Sustenance and Power: Provision Grounds and Plantation Enterprise in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Slavery

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the significance of provision grounds and informal marketing to Jamaican plantation enterprise in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It draws evidence primarily from the papers of the planter Simon Taylor (1739–1813) and traces how managers attempted to control enslaved subsistence practices. Taylor sought to encourage marketing among the enslaved through various managerial incentives and by arranging for the purchase of African captives from certain ethnic groups he considered the most eager to cultivate provision grounds. Yet, his inabilities to direct enslaved cultivation and marketing demonstrated the limits of planters' influence over the provision-ground system.