Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Abstract

This richly illustrated and engaging comparative study focuses on visual representations of plantations in three frontier zones of economic expansion during the nineteenth century: the world of cotton in the lower Mississippi Valley of the United States, sugar plantations in the interior of Cuba, and the coffee zone in the Paraíba Valley of Brazil. Each region became a world leader in the production of their respective crops during what one of the authors (Dale Tomich) has called the “second slavery,” the period after 1800 when increased technological and transportation developments, new forms of land management, and new systems for organizing labor resulted in a significant increase in commodity production and the mass movement of enslaved peoples into these regions. The authors emphasize that “world economic conditions” such as industrialization, population growth, and urbanization drove demand for these crops and fueled agricultural expansion in the three regions, but that local environmental conditions and the demands of different crops gave rise to distinct plantation forms and landscapes in each.In outlining economic forces and agricultural developments, the authors synthesize clearly and effectively the rich literature on cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations that has emerged over the past several decades. What distinguishes their work in this book, of course, is the attention to images of the landscapes that resulted from these developments: the maps, plats, paintings, lithographs, and photographs of plantations, buildings, machinery, and enslaved people, many reproduced in full color. Their goals are twofold: to explore “how visual documents help us to understand these landscapes” and to examine what “such landscapes tell us about the history of the commodity frontiers of the second slavery” (145). In doing so, they move beyond what they see as a limitation of many existing landscape studies, namely the focus on “landscape” as an abstract idea divorced from “any specific material, social, or historical content or context” (5). Such studies may call attention to how landscapes (and representations of landscapes) can articulate power relations, but they do not explore fully the specific historical circumstances in which those relations emerged. That is the focus here.The book is divided into two sections, each with three chapters, one for each region. The first section focuses on the development of plantations and plantation agriculture. The authors make excellent use of regional maps to illustrate different patterns of landholding, the expansion of commodity frontiers across space, and the transportation networks (river and boats, trains, and mules) needed to link plantations to markets. The second section explores the economic and spatial layout of plantations. The analysis of the images here is especially rich. There are some maps, but paintings and photographs are more prominent. The authors offer clear and insightful commentary on these various images as they explain how the spatial layout of plantations and plantation buildings reflected the physical and environmental conditions needed to grow various crops, the labor routines involved in production, and the technological developments that facilitated rapid increases in output. Images of work logs and gin houses in the Mississippi Valley, steam engines and vacuum pans in sugar ingenios, and the drying terraces on coffee fazendas in Brazil all dramatically illustrate new modes and spaces of production on plantations. Even familiar images, such as scenes from a cotton plantation that appeared in Harper's Weekly in the 1860s, are analyzed in the context of work, space, and labor control.While the discussion of images of plantations and plantation operations in each region is illuminating, the comparative framework makes the book especially valuable. Maps of the Cuban and Brazilian plantations, for example, depict a group of structures at the center of those estates that were central to the production process while no such grouping appears on maps and plats of cotton plantations. Likewise, images of barracks housing enslaved people on coffee plantations, which developed in response to the expanded scale of production, and the placement of those barracks differed significantly from the individual structures that housed enslaved people and the spatial layout of cotton estates. In short, the authors' focus on how global economic forces interacted with local environments to reshape the landscapes of these three regions, and their argument that critical attention to images can reveal how those transformations played out on the ground, make an important contribution to our understanding of the period of the second slavery in various parts of the Americas.