Blurring Disciplinary Boundaries: The Material Culture of Improvement during the Age of Abolition in Barbados

Abstract

This article uses plantation archaeology to explore white Barbadian responses to the British anti-slavery campaign during the late eighteenth century. By blurring disciplinary boundaries between history and archaeology, we examine how competing British and Caribbean images of West Indian planters were contested through material culture. Drawing on an archaeological case study at St. Nicholas Abbey sugar plantation, St. Peter, Barbados, we highlight how the landscape of slavery was transformed with the emergent, English ideal of ‘improvement’. This early Barbadian response to anti-slavery was a form of political mobilization deployed by the planter elite, allowing for the construction of new racial and cultural identities.