Plantation Complex Research Articles

Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson

Reviewed by: Keywords for Southern Studies ed. by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson Sarah E. Gardner Keywords for Southern Studies. Edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson. The New Southern Studies. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 411. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4962-6; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4061-6.) Ever since Raymond Carver published his collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York, 1981), the formulation has been well used. From Nathan Englander's homage to Carver in What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (New York, 2011) to New Yorker parodies—such as Michael Gerber and Jonathan Schwartz's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Doughnuts" (May 10, 1999)—the conceit is now so commonplace, so well-worn, that it has perhaps lost its usefulness. (The September 17, 2015, Huffington Post article, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Hepatitis C," may have been the tipping point.) The thirty short essays that make up Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Rae Greeson, suggest otherwise. In fact, Thomas F. Haddox employs the phrase in his essay on literature. Whether or not the contributors fall back on this wording—and most do not—the premise nonetheless undergirds much of the work presented here. What we talk about when we talk about segregation, then, or the Native South, or labor, or the black Atlantic, or indeed a whole host of other terms crucial for understanding the American South varies depending on time, place, disciplinary training, who is doing the talking, and who is doing the listening. [End Page 1024] The collection effectively and persuasively makes clear that there is nothing fixed or stable about the South. The field of southern studies is similarly unbounded. As the editors of this volume note, southern studies "is remaking itself" (p. 1). How then to pin down something that is constantly in flux? One does not try to do so, of course, for the attempt would be not only foolish, but also quite possibly pernicious. The consequences of limiting, defining, or imagining a fixed way of approaching a field of inquiry are, after all, real. The essays in Keywords for Southern Studies each point out the binds we have written ourselves into when we essentialize. Whatever southern studies is, then, the editors write, "it is mimed by the form of this volume, which does not presume to present a canon, a comprehensive account, or a curated catalog that demarcates the contours of a stable, shared field" (p. 1). Instead, the volume makes available "an idiosyncratic collection of essays on keywords" that its contributors deem "critical for the project of southern studies" (p. 1). The result, the editors readily concede, is a collection that is "contingent and fragmentary, but capacious enough to hold side by side various disciplinary and theoretical approaches, generational affinities, and intellectual perspectives on an arena of inquiry whose boundaries are constantly being renegotiated" (p. 1). Matthew Pratt Guterl's essay, "Plantation," serves as a useful example. He opens with a reasonable, if accusatory, assumption: "we usually imagine that a plantation is a uniquely southern thing: a big antiquated farm, set in the land of moonlight and magnolias, peopled by large numbers of poor, dark-skinned workers, and presided over by a small white minority" (p. 22). What's more, he continues, "We understand this representation of the plantation to be fixed in time, as an expression of the slaveholding South, from the settlement of the colonies until the Civil War's conclusion" (p. 22). That the word plantation conjures up this image—at once nostalgic and comfortable because the slaveholding plantation, along with its unsavory political implications, was destroyed by war—is itself an argument that has had legs since Lost Cause mythologizers evoked it during the late nineteenth century. A rich vein of scholarship tells us something else altogether, as Guterl makes clear, but a vibrant tourist industry counts on our discounting the plantation complex's "bone-breaking, race-making past" (p. 29). What we talk about when we talk about plantations matters profoundly...

Consuming Bodies: Health and Work in the Cane Fields in Xinavane, Mozambique

Sugar produced on large estates of the Zambezi River Valley was one of Mozambique’s major exports in the colonial period but production declined radically in the course of the post-independence war. Now, with the entry of multinational sugar conglomerates, cane is growing again, beginning somewhat improbably in the water-starved Incomati Valley. Using a case generally regarded as a success, the Tongaat Hulett mill–plantation complex at Xinavane, this paper focuses on the consequences of the organisation of plantation work on the health of workers, their families and surrounding communities. It shows that the profitability of investment in the technological modernisation of milling, drainage and irrigation remains dependent on enduring forms of labour recruitment, modes of payment and organisation of work that are debilitating for individual and public health.

Ireland, slavery, antislavery, post-slavery and empire: an historiographical survey

ABSTRACTThis article traces the development of academic writing on Ireland's role in the Black Atlantic. In the nineteen thirties, publications appeared focusing on an Irish presence in the plantation complex. The nineteen seventies produced a study of the island's antislavery movement. Both discoveries were the work of lone pioneers. Meanwhile political developments after the Second World War produced American historians determined to understand this tenacious and resonant transatlantic institution. Thus the millennium proved to be a boom time for slavery studies, spreading out into investigation of the part played by the Irish. Historians were now joined by literary scholars. Historians, focused on the Importation, exploitation and emancipation of Africans, discussing whether or not Ireland's situation as Britain's first colony, shaped their attitude towards slavery in the New World. Literary scholars were increasingly drawn to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, finding parallels between Irish and Caribbean poets and novelists. The aim of this paper is to describe both approaches, leaving the reader to decide whether they illuminate or confound one another.

Surrendering Surinam: The Barbadian Diaspora and the Expansion of the English Sugar Frontier, 1650–75

Before 1667, Surinam was the next major frontier for Barbadians who wanted to expand the sugar plantation complex. A proprietary colony under the control of Francis Willoughby, governor of Barbados, Surinam was occupied by the Dutch during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The English Crown, in a key moment of metropolitan intervention in the design of the empire, turned its back on the Surinam colony in the Treaty of Breda, trading it to the Dutch for Manhattan. The Willoughby family recaptured Surinam after the treaty was signed and encouraged the English state to retain it as a royal colony, but Charles II insisted on its surrender. The loss of Surinam changed the trajectory of English expansion in the Americas. Surinam’s English planters with capital for investment and agricultural expertise in sugar planting were redirected toward Jamaica, the colony favored by the crown. These planters faced labor shortages under Dutch rule and the vast majority left for Jamaica in 1671 and 1675. An increasing supply of slaves from the Royal African Company had made Jamaica a more attractive option. These Surinam migrants spurred the growth of the Jamaican sugar economy.

More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans‐imperial Caribbean and Its Sinew Populations

AbstractAlthough the plantation as a social and economic organizing principle continues to dominate early modern Caribbean historiography, recent literature has explored outside of its confines to document a range of Antillean inhabitants who were neither masters nor slaves. These subjects exploited the inter‐imperial fluidity of the region to their advantage in order to carve out commercial, strategic, and cultural niches. This article surveys new studies on smugglers, soldiers, and European ethnic minorities in the colonial Caribbean. These groups are representative examples of much larger sinew populations that the dominant historiographical paradigm of sugar and slaves has overlooked. Despite planters' attempts to essentialize race, class, legal status, and occupation into their simplest forms, a broad body of historical actors resisted and coexisted with the plantation complex and reshaped the designs of empires in the process.

Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations

“This book is mostly a meditation, a personal look back,” Sidney Mintz confesses, “not weighty scholarship” (p. 24). Despite the modest disclaimer, the text sheds light on the characteristics that set the Caribbean apart in world history while also highlighting the diversity within the region. Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico each followed distinctive historical trajectories, Mintz tells us, which intertwined and overlapped economically, socially, and politically.What distinguished the region, Mintz argues, was the development of large-scale sugar plantations and the use of African slavery to cultivate the crops—what he calls the “plantation complex” (p. 12). This oppressive system encouraged the development of regimented and hierarchical conceptions of race, skin color, and social difference. Plantations and slavery shaped the colonies in ways that would last even after the collapse of these economies.Mintz combines anthropological and historical methods seamlessly to “make my own sense out of the past” and to learn how the past continues to be experienced in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico (p. 22). To understand the specificity of these societies, he focuses on church-founded peasant villages in Jamaica, rural market women in Haiti, and workers on American-owned sugar plantations in Puerto Rico. This comparative approach reveals key distinctions among the three societies and therefore how the chronology of economic development was central to both the similarities and differences across the region. The rise of plantation economies in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set them on a different path from Puerto Rico and the Hispanic triad (which also included Cuba and Santo Domingo). Sugar only became a core feature of the Hispanic triad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under the ownership of American investors.The development of the sugar plantation complex in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was paired with the emergence of a secondary economy in which masters forced slaves to cultivate their own subsistence crops. These crops provided the basis for the creation of a local market economy that shaped the future of the societies in important ways. The cultivation of these small plots of land produced what Mintz calls a “proto-peasantry.”Where Jamaica and Haiti differ, as Mintz highlights, is in the postemancipation period, during which the determining factor was access to land. Since Jamaica remained a colony long after emancipation, the state and the elite were able to continue to extract labor from the ex-slaves who were prevented from gaining access to land. This system therefore blocked the development of a peasant society. On the other hand, Haiti, as a result of the government’s inability to exert power, progressed in the nineteenth century into a peasant society in which the government extracted taxes but was otherwise unable to prevent the occupation of the land by laborers.In contrast to both Jamaica and Haiti, Puerto Rico remained a largely undervalued colony in the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, when sugar cultivation boomed. By this time, however, slavery was in decline and Puerto Rico already had a poor white laboring class; the labor force, therefore, was a mixture of white, black, and mixed-race people. This meant that the strict racial hierarchies that existed in Jamaica and Haiti did not develop with the rise of sugar in Puerto Rico.Throughout the book, the uniqueness of the Caribbean experience is a consistent theme. In the concluding chapter, Mintz revisits the uses of the terms creole and creolization to argue that the terms reflect the specificity of the Caribbean experience. “Creolization, as the process by which slaves dealt with the immediate postenslavement trauma they faced,” cannot, he argues, be applied to cultural contact and change elsewhere in the world (p. 205). Creolization, Mintz reminds us, was the result of violence against and control of heterogeneous groups who “responded creatively to the condition” (p. 197). The social institutions that they built in response to the plantation complex have remained central to Caribbean societies ever since.Since Mintz offers compelling overarching arguments about the region while also leaving room for debate, expansion, and further comparisons, this book will be an excellent choice for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Students will gain a deep appreciation of the centrality of the Caribbean in world history and especially of the roles of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the increasing globalization of the early modern period. Moreover, readers will learn about the distinctiveness of the region, such as the differences between slavery in the Caribbean and the US South. Along the way, they will see the enduring connections between the past and the present and will understand the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship.

The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas

Manuel Barcia has produced an important contribution to the study of slavery and slave resistance in Cuba with his engaging study of a crucial 1825 revolt in Matanzas. Barcia sets out to establish the significance of the 1825 revolt, arguing that it was a turning point in slave rebellions in Cuba, an action distinct from previous incidents in that it was organized by Africans rather than collaborative groups that included slave and free, Africans and creoles. This would have several consequences, as Barcia demonstrates, both for the participants and for our understanding of slave uprisings in Cuba.To make the case that this relatively unknown incident was pivotal in the history of Cuban slavery, the author begins with an overview of earlier slave revolts on the island. Barcia situates the Cuban examples within the larger regional context, including US and British North America. He also offers concise discussions of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on Cuba, as well as the colonial constraints imposed by Spain. These all affected growth and development in Cuba, including the area near Matanzas, where a rapid increase of the enslaved African population helped create the conditions for the slave revolts.Barcia situates his study in relation to scholarship on rebellions in Cuba by Robert Paquette, Matt Childs, and Gloría García in order to highlight the differences of the 1825 revolt. He also contrasts the context of this revolt to slaves’ experiences as described in the works of Manuel Moreno Frajinals, Fernando Ortiz, and Laird Bergad. This contrast is significant because it enables Barcia to discuss the larger picture of plantation agriculture on the island and show that the landscape of slavery in Cuba was much more complex than many might assume. Revolts occurred in many places and involved slaves on multiple plantations as well as in urban locations, but Barcia significantly demonstrates that many rebellions began on coffee plantations rather than on sugar cane plantations, as has often been assumed. The story of the 1825 revolt that Barcia tells is as much about the growth of the coffee district and the coffee plantation complex as it is about a consequential revolt. This work joins other recent studies, such as those by María Elena Díaz and Charlotte Cosner, that shift away from sugar, the focus of the vast majority of the historiography on slavery in Cuba, to other important topics.Beyond this important contribution, Barcia is centrally concerned to show that acts of revolt were rooted in African cultural understandings of war. Using extensive documentation, Barcia recreates the revolt’s cells, describing their leaders, the steps they followed, and the violence that occurred, as well as the reaction of the survivors. Through this painstakingly reconstructed detail Barcia demonstrates a point he has argued elsewhere: that African military knowledge and experience, especially among the leaders, was a crucial factor in the rebellions in Cuba from this revolt on. This is best seen in the uprising’s planning by an ethnically diverse group of slaves living on several different farms.Barcia rightly notes that to better understand this rebellion and its importance we must also know why the slaves rebelled. Barcia offers some of his strongest analysis in explaining the counterintuitive connection between the relatively easier lives for slaves on coffee plantations, compared to their counterparts on sugar cane plantations, and revolt. He attributes this to increased freedom of movement, evidenced in the revolt’s planning. The second factor was their African backgrounds, which included an understanding of the ways of war. This is a compelling case but does not speak to why slaves gathered to plot and ultimately rebel rather than to interact benignly. Barcia does an excellent job discussing the motivations of authorities in Havana and Matanzas as well as planters in Guamacaro; existing documents illuminate their reactions to events as they unfolded. Admittedly, it is more difficult to get at the slaves’ proactive motives for revolt, as Barcia notes; the authorities were the ones who produced the documentation of the event, who told the stories they wanted to tell and who thereby distorted the testimonies of the captured rebelling Africans.The work concludes with a rousing call for more studies, acknowledging that this is a first attempt at addressing some of these largely ignored issues. The author also notes that nearly all the literature that actively takes up the connection between slave revolts and the Age of Revolution suggested by Ira Berlin ignore Cuba, even though, as Barcia has shown, there were important rebellions during the period that warrant investigation.Barcia, with this monograph, has started us on the road to filling a substantial gap in the historiography of slavery in Cuba. This work will also prove to be a significant contribution that connects African origins with the cultural practices of enslaved Afri-cans and African-descended people in the Western Hemisphere.

The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 by Toby Green (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 by Toby Green Rebecca Shumway The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589. By Toby Green. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 366 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $79.00 (e-book). Drawing on archival sources in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Toby Green presents a new study of the earliest phase of European maritime activity and settlement on the Cape Verde islands and the West African coast between the Senegal River and Sierra Leone. The book examines conditions in fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury Iberia and West Africa that set the stage for the complex interactions between Europeans and Africans that followed, though the book primarily focuses on the period from 1460 to 1589, when Cape Verde was a hub of long-distance trade. Most of the nine chapters deal exclusively with the islands and coastal towns where Iberians conducted trade, although frequent reference is made to the African hinterland as well as locations in Europe and the Americas that were connected to Cape Verde by maritime trade. The book provides a richly detailed analysis of the evolution of Cape Verde as both an entrepôt for trade in enslaved Africans and a very early European colony in which African slaves produced agricultural products for export. Green’s use of documents from the Inquisition enables him to paint a detailed portrait of the settlers who came from Iberia in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seeking their fortunes in the first site of what Philip Curtin has dubbed the “plantation complex.” A large proportion of these settlers were New Christians of Jewish ancestry, and Green argues that their experiences with violence and exclusion in Europe shaped the ways in which they built a new society based on slavery and slave trading on Cape Verde and the African coast. One of the most intriguing ideas presented in the book is that this part of the world was simultaneously shaped by three overlapping diasporas in this period: the New Christian diaspora in Cape Verde and the Mediterranean, the diaspora of Islamic traders involved in trans-Saharan trade, and the Mandinka diaspora through which coastal Western Africans shared a cultural and linguistic link with their neighbors in the distant interior. Green is very keen to show that he has uncovered new evidence that warrants a reassessment of the volume of the early slave trade from Upper Guinea. He makes a strong argument for the underappreciation of the Portuguese contraband slave trade and introduces evidence showing that the scale of this trade may have been quite large. For example, he demonstrates that many slave ships could have been provisioned by the increasing agricultural production in Upper Guinea [End Page 729] in this period. The number of enslaved Africans taken by slave ships in this period nevertheless remains extremely uncertain, however, and historians who have used quantitative methods to assess the volume of the trade will undoubtedly question Green’s interpretation. Moreover, this evidence alone does not refute the generally accepted view that African gold was more important than slaves to the first generations of European traders in Africa, which Green rejects. New evidence presented here regarding early Europeans’ travels in the Americas has more potential to stimulate fruitful historical analysis. Green shows that many of the first “explorers” of the Americas, including Columbus, actually had extensive experience in and knowledge of West Africa, and that they referenced their African knowledge in their encounters with the indigenous people of the Americas. The ways in which these European travelers introduced ideas about slavery and slave trading from the Old World to the New constitute a new dimension of the ideological processes involved in the formation of the early Atlantic World. Some readers will be put off by Green’s exaggerated claims. This book certainly advances historical knowledge of the complex processes that might be called the making of the Atlantic World (à la John Thornton); however, it is a stretch to say that it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of major events in the more recent history of the world—such as the colonization of Africa...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

“My Laborers in Haiti Are Not Slaves”: Proslavery Fictions and a Black Colonization Experiment on the Northern Coast, 1835–1846

“My Laborers in Haiti Are Not Slaves”Proslavery Fictions and a Black Colonization Experiment on the Northern Coast, 1835–1846 Mark J. Fleszar (bio) In early August 1839 the brig America arrived at Puerto Plata on the northern coast of Haiti after two weeks at sea. On board the approximately “100 free colored” passengers, mostly ex-slaves from East Florida, cheered the end of their long journey from slavery to freedom. According to one observer the scene “[was] overwhelming to the feelings of humanity. It was an affecting sight to see so many young, lively, and decent looking people cordially welcomed with every manifestation of pleasure from a joyous community among whom they were to reside.”1 However, benevolent appearances can mislead, disguise, and distort actual circumstances. The arrivals simply exchanged one type of submission for another. They would become indentured laborers as part of a proslavery “colonization experiment” at Cabaret, a space carved out of the lush Haitian landscape through the efforts of Zephaniah Kingsley, a planter and slave owner in eastern Florida.2 Florida’s firm connections to the Greater Caribbean drew the region into the complex and often contradictory changes enveloping the Atlantic World. More stringent laws regarding race and property rights in the American South continued to erode the mastery of longtime Florida residents like the wealthy Kingsley, threatening the legacy of his own mixed-race family in the process. Using strict Haitian laws designed to maximize agricultural output, Kingsley responded by purposefully recreating an ambiguous plantation complex there, managed in his absence by his mixed-race son, and outfitted with “cultivators” drawn from the ranks of black emigrants hoping to improve their situations. Far from this, most black laborers instead encountered misery and disappointment. Most of the emigrants to Cabaret had been Kingsley’s own bondmen, manumitted on the express condition of removing to his Haitian plantation. Once in Haiti, most of the indentured protested working conditions and the terms of their contracts, which promised eventual freedom and, more important, land. From their first days on the island, a number of the emigrants chose [End Page 478] to escape these circumstances, fleeing Cabaret in small numbers from their first days on the island. In due time, they created a vibrant settlement of their own, subsequently (and incorrectly) dubbed “Kinsley’s colony.”3 Kingsley’s peculiar colonization scheme does not fit congruently within the historiography of proslavery ideology, colonization, or black emigration.4 The settlement appears on its face an act of benevolence. Zephaniah Kingsley bankrolled a fledging agricultural colony specifically for his newly freed slaves and to provide for his black mistresses and mixed-race children. And in an era when even the bare mention of Haiti conjured up thoughts of death, disorder, and the end of white mastery, the decision to locate the settlement within the Haitian Republic was nothing short of astonishing. Yet I argue that despite philanthropic pretenses, Kingsley’s colonization experiments were schemes designed to preserve his wealth and power against what he feared were overwhelming forces. They reveal that the world some antebellum slaveholders made was collapsing in the 1830s. In reimagining the geography of his slave empire, Kingsley’s efforts purposefully bound Florida and Haiti intimately while strengthening his mastery. As Florida was situated between the limits of the United States of America and the Caribbean, its relationship with both regions proved problematic historically. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spain’s precarious hold on its Florida colonies intensified amid international rivalries with Britain and France, mounting concerns over the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the militant policies of their “aggressive and unhappy northern neighbors” in the southeastern United States.5 On November 20, 1790, to bolster its sagging economic situation, the Spanish Crown issued a royal decree that encouraged immigration to La Florida in exchange for land grants. The policy brought a much needed boost in overall population numbers in the ensuing years, chiefly in the roughly five thousand slaves these immigrants introduced into the colony before 1810. Many settlers, including Zephaniah Kingsley, also brought with them extensive personal and economic ties to the Atlantic World and a cutthroat business style marked by an “aggressive and...

Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820

This article examines the origins and expansion of "empires for slavery" on the North American continent between the Seven Years War and the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, arguing that historians should rethink the origins, periodization, geography, and dynamics of slavery's growth in the interior of the North American continent through 1815. Slavery was central to British, French, and Spanish efforts to establish territorial hegemony in the interior of the continent in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Consequently, in the forty years between the Seven Years War and the Louisiana Purchase, slavery became one of the central economic, social, and political institutions in the imperial Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Valleys. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, these regions were joined in a distinct Mississippi Valley plantation complex that was itself part of a broader Atlantic world of empires, commerce, and slavery. Like its imperial rivals and predecessors, the United States used state support for slavery as a means to secure sovereignty. Furthermore, under American rule, the continuities that characterized slavery and its growth were more significant than the changes wrought by the extension of American sovereignty into the interior of the North American continent. In sum, this article argues that in the interior of the North American continent, the growth of slavery under American rule represented not a sharp break from the past but a significant continuity that stretched back to the 1760s and connected the region's colonial past to its place in the post-1815 American Union.

Balancing the Baltic trade: colonial commodities in the trade on the Baltic, 1773–1856

This article attempts to look at the connection between the Atlantic and the Baltic economies during the transition from early modern to the modern era. Previous research has seriously underestimated the importance of colonial commodities traded on the Baltic during this period. Colonial commodities, particularly from the American plantation complex, became ever more important for the Western European balance of payments on the Baltic. Already by the late eighteenth century, these commodities were on aggregate worth approximately as much as the exports of strategic commodities such as grains or iron from the Baltic at the same time. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the value of colonial commodities imported to the region far surpassed the value of such key exports from the Baltic. The colonial commodities thus constituted an important part of the balance of payments for the trade on the Baltic.

Más allá del azúcar: política, diversificación y prácticas económicas en Cuba, 1878-1930 (review)

Reviewed by: Más allá del azúcar: política, diversificación y prácticas económicas en Cuba, 1878-1930 Jorge L. Chinea Antonio Santamaría García and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, eds. 2009. Más allá del azúcar: política, diversificación y prácticas económicas en Cuba, 1878-1930. Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles. ISBN: 9788497440471. Caribbean specialists are well aware of the impact that plantation-grown sugar has had in the region's environment, economy and society. Understandably, it is to the enduring legacy of the sugar plantation complex that students of the Antillean chain have aimed a great deal of their interests. The disproportionate outpouring of research and writing on Cuba's experience with the "sweet malefactor," which elevated the Spanish Caribbean colony into a leading world sugar producer during the nineteenth century, confirms this general pattern. To be sure the volume of work devoted to such themes as the island's indigenous people, peasantry, subsistence farming, cattle ranching and free artisanry, for example, pales in significance when compared to those [End Page 220] focusing on the sugar-slavery duet. Más allá del azúcar is an effort to take a closer look at the other face of Cuba, one that is not entirely dominated by cane fields, ingenios and gangs of nonwhite men, women and children forced to toil against their will. As historian Allan J. Kuethe observes in the book's prologue, the sugarocracy did not make up a homogeneous block nor speak or act with one voice on economic, cultural or scientific matters. In her introduction fellow Cuban specialist, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, echoes his sentiments when she notes that sugar did not blot out reformist and diversification projects that gained currency during the 19th century. To the contrary, she adds, appeals for the aforementioned proposals, many of which were incompatible with the interests of the agrarian elite, grew stronger each time an economic crisis threatened the plantation system. Naranjo Orovio's own chapter traces the shifting discourse amongst the island's competing social groups surrounding the founding of white colonias and calls for the blanqueamiento (whitening) of Cuba's population. At various junctures Spain favored both, mostly in words rather than deeds, to safeguard the territory, but also to keep separatists in check by raising the specter of an impending race war. By the late nineteenth century, however, metropolitan overseers and Cuban reformers revived the debate in their respective attempts to influence the course of Cuba's uncertain social, economic and political future. Antonio Santamaría García synthesizes the last thirty years of Cuba's economic history, and attempts to make sense of the island's agricultural, mercantile and railroad expansion of this interval. Here sugar joins other factors, including the growing transportation infrastructure and global competitors, in steering Spanish commercial policy in Cuba. The metropolis' balancing act becomes more evident in its management of Cuba's growing trade with the U.S. According to Oscar Zanetti Lecuona, the imposition of protectionist tariffs by Spain (until 1898) and the U.S. (after 1898) alone does not do justice to the complicated trading dynamics of this period. While Spain experienced a sizeable economic loss after 1898 at the hands of hegemonic U.S. capital, some of its goods continued to have a modest competitive edge due, in no small part, to heavy Spanish immigration and prevailing cultural tastes. Other factors such as the variety, quality, price and accessibility of specific Spanish products may have also helped to keep mercantile flows from the former metropolis to Cuba economically viable. Much of the published scholarship on this period, as suggested by the work of the late María A. Marqués Dolz, overlooks the growth of domestic industrial and manufacturing activity. She notes that many of the enterprises that were set up in the last decade of Spanish rule were fundamentally artisanal in organization, were centered on the urban [End Page 221] enclaves, catered to local needs, and were not always directly connected to the plantations and the sugar export sector. Some of the private wealth generated through these and other transactions eventually found their way overseas, as shown by Martín...

Can oil palm plantations become bird friendly?

Despite the increasing claims that structural complexity in agroforestry plantations is a key variable for enhancing bird biodiversity, few studies have experimentally manipulated the understory component of structural complexity. Here, we examined the impact of removing understory vegetation from oil palm plantations on the richness and abundance of birds in eastern Guatemala, testing if bird richness and abundance are positively affected by the presence of understory vegetation. Oil palm plantations with understory hold more bird richness and abundance than those lacking it. The experimental removal of this vegetation, equivalent to a reduction in complexity, decreases bird richness but not abudance. Our analysis shows clear effects of vegetation removal on bird richness, such that removal reduces richness and abundance to levels found in areas without understory. Hence, leaving or implementing structural complexity within plantations could satisfy the current need of making commodity production a cleaner industry, fulfilling both, the production of highly demanded commodities and the conservation of biodiversity in productive landscapes. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is one of the most rapidly expanding crop in tropical regions, representing the major cause of loss of natural forests and of the decline of endangered species in several countries. Enhancing understory vegetation might reduce such negative effects. This is one of the few experimental tests about how a component of the vegetation and structural complexity of plantations affects birds.

Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (review)

Reviewed by: Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Wilma King Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. By Clarence E. Walker. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2009. "I want to posit in this book a new myth of origin of the United States," writes the author Clarence E. Walker, who suggests that "at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixed race one" (2). Rather than positioning George and Martha Washington as "founding parents" of the United States, the author suggests that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings replace them. Walker makes his case for the "new myth" in Mongrel Nation, a slim two-part volume containing the essays "Sexuality," and "Character and History, or 'Chloroform in Print.'" Walker acknowledges that his proposition will disturb some readers. Nevertheless, he focuses sharply on the Jefferson-Hemings nexus to answer questions about national identity, racial provenance, and who owns history. An 1802 story in the Richmond Recorder by James Thompson Callender claimed that Jefferson had fathered children with Hemings. "Interracial sex was normative," says Walker (27) yet such a charge against Jefferson, president of the United States, was "news." Besides, he had published disparaging remarks about people of African descent, especially women, in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), causing Jefferson's defenders to believe he would never become intimate with a black woman. As a result, the "news" prompted members of Jefferson's family, his admirers, and some historians to vigorously dispute Callender's charge. Jefferson's defenders remain vigilant, and their attitude is, in Walker's view, "representative of a congenital racial tension in American society" (2). [End Page 175] A brief review of the scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings spanning nearly fifty years calls attention to the continuous debate in which Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) and the 1998 DNA evidence linking Jefferson to a Hemings offspring are integral. Given the body of existing literature, one must ask what will Mongrel Nation contribute? Briefly, Mongrel Nation takes the thirty-eight-year-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship out of the "closet" and places it within a global context. The United States was part of a larger colonial settler society or plantation complex in which creolization, primarily by exploiting enslaved women, occurred. It is against this historical backdrop that Walker asks, why did intimacy between blacks and whites create angst in the United States? In actuality, it is not solely the intimacy but the resulting "mongrel nation" that has been disturbing. Whiteness, rather than an impossible mixture thereof, defined and was the criteria for American citizenship. Children resulting from white-black relationships prompted fractionized calculations or mathematical blood analyses that relegated non-whites to an outsider status in the "racial state." Mixtures threatened the creation of a "pure" republic. Within this context, Jefferson's ideas about colonizing blacks outside the United States are understandable. Writing or theorizing about people of African descent was one thing, but living with or loving them was another matter. How was that possible? Was it ambivalence about blacks that created a racial and sexual amnesia? Did that amnesia create a canonical master narrative of the United States distinguished by "unblemished whiteness?" The answer may be found in Walker's alternative readings and discussions of who Americans are as a nation. Had another Virginia planter, for example George Wythe or John Wayles rather than the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, been accused of intimacy with an enslaved woman would the results have been the same? Obviously, the answer is no, but answers to more edgy questions give pause. For example, do readers know with certainty that Sally Hemings was phenotypically black? How did she identify herself? There is no extant description of her skin color, hair texture, or facial features to determine that they were clearly Caucasoid or Negroid. Even so, one must ask if she and her half-sister, Martha Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's wife, bore a striking resemblance. Could Jefferson, a forty-one-year-old widower, have subjected Sally's identity to the mathematics of blood as he once...

Natural Regeneration in Thinned Douglas-fir Stands in Western Oregon

ABSTRACT In response to interests by land management agencies to transform even-aged stands to structurally mimic old-growth forests, we evaluated whether thinning in 40- to 80-year-old Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) stands influenced amount and composition of advanced regeneration 5 to 7 years following treatment. We used data from two large-scale management experiments (Density Management Study and Young Stand Thinning and Diversity Study) conducted in western Oregon. Thinning focused on the removal of Douglas-fir, while maintenance of minor species was encouraged. Although both experiments showed higher tree regeneration after thinning, we found that variation in regeneration density was too high (3 orders of magnitude) to find statistical differences among thinning intensities. While seedlings of the major species, Douglas-fir and western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), were always present and dominated regeneration on nearly all sites, species trends were driven by high spatial and compositional variation throughout all units, treatments, and sites. Thinning increased the number of species within the regeneration layer. Hereby, species diversity was strongly related to overstory composition, suggesting seed source limitations for minor species. Hence, favoring rare species during thinning operations may be an effective method to increase regeneration species richness. Local conditions, as defined by overstory density appeared more influential than regional climate patterns in determining seedling densities. Shrub and grass competition did not prevent seedling establishment as their cover values were generally not as high as typically found in clearcuts in the region. The high variation in seedling density and species richness within the seedling stratum in the thinned stands may set the stage for development of structural complexity in even-aged Douglas-fir plantations.

Race, Sex and Slavery: ‘Forced Labour’ in Central Asia and Afghanistan in the Early 19th Century

AbstractThe word ‘slavery’ conjures images of cruelty, racial bigotry and economic exploitation associated with the plantation complex crucial to the Atlantic trading economy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Yet this was only one manifestation of practices of human bondage. This article examines the practice of ‘slavery’ in a very different context, looking at Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Punjab in the early nineteenth century. Here, bondage was largely a social institution with economic ramifications, in contrast to its Atlantic counterpart. Slavery served a social, and often sexual function in many of these societies, with the majority of slaves being female domestic servants and concubines. Its victims were often religiously, rather than racially defined, although bondage was a cross-confessional phenomenon. The practice continued to be widespread throughout the region into the early twentieth century.

Human Microevolution and the Atlantic Slave Trade

Populations derived from the Atlantic slaving process provide unique opportunities for studying key evolutionary determinants of current patterns of human cultural and biological variation. Examination of the genetic patterning of the small plantation island of São Tomé (Gulf of Guinea) using a study design that avoids the use of preconceived ethno‐linguistic labels to define genetic sampling units reveals that, despite the fact that maximum distance between any two sampled sites is less than 50 km, the island has an unusual level of genetic structure that is mainly caused by the grouping of Angolar Creole‐speakers in a separate cluster carrying a distinctive imprint of genetic drift. This pattern may have been shaped by a kin‐structured founder effect associated with the flight of a patrilineal clan of rebel slaves who established a remarkably successful maroon community in the vicinity of the plantation complex. The observation that population‐discontinuous jumps may occur even under social conditions of massive coercive amalgamation provides an illustration of the way in which human clusters emerge and eventually shape the genetic background of human populations.

Human Microevolution and the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Case Study from São Tomé

Populations derived from the Atlantic slaving process provide unique opportunities for studying key evolutionary determinants of current patterns of human cultural and biological variation. Examination of the genetic patterning of the small plantation island of Sao Tome (Gulf of Guinea) using a study design that avoids the use of preconceived ethno-linguistic labels to define genetic sampling units reveals that, despite the fact that maximum distance between any two sampled sites is less than 50 km, the island has an unusual level of genetic structure that is mainly caused by the grouping of Angolar Creole-speakers in a separate cluster carrying a distinctive imprint of genetic drift. This pattern may have been shaped by a kin-structured founder effect associated with the flight of a patrilineal clan of rebel slaves who established a remarkably successful maroon community in the vicinity of the plantation complex. The observation that population-discontinuous jumps may occur even under social conditions of massive coercive amalgamation provides an illustration of the way in which human clusters emerge and eventually shape the genetic background of human populations.

Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

ERIC Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of each other's work, and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has provided and for encouraging me to consider what interdis ciplinary work may contribute to the study of the world. Carrying on a long tradition of early American scholarship, Slauter has constructed a declension thesis, one in which a field formerly reliant on literary approaches has fallen off. He asserts, for example, that Atlantic history as a whole is apparently moving away from a focus on text-centered evidence. Yet was the field ever so text centered as he sug gests? Slauter identifies Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's Colonial Identity in the World as a crucial, agenda-setting text for com parative studies and points to this collection's literary and cultural approach. I am a big fan of these essays, but we should acknowledge that the volume's strengths lie in its examination of colonial elites in the western Atlantic. It does not have much to say about Africa or early modern Europe (apart from Ireland), nor does it take us deep into the structure of colonial societies. And though it is certainly true that in the 1980s many historians, inspired largely by the scholarship of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, turned to cultural approaches, it was also still an era of social history, as studies that preceded Canny and Pagden's collection indicate. history's origins reflect the period's multiple strands of inquiry. When I consider the field's beginnings, I think of works such as Philip D. Curtin's heroic effort to calculate the scope of the slave trade in The Slave Trade or his powerful synthesis The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Another crucial text came from the field of historical geography: D. W Meinig's The Shaping of America.1 These books mapped out?in