Jesuit Missionaries and Enslavement at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century: An Assessment from the Loyola Plantation in French Guiana

We present an overview of the archaeological research carried out on a sugar plantation operated by the Jesuits in French Guiana. The Jesuits’ production was exported to Europe to provide funds to develop their missions among Native people living in French Guiana and Amazonia. We present a brief history of the plantation and discuss the place the missionaries occupied in the colonial venture and their role in the economy of the colony. Loyola was a large and successful plantation compared with other plantations in French Guiana, and its success rested on the exploitation of enslaved labor. Recent research on the area covered by the plantation storehouse, its chapel, and the forecourt in front has allowed us to reassess our initial interpretation of the chronology and development of the plantation. In doing so, we realized that the Jesuits rigorously conformed to the architectural principles of the Enlightenment to symbolize their prestige in the colony.

The Fiction of Formalization

This chapter explores the regulatory fictions of presumably fixed administrative categories in the vastly different context of rural Cambodia. It examines the work of property formalization in the country, through processes of titling and concession making associated with the global land rush of the late 2000s. Through an impressive cartographic deconstruction of Cambodia's uneven geography of formalization as well as the land allocations for a private sugar plantation, the chapter illustrates that this formalization fix operates more as a promise than a reality. It shifts to discuss the discursive work that renders formalization logical, legal, and hegemonic. The chapter then explores the bureaucratic work that gives it a subnational geography, and ends with the political work of enforcing it at the margins where hegemony breaks down and conflicts erupt with those who openly question its fictions. The chapter argues that the goal is not to argue against formalization per se, but to denaturalize it so that its powers can be put to work in better ways.

“[M]anaged at First as if They Were Beasts”

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.

Searching for the 17th Century on Nevis: The Survey and Excavation of Two Early Plantation Sites

Searching for the 17th Century on Nevis is the first of a series of monographs dedicated to the archaeological investigation of the landscape, buildings and artefacts of the Eastern Caribbean by the Nevis Heritage Project. This volume presents the results of documentary research and excavation on two sugar plantation sites on the island of Nevis. Upper Rawlins, located high on Nevis mountain, was occupied in the late 17th and early 18th century and abandoned early. Fenton Hill was occupied from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century and originated with an earthfast timber building, probably a dwelling house, later converted to a kitchen and encapsulated in stone about 1700. The adjacent main house was probably destroyed in the French raid of 1706 and rebuilt in timber. The final occupation was by Portuguese Madeiran labourers, who were introduced to fill a labour force shortage in the 1840s. Detailed reports on the finds assemblage include discussions of the handmade, bonfired Afro-Caribbean pottery made by enslaved African women, imported European ceramics and glass, clay tobacco pipes, metalwork and building materials. The dominance of imported goods from south-western England demonstrates the strong mercantile links between Nevis and Bristol, but local Nevis production of ceramics adds new insights into the estate-based ceramic production on European lines.

An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex

This article argues that Pacific Islander labour in Australia was not analogous to earlier Atlantic world slavery and can better be understood as its ‘illegitimate offspring’. Through case studies that connect the Caribbean to Australia, it reveals how the idea of Pacific Islander labour was forged in an environment where the abolitionist battle had been won, but where the interconnected and changing racial constructions of the time, and arguments about what constituted free labour, were very much ongoing. Money, values and personnel moved from the Caribbean and Mauritius to Australia, as explored through the stories of James Williams, a convict of African origin who grew Australia’s first sugar, and Benjamin Boyd, the son of an Atlantic slave trader who first introduced Pacific Islanders to Australia. The final case study is that of Louis Hope, whose mother’s family, the Wedderburns, had previously gained considerable notoriety in the Atlantic world for the way that they treated their enslaved people. Hope was the first person in Australia to employ a large Pacific Islander workforce on his sugar plantation.

Sweetness and HPOWER: Waste, Sugar and Ecological Identity in the Development of Honolulu's HPOWER Waste-to-Energy Facility

Recent studies have demonstrated the high spatial, economic and ecological stakes of solid waste management in remote island environments, like Hawaii, but also suggested ways in which conceptions of risk and identity have factored into stakeholders' decisions regarding particular waste management technologies and processes. Through an analysis of historical and archival documents, this article examines linkages between a declining sugar plantation industry and the development of a major waste disposal project, and shows how an ecological identity narrative which combined an understanding of Honolulu as a place needing to reduce reliance on imported resources with an understanding of metropolitan Honolulu as a major centre for plantation sugarcane agriculture resulted in a plan for combining waste disposal with sugarcane processing. Focused on the historical case of the HPOWER facility on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, I argue that ecological identity offers new insights for understanding how environmental infrastructures are conceptualised and resisted, and that explicit consideration of ecological identity in the analysis of environmental governance may lead to improved scholarly understanding as well as improved outcomes for governance itself.

Within the Same Household: Fanny Coker

Fanny Coker is the focus of this chapter by Christine Eickelmann. She represents a group of women whose stories have been mostly lost to British history—plantation-born domestic servants. Eickelmann outlines what we know of Fanny’s timeline: Born on the Mountravers sugar plantation on Nevis to an enslaved black woman and, likely, the white plantation manager, Fanny spent her adult life in England working for the family of Mountravers’ owner, John Pinney who freed and educated her. Settling in Bristol with the Pinneys, Fanny was separated from family and the plantation community and left to navigate a new country and employer dynamics on her own. Choosing to stay with the Pinneys her whole life, Eickelman describes how she maintained connections to family in the West Indies through letters, gifts and one extended visit, and was part of a larger network of information and economic exchange across the Atlantic. Operating under the strictures of her employer as a lady’s maid under annual contract, she managed to be baptized in the Baptist church, build financial security through investments and an inheritance and, unlike most of her plantation counterparts, realize some agency over shaping her life. Learning about Coker’s life, says Eickelmann, is an important window into the stories of black servants, especially women, in Georgian England.