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The first book to examine plantations in their global variations through the history of knowledge.
Few institutions feature as prominently in contemporary notions of colonialism, racism, and environmental degradation as the modern plantation. The racialized plantations of the Atlantic World loom large in the public imagination, namely those of the British Caribbean and the US South. Yet, the plantation has proliferated into the Information Age and has continued to expand across the tropical zone of our planet, surviving the abolition of slavery, the collapse of European empires, and the challenge of generations of anti-colonial thinkers. To grasp how the plantation has spread and evolved in our modern world, this volume studies what it terms plantation knowledge, or the types of expertise, experience, and information processing that have made and continue to make plantations possible. Drawing on case studies including Ireland, Mexico, Mississippi, Hawaiʻi, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cuba, Brazil, and Central Africa, it examines the global spread of the plantation; the diverse people, beings, and forms of knowledge intertwined with this process; and the elasticity and durability of the plantation as a mode of commercial agriculture.
"Plantation Knowledge expertly illustrates how plantations around the world have historically functioned not just as engines of wealth creation but also as sites of knowledge production. It also shows how plantations have survived, even thrived, over the past five hundred years precisely because their owners have adapted them to fit changing moral norms around slavery and racism. Indeed, reading this volume one walks away with a much richer understanding of what a 'plantation' is: not a relic of a bygone era of slavery and racism but a dynamic system of labor exploitation and capital accumulation that continues to thrive by adapting to shifting social norms and changing economic environments." — Eric Herschthal, University of Utah
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Plantation Knowledge: Concept, History, and Research
Nicholas B. Miller and Ulrike Lindner
Part I: Epistemology
1. Between Irish Plantation and the Plantation Complex: The Down Survey (1654–1658), Projecting, and the Origins of Political Arithmetic
Ted McCormick
2. The Badianus Herbal and Forced Indigenous Labor: Art, Land, and Nahua Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century Central Mexico
Jennifer R. Saracino
Part II: Boundaries
3. Sugar and Sovereignty in Hawai'i: John Adams Kuakini Cummins and Waimānalo Plantation, 1878–1895
Nicholas B. Miller
4. Experimental Paternalism: An Owenite Plantation in Mississippi, 1820–1870
Claudia Roesch
Part III: Experiments
5. Revisiting the Charduar Plantation: Local Connections, Imperial Portfolios, and the Global Pathways of Assam Rubber
Moritz von Brescius
6. Sugar in Province Wellesley: Converging Streams of Plantation Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Malaya
Christina Skott
Part IV: Institutionalization
7. Cocoa and Coercion: Connected Histories of Sao Tome and the Belgian Congo
Marta Macedo
8. Copra and Conquest: Penal Colonies and Botanical Knowledge in the American Colonial Philippines
Theresa Ventura
Part V: Reform
9. Cane Farmers Versus Sugar Factories in Post-Emancipation Era Cuba and Brazil
Gillian McGillivray
10. Managing Regulation: Changes of Policy and Continuities of Practice on Indian Tea Plantations, 1901–1931
Rebekah McCallum
List of Contributors
Index