Ugly Freedoms

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.

The “Perfect Map” of Widow Hiamtse: A Micro-Spatial History of Sugar Plantations in Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1685–1710

Not all early modern sugar plantations were in the Atlantic World. Indeed, far away from it, in the rural space surrounding the Dutch headquarters in Asia (the Ommelanden of Batavia (Jakarta)), over a hundred of them were thriving by the end of the seventeenth century. Together, they constituted a unique plantation society that followed Dutch land law, was operated by Javanese rural labour, and was managed by Chinese sugar entrepreneurs. Through archival work on a certain “perfect map” that belonged to a Chinese widow, this article explores how that plantation society took shape on the ground.

Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Haiti’s Missing Sugar

In the eighteenth century, Haiti was the world’s leading sugar producer, but when cane surged in the Caribbean in the early twentieth century, Haiti produced none. Instead, the land sat idle while workers emigrated to work on sugar plantations. I examine the hypothesis that historical property rights institutions created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production. I collect new data on land-use from 1928–1950 and a proxy for transaction costs. The evidence suggests transaction costs impeded the land market from responding to the sugar boom.

“Against Right and Reason”: The Bold but Smooth French Take-Over of Dutch Cayenne (1655–1664)

The Dutch loss of Brazil in 1654 favoured the resettlement of Dutch merchants along the Wild Coast and in the Lesser Antilles and the establishment of new colonies. Cayenne Island was one of them. One WIC patent was handed to Jan Claes Langedijck, who settled at the former French fort of Cépérou, and another patent was given to David Nassy, who settled in the Anse de Rémire, situated at the opposite part of the former island. Both colonies were taken by the French in May 1664 as part of the imperial French expansion under King Louis XIV and Jean-Baptist Colbert. It is argued here that the main French goal was to gain control of the sugar plantations of the Sephardic community located there, and, to a lesser extent, the much-desired territorial control of this region as proposed by the newly established French West India Company. The Dutch were aware of the attack, but could not intervene as it was already too late to send support to the poorly defended Cayenne colony. Both parties negotiated the take-over and the majority of the Dutch settlers stayed under French rule, as was suggested by the Dutch government and hoped for by the French.

The Whip and the Hoe

Spectacular physical punishments such as whipping were at the core of the master-slave relationship but it was the chronic and acute physical demands of forced labor that did the most destructive and lasting damage to enslaved people. Plantation field work caused more extensive damage to enslaved bodies than non-field work. Field work was more debilitating to enslaved women than to their male counterparts. Work on sugar plantations caused more damage to the enslaved than work on cotton plantations. Changes in crops, productivity rates, and work regimes had a compound and cumulative effect on the health of the enslaved.