Global Plantations in the Modern World

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxv

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2. Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times

   • Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, Colette Le Petitcorps

   Pages 1-32Open Access

3. Revisiting the Caribbean: Genealogies for the Plantationocene

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 33-33

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   2. From Marrons to Kreyòl: Human-Animal Relations in Early Caribbean

      • Rodrigo C. Bulamah

      Pages 35-58

   3. The Rise and Fall of Caporalisme Agraire in Haiti (1789–1806): Labor Perspectives Through the Plantation Complex

      • Martino Sacchi, Lorenzo Ravano

      Pages 59-76

   4. Cacos and Cotton: Unmaking Imperial Geographies on Haiti’s Central Plateau

      • Sophie Sapp Moore

      Pages 77-97

   5. Nostalgia for Oranges: Plantations as a Development Promise in Socialist Cuba

      • Marie Aureille

      Pages 99-126

4. Continental and Pacific Americas: Multiple Subjectivities Between Control and Resistance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-127

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   2. ‘[A] Continual Exercise of…Patience and Economy’: Plantation Overseers, Agricultural Innovation, and State Formation in Eighteenth-Century North America

      • Tristan Stubbs

      Pages 129-153

   3. Inside the Big House: Slavery, Rationalization of Domestic Labor and the Construction of a New Habitus on Brazilian Coffee Plantations During the Second Slavery

      • Mariana Muaze

      Pages 155-176

   4. Plantation Colonialism in Late Nineteenth-Century Hawai‘i: The Case of Chinese Sugar Planters

      • Nicholas B. Miller

      Pages 177-213Open Access

5. West Africa and Its Diasporas: Excavating Forgotten Pasts and Haunted Presents

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215

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   2. The Materialities of Danish Plantation Agriculture at Dodowa, Ghana: An Archaeological Perspective

      • David Akwasi Mensah Abrampah

      Pages 217-253

   3. “Sweet Mother”: The Neoliberal Plantation in Sierra Leone

      • Nile Davies

      Pages 255-283

   4. “New Slavery”, Modern Marronage and the Multiple Afterlives of Plantations in Contemporary Italy

      • Irene Peano

      Pages 285-311Open Access

6. South and South-East Asia: Indigenous Labor, More-Than-Human Entanglements and the Afterlives of Multiple Crises

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 313-313

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   2. The Multispecies World of Oil Palm: Indigenous Marind Perspectives on Plantation Ecologies in West Papua

      • Sophie Chao

      Pages 315-338

   3. Colonial Plantations and Their Afterlives: Legal Disciplines, Indian Historiographies and Their Lessons. An Interview with Rana Behal

      • Marta Macedo, Irene Peano, Colette Le Petitcorps

      Pages 339-349

7. Afterword

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 351-351

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   2. Afterlives: The Recursive Plantation

      • Deborah A. Thomas

      Pages 353-364

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises.

Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

• Caribbean
• Plantation infrastructure
• Labour
• Interspecies
• Sovereignty
• Race
• Plantation colonialism
• Ecology
• Production system
• Post-colonialism
• South Asia
• American history
• African history
• Indigenous
• Resistance
• Coloniality
• Nostalgia
• Plantation afterlives
• Migrant labour

“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 plantation 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 theunexpected 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

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

• Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

  Colette Le Petitcorps, Irene Peano

• Institute of Contemporary History, NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal

  Marta Macedo

Irene Peano is an Assistant Researcher in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She researches the processes of migrant farm-labour and agribusiness organisation in contemporary Italy and their genealogies.

Marta Macedo is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Her work focuses on São Tomé plantations, mixing approaches from the history of science and technology, environmental history and labour studies.

Colette Le Petitcorps holds a PhD in Sociology at the University of Poitiers (France). She is currently a postdoctoral researcher associated with the Centre d’études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques (Center 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.

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