics, violence and exclusion (Yusoff 2019) and led
to the emergence of a plethora of alternative concepts politicizing this
new epochal shift (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). In fact, political ecology
scholars have long argued that human activity is embedded within larger
ecosystems that have had an impact on global processes of wealth accu-
mulation, concentration and inequality, and asymmetrically distributed
environmental degradation (Escobar 1999; Hornborg 2007; Robbins
2012; Ross 2017), proposing the concept of Capitalocene to merge
world-system theory with earth-system science (Moore 2015, 2016).
Intervening in such geo-historical debates, the identification of our era
as Plantationocene (Carney 2021; Haraway 2015; Haraway and Tsing
2019; Haraway et al. 2016; Murphy and Schroering 2020) further shifts
the focus, foregrounding the importance of monocultural agro-industrial
systems (Besky 2020) for our understanding of ecological devastation
and the perpetuation of colonial and imperialist relations, in particular
through racialized and coerced labor. Rather than feeding into discussions
about a definite periodization of geological epochs, we are interested in
how the empirically grounded studies that compose this collection speak
to the analytical potential of the Plantationocene. Our goal is to examine
the multiple socio-ecological interactions within which plantations are
enmeshed, and identify their effects. The fine-grained approaches from
post-humanist and critical race perspectives developed in this book bring
to the fore the violence against humans and non-humans, the unequal
power relations intrinsic to the plantation system and the possibilities for
its subversion, allowing us to imagine more elaborate ways of narrating
plantation regimes, and to move beyond overly simplistic binaries between
exploitation and resistance.
The recurrent uprooting, selection and transplanting of different
life-forms from specific ecologies was foundational to modern planta-
tion projects (Dusinberre and Iijima 2019; Haraway et al. 2016; Tsing
2015). In the process of putting cultivators and cultivars to work, the
planters and managers who engineered the ordering and disciplining
of these “naturecultural” worlds also sustained specific beliefs about
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 7

the superiority of plantation-style production and, attached to that,

about “nature’s” ideal keepers. Plantation-making was instrumental in
the development of racialized discourses about local populations that
did not conform to specific notions of productivity and profitability,
with important political consequences: supposedly “lazy” agricultural-
ists, employing “backward” agricultural methods, should not be granted
access to land (Li 2014), just as pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. Thus,
plantation-making almost always involved the exclusion of local peoples,
the destruction of their livelihoods, the denigration of their intimate and
embodied knowledges, and ultimately the ruination of the very ecologies
that nurtured those communities.
If making plantations demanded plans, ideal schemes, prototypes to
be built based on technical expertise and hierarchical control, many case
studies confirm that plantations seldom functioned according to these
predefined designs. If laborers—whether enslaved, indentured or waged,
in various combinations—never fully conformed to planters’ disciplinary
prescriptions (and in fact it was insubordination or its threat that made
the constant elaboration and refining of such prescriptions necessary in
the first place), local environmental conditions also challenged scien-
tific, “rational” projects. Furthermore, when the imagined plantation was
physically realized, unforeseen consequences may ensue. Plantations have
always been vulnerable to forces generated from within as much as from
without, and disturbances happened far more often than acknowledged
(Tsing 2004).
In fact, the standardization, simplification and scaling-up processes
that characterize these agricultural systems, seeking to convert plants
into marketable crops and humans into labor power, occlude the trans-
formative capacities of the other life-forms that obstinately continue to
exist within plantations. Not denying the ways in which plantations have
caused biodiversity loss, Chao’s contribution in this volume points to the
necessity of complicating our understanding of plantations’ metabolisms,
acknowledging the role of non-humans in countering extractive aims that
stretch across unprecedented scales. This case study eloquently illustrates
how monocrop regimes, while contributing to eliminate some organisms,
created possibilities for the proliferation of others. Bringing to the fore
fungi feasting on palm trees, fungi that established symbiotic relations
with those trees, and salvific plants turned into invasives, together with
the perspectives of indigenous communities working for/fighting against
8 I. PEANO ET AL.

the oil palm sector in West Papua, Chao casts light on the interdepen-
dent if unstable relations across species that are formed in those ecologies.
Besides, discussing the parallel dimensions of conflict and collaboration
constitutive of this plantation experience, this chapter highlights an aspect
that the study of plantations has frequently ignored, namely the constant
need for maintenance. Plantations’ disciplining (and policing the bound-
aries of) humans and “nature” has always been as much about repair and
improvisation as about planning and control.
By calling attention to environmental disruptions, we can also better
understand how non-human forms have impacted on the very struc-
ture and character of labor (e.g. affecting tasks and seasonal rhythms)
and how the transformation of the relations between humans and other
life-forms has shaped the tense social dynamics constitutive of plantation
worlds. Modern agricultural regimes for the cultivation of rice, tobacco,
indigo and cotton in eighteenth-century North American plantations,
discussed by Stubbs, and the struggles for their implementation, provide
a fertile terrain to study the open conflicts between working people (be
they enslaved men and women, overseers or managers) and the planters.
Planters’ demands to bring Europe’s “new agricultural” science to the
colonies of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, together with their
expectations regarding both the yield and quality of new crops, clashed
with overseers’ real or presumed competences and skills. While adap-
tation to specific environmental conditions and the violent disciplining
of bondspeople were routinely asked of overseers, absentee landowners
were disappointed when events fell outside the script. Planters’ concerns
over their reputation and financial returns resulted in the vilification of
overseers. This chapter opens an important discussion on how scientific
agricultural projects affect plantation-labor relations and hierarchies, that
cut across class and racial lines.
Thus, plantation-making has always also been a matter of contention
between alternative world views and agendas (cf. also Miller, this volume).
But despite the violent and unequal power relations spun within and
through plantations, projects for taming “the wild” and building strict
social hierarchies always left “room to maneuver” for alternative liveli-
hoods (Trouillot 2002b). Even if the plantation mode of production plays
a central role in all chapters, it is important not to lose sight of how these
specific socio-environmental regimes have had to negotiate their exis-
tence in relation to other communities and life-forms. Over the centuries,
assemblages of humans and non-humans opened up possibilities for the
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 9

subversion of plantation discipline. Bulamah’s contribution explores an

array of geographies in the early modern and modern Caribbean that run
counter or parallel to plantation apparatuses. These geographies—inhab-
ited by enslaved men and women, pirates, smugglers, maroons and their
“companion species”—functioned as spaces of subsistence, autonomy,
healing or struggle. Bulamah explores in detail the human-pig entan-
glements made possible inside provision grounds and in the landscapes
surrounding plantations. Such crafted and nurtured environments that
subaltern peoples created along with their animals helped mitigate or
evade subordination in plantation spaces. Moore’s chapter also highlights
how the imperial and colonial imaginaries imposed onto the land and its
inhabitants collide with those of local communities. It discusses precisely
the (too often neglected) conflictual relation between peasant and plan-
tation modes of production. Focused on Haïti’s Central plateau during
US occupation, this case study examines the efforts of both scientists
and the military to transform the landscape into cotton plantations, and
the struggle of Afro-Caribbean communities to defend their livelihoods.
The environmental characteristics of the Central Plateau and the biolog-
ical properties of the cotton plant are essential to Moore’s story. The
physiological features of cotton varieties and the physical qualities of this
borderland, together with imperial authorities’ changing perception of
them, make the various elements necessary to bring a plantation into
existence visible. This chapter is also a good reminder that plantations
recurrently failed. In Haïti, even under the oppression of US imperialism,
other forms of cultivation prevailed over cotton monocrops. However,
regardless of plantations’ actual workings, the racialized representations of
the peasant guerrilla (“cacos”) as wild, wasteful and primitive still linger
in public memory, making the enduring ideological power of plantation
imaginaries evident.
Yet, the plantation stories addressed in this book show that inequal-
ities were and are more than a matter of perception: they have been
inscribed on the actual bodies of workers. Labor tasks have been learned
and performed by men and women involved in shaping new habi-
tats where crops could grow. As those workers have transformed the
environment, conversely, the environment has acted upon them. In his
contribution, Davies places the bodies of contemporary Sierra Leonean
plantation workers at the center of his narrative. By stressing the rela-
tionship between them and the spaces they inhabit, he shows how the
10 I. PEANO ET AL.

very process of generating sugar and profit has also produced contam-
ination and death. Pesticides with noxious effects on land and water
penetrated the porous boundaries of human flesh, revealing the embodied
and environmental dimensions of subordination and toxicity produced by
this plantation experiment. While attempting to recover the life stories
of people whom narratives of global development and international aid
have forgotten, this chapter also opens up new avenues to investigate
the ways in which laborers frame their identities not only in relation to
kin and other relations, to land or work, but also to toxic matter and
other environmental components. The nexus established between chem-
icals and illness also encourages a reflection on the value attributed to
specific subjects and the racial contours of such metrics. The cheapness
of plantation labor has multiple meanings: besides being poorly paid, it is
fungible and, according to differential perceptions of physical well-being,
disposable. This case study feeds into an important discussion on the role
of plantations as systems of labor-power commoditization, producing and
reproducing specific bodies and human groups along racial lines, in rela-
tion to the too often overlooked subjectivities of working people (Holmes
2013; Nash 2017; cf. also Miller, this volume).

The Afterlives of the Plantation:

Old and New Insights
While some studies address the present of plantations’ productive activi-
ties across different epochs, others focus on their afterlives. They investi-
gate the future of the plantation system after the dismantling or transfor-
mation of its productive apparatus, that in many cases left economic and
environmental ruination in its wake. The authors of this book’s chap-
ters address the afterlives of plantations from different angles, following
previous scholarship on plantation futures. If the present legacy of plan-
tation societies was a classic theme in Caribbean dependency theories
(Beckford 1999 [1972]), contemporary scholars have built and expanded
on those insights to analyze the ways in which “the plantation” has spun
multiple futures across a range of (black) geographies, seeking also to
envisage decolonial horizons (McKittrick 2011).
The durability and extensibility of plantations, as the central locus of
antiblack violence and death, have been tracked most especially in the
contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban
areas (Davis 2003; Wacquant 2002). But the notion of “afterlives”,
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 11

famously adopted by Saidya Hartman in connection with (plantation)

slavery to denote “skewed life chances, limited access to health and educa-
tion, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (2007: 6),
has been productively stretched to encompass also psychic, affective and
imaginary dimensions, often in connection with notions of spectrality and
haunting (Adams 2007; Clukey and Wells 2016; Gilroy 1993; McPherson
2003)—that however remain mostly tethered to American (or at best
Atlantic) geographies. References to the afterlives of various aspects of
plantation management, relating for the most part to labor organization
and discipline, have also been made across different contexts (e.g. Mintz
1985; Rosenthal 2018; Sherman 2021; Weiss 2011 - cf. the next section),
but demand further exploration.
In original ways, the chapters collected in this volume examine the
afterlives of plantations beyond the spatiotemporal and political-economic
frames in which these durabilities are normally expected. Authors care-
fully analyze the restructuring of plantations in their labor-extractive and
lethal aspects by means of policies whose driving ideology was in some
cases anti-imperialist and alternative to capitalism: the establishment of
citrus plantations in 1960s socialist Cuba (Aureille) and of Chinese-owned
sugar plantations in 1970s Sierra Leone (Davies), Revolutionary Haïti’s
reorganizing sugar plantations by 1805, after the war of independence
(Ravano and Sacchi) or the shift from Chinese-owned plantations in the
nineteenth-century’s native kingdom of Hawai’i to the twentieth-century
white nativist rule with its attendant solidification of racial categories
(Miller). The recursive use of past techniques for disciplining land and
labor in order to exploit ever new territories for monocrop cultivation is
evident in Moore’s chapter on the United States’ occupation of Haïti’s
hinterland for cotton production in the 1910s to 1930s. A productivist
rationale can be seen to cut across plantations that otherwise resulted
from opposed ideologies, from the colonial to the “native” or the anti-
colonial, in some cases with similar effects on workers’ conditions. The
case studies gathered in this book thus highlight more complex global
geographies and temporalities inherent to plantation systems than the one
shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and its morphings into indenture
alone.
Besides expanding the reach of such processes to planetary scales and
longer histories, we seek to bring together plantations’ devastating social
and ecological legacies within a single framework. From this perspec-
tive, plantations are analyzed as a shared symbolic-affective reference and
12 I. PEANO ET AL.

a haunting past that permeate present eco-material and social relations,

subjects’ and communities’ imaginaries of the future—be it in expecta-
tions about plantations’ rebirth after their material ruinations (Aureille,
Davies), in nostalgias about plantations’ brutally hierarchical power struc-
tures, and in disavowals of some of their localized genealogies (Peano), or
rather in the constant flight from plantation-derived violence (Bulamah,
Moore). As noticed by Mintz and Wolf (1957), the durability of plan-
tation systems does not merely rest on the coercion employed to set up
such enterprises, but rather on the establishment of indirect constraints
that bind people to plantation labor and order. The moral economy that
developed between planters and laborers in order for the latter to secure a
minimum of subsistence explains the long duration of relations of depen-
dence into the present, still expressed in racial terms. Thomas (2019) also
identified a political-affective continuity between the imperialist gover-
nance of Jamaican plantations and the formation of the nation-state as a
post-plantation society in the mid-twentieth century. She highlighted how
contemporary social relations based on absolute loyalty to a powerful local
figure—what she calls “garrison politics”—are grounded in the system
of political authority first developed in sugar estates. Relations of depen-
dence between planters and their laborers, sustained by a moral tie that
indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, are the main mechanisms
reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery,
and even after the cessation of monocrop cultivation. The estate hier-
archy survives in post-plantation subjectivities, being a major blueprint
of socialization into work for generations and up to the present. Ravano
and Sacchi’s chapter echoes these perspectives, demonstrating how after
the insurrection of enslaved Africans, the Haïtian nation was built on the
policing of former slaves’ activities, mobility and access to citizenship by
conditioning this latter to bonded labor in sugar plantations.
At the same time, the afterlives of plantations index the perpetual strife
to make life out of spaces of death and violence. Wynter (2003) iden-
tified a constitutive tension between the dominant logic of plantations
as a sovereign-making project and the internal threat to such project
caused by enslaved people who maintained a conception of themselves as
human subjects rather than as objectified property. This conflict pervades
the post-plantation present. Analyses of these mechanisms have focused
on the reproduction of slave institutions built on the edges of the plan-
tation (Trouillot 2002a) in order to ensure everyday survival, exploring
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 13

collective memories of life-making away from plantations, through provi-

sion grounds and solidarity networks that are remembered and remade
also through embodied and material dynamics, in the ways in which
former plantation laborers and their descendants inhabit space (Chivallon
2012). Alternatives to plantation life have often lain in the creation of
an agriculture-based socio-economic system that would ensure one’s own
family and community subsistence. Plantations were thus also central in
the emergence of oppositional and peculiar social groups, such as small
black peasantries (Ibid.), which are still an important component of many
contemporary societies—across the Caribbean, in the United States and
in Brazil for example—playing a role in slowing down or undoing the
further expansion of plantations.
Once again, the exploration of these processes reveals the extent
to which plantations are precarious productive systems, far less stable
than what many contemporary representations would make us believe.
Furthermore, the sense of community inherited from plantation expe-
riences and their culture-making dynamics directly unsettles the socio-
political organization promoted by contemporary nation-states (Thomas
2019). These dimensions are evidence to the long-lasting legacies of
the fundamentally strained relations between plantation infrastructures
and communities, and of the unexpected institutions developed on their
margins. It bears repeating that the unpredictability of making life out
of plantations is an essential feature of social, cultural and economic
systems that have developed everywhere in the margins of global planta-
tion geographies. Plantations can be defined as hyper-exploitative systems
because they ensure only the immediate, bare reproduction of their labor
force, without providing for the social reproduction of laborers in the
long term (Meillassoux 2018). In this context, the structuration of an
Afro-American culture has been seen by Mintz and Price as “a miracle”
(Mintz and Price 1992).
Everywhere in plantation systems, new social groupings have been
created out of the interpersonal relations between laborers of different
origins, in order to organize everyday survival and to create a modicum
of space for human life. Bulamah demonstrates in his chapter how the
Haïtian revolution was the direct result of enslaved people’s provision
grounds. In organizing daily survival, the household economy created in
the margins of plantations by the unexpected association between slaves,
free black persons and animals (pigs) is the main institution that made
the Revolution possible according to the author. He makes use of the
14 I. PEANO ET AL.

concept of the counter-plantation, drawn from Haïtian sociologist Jean

Casimir (2008), to highlight how much the invention of a creole culture
through these encounters was the expression of the opposition to the
dominant culture of occupiers and plantation entrepreneurs.
If creolization processes have challenged labor and productive orga-
nization in all plantation systems, according to Casimir (ibid.), Haïtian
creolity is peculiar in its structural ungovernability. The full institution-
alization of an autonomous life among slaves of different origins, who
organized their own social reproduction during the eighteenth century
(i.e. before the fixation of racial categories by the colonial state), under-
mined colonial and later national attempts to create and control a
unified social formation. In this view, we can interpret the militarized
labor regime imposed by the newborn Haïtian nation-state, described by
Ravano and Sacchi, as a panic-driven response to what was perceived as an
ungovernable country. The invention of a peasant economy and society,
as an afterlife of provision grounds, appears foundational in Haïtian
history if we connect these studies to Moore’s chapter. As we already
mentioned, the author shows that the peasants of the hinterland opposed
the US project to establish cotton plantations during the 1910s and up
to the 1930s, and finally determined its failure and abandonment. The
household economy and other strategies of survival, always readapted by
plantation laborers according to the socio-economic conjunctures of plan-
tation systems, are one of the main foci of those analyses that deal with
plantation afterlives.
Reflections on “afterlives” thus question the kind of subject forma-
tion deriving from past experiences of plantation norms and values and
the horizons of expectation they still entail in the present. Some chap-
ters in this book highlight the ways in which laborers regard plantations
as a “promise of development”, providing welfare and social mobility
(Aureille, Davies, Chao), or on the contrary as a place from which to
escape (Bulamah, Moore, Chao, Peano, Miller). Yet, despite apparently
antagonistic ways of internalizing the plantation system, its pasts and futu-
rities, it remains a common symbolic and affective reference for social
action in the present: even when plantations are the space that every-
body runs from, nobody stops talking about them, as Toni Morrison
observed (quoted in McKittrick 2013: 10). Drawing on these insights,
but also opening new horizons for thinking plantation futures, the chap-
ters in this book address the continuities of plantation infrastructures and
of subjects’ internalization of their set of norms through time (Ravano,
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 15

Sacchi in Haïti, Aureille in Cuba, Davies in Sierra Leone, Behal in India);

the “counter-plantation” events that keep threatening plantation projects
and can cause their ruination (Bulamah and Moore in Haïti, Chao in West
Papua); and the complex spatiotemporal overlaps of relations of domina-
tion with social encounters that challenge our contemporary imaginaries
on the fixity of plantation systems (Abrampah in Ghana, Peano in Italy,
Miller in Hawai’i).
In his study of the Chinese sugar plantation at Magbass, in Sierra
Leone, Davies shows that despite its managers’ discourses promoting
rural development, the plantation enterprise concretely created long-term
precarity for its workers. The sugar plantation is chronically set for aban-
donment as a result of economic and political conjunctures (especially the
civil war that raged between 1991 and 2002), leaving workers jobless in a
wasted land. This intervention by a foreign economic actor, ostensibly in
favor of the putative “rural poor” in Africa, had long-term consequences
that are typical of plantation economies, what Beckford (1999) identified
as persistent underdevelopment and poverty. In his perspective, the socio-
economic future of plantation laborers is both blocked by the ongoing
grip of export-oriented production in plantation zones and by recurring
land dispossession. This last aspect is also present in Ravano and Sacchi’s
chapter on independent Haïti. The transition from slavery to a free labor
regime was artificially set “by both limiting access to subsistence farming
and by subduing freedom to labor subordination”. In the same vein, the
persistence—until the 1970s in most Caribbean and Indian-Ocean plan-
tation societies, and even until today in Indian tea plantations (see the
interview with Rana Behal)—of a system of remuneration based on subsis-
tence wages, supplemented in kind, has both induced the reproduction
of relations of dependence at work and the normalization of subsistence
wages.
Thus, plantation afterlives display structural, economic and political as
well as symbolic, material and affective dimensions. Ravano and Sacchi’s
chapter particularly highlights the formation of Haïtian nationhood after
the war of independence, in parallel with an emerging conception of citi-
zenship that was conditional upon work on plantations or upon army
service. Work and discipline, conceived according to the old norms of
colonial plantations, are necessary also to access modern citizenship. Inde-
pendence, freedom and waged labor in Haïti appear then less opposed to
than in continuity with slavery, plantations and the colonial regime. This
important point on the direct relation of modern citizenship to plantation
16 I. PEANO ET AL.

infrastructure, echoing other works like Thomas’ (2019) on Jamaica or

Williams’ (1991) on Guyana, speaks of the normalization of mechanisms
first introduced by plantation systems (McKittrick 2013). This aspect is
particularly developed in Aureille’s study. The author describes the ways
in which peasants were groomed to a socialist way of life via the creation
by the Cuban State of villages and agricultural communities within citrus
plantations. Plantations, here as everywhere, represented an institution
that governed not only production, but more broadly social life and the
economy. Although citrus plantations were later dismissed and a transi-
tion to agroecology and re-peasantization was promoted in their place,
former workers still framed their expectations of social mobility, recogni-
tion and protection according to the set of norms and values ordering
social relations in plantations. This case study illustrates an important
aspect of plantation histories: the transition from plantation systems to
new political, economic and social structures is not the straightforward
result of a plan. Conceptions of social justice and political legitimacy based
on workers’ experience of the plantation can, and often do, conflict with
the imposition of a new economic order and set of norms, but they might
also foster such changes actively. As Garcia (1986) showed in relation to
North Eastern Brazil’s historical district of sugar plantations, for example,
the transition from planters’ traditional domination to the introduction
of labor laws and a free labor market in the 1980s was not spontaneous
nor fully ordered, but the product of social tensions in which workers’
conceptions of political legitimacy played an important part.
Finally, this book provides new reflections that go off the beaten
track, problematizing the binary approach that pits plantation durabilities
against counter-plantation dynamics. Abrampah’s archaeological study of
Danish plantation ruins in Ghana and Peano’s analysis of the contem-
porary discourse on “modern slavery” applied to migrant farm labor in
Italy both uncover more complex heritages of domination and social
encounters on “plantation-looking landscapes” than what our contempo-
rary imaginaries on plantations and slavery may typically foreground. In
the archaeological excavation of the eighteenth-century Danish planta-
tion house at Frederikssted, Abrampah and his collaborators found many
more vestiges of local elites’ settlement of the main building after its
abandonment by Danish colonizers than of the latter’s very short-lived
occupation of the area for cotton and maize cultivation. Abrampah’s
archaeological findings speak both of the colonial occupation and of its
aftermaths, in the adoption by African elites of various types of European
 1 INTRODUCTION: VIEWING PLANTATIONS … 17

material implements in their everyday life. Peano’s chapter also unveils

the “heterogeneous layers” of heritage (Foucault 1977: 82) behind the
contemporary association between slavery and black migrant bodies in
media, politicians’, NGOs’ and activists’ discourses in Italy, but also in
legal and corporate dispositifs. The author shows for example how the
justification of Ethiopia’s invasion with the moral necessity to abolish
Abyssinian slavery by Mussolini’s fascist government, and the latter’s
elaboration of racial theories via the rediscovery of Medieval slavery in
Italy, are far more influential on contemporary conceptions of “modern
slavery” and race than a “plantation elsewhere” might be. At the same
time, canonical counter-plantation experiences and their legacies (most
notably Rastafarian culture and its West African re-elaborations) may
inform contemporary migrant farm workers’ languages of resistance and
refusal.
These works remind us, through the genealogy of power and social
encounters they carefully trace, of the “hazardous play of dominations”
(Foucault 1977: 83) that emerge, overlap, conflict and disperse, in fluid
rather than fixed spaces. In this respect, according to Peano, instead of
really explaining contemporary mechanisms of labor exploitation, planta-
tion narratives and discourses on modern slavery tethered solely to the
“New World” as the primal scene of exploitation tend to reproduce race-
making operations, by representing migrant farm laborers as the “others”,
locked in black bodies without any acknowledged subjectivity. Following
contributors’ insights, the “afterlives of plantations” therefore also define
a contemporary imaginary of race and race fixity (such as that which
prevails in Hawai’i and its histories, as Miller argues), that has been the
product of a long-term process of ideological elaboration, far beyond slave
times.

Plantations as Sovereign Machines:

Subject Formation, Relations
of Patronage and the Intimacies of Power
Plantations have been viewed as displaying sovereign-like features of
control and violence monopoly over land and subjects, through force
as much as ideology, across a wide range of contexts and epochs. Yet,
if the sovereign-making powers of plantation systems have long been
flagged in the literature, they have hardly been analyzed—witness the
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookmass.com