Plantation Economy Research Articles

Property Laws, White Settler Power and the Kingdom of Hawai’i

Hawai’ian property laws in the 19th century, while intended to provide for the transition of the islands to a European mode of commerce and allow for greater prosperity, weakened the power of Native Hawai`ian subjects and ultimately contributed to European planter power and the eventual annexation of the islands. Prior to European contact, land in the Kingdom of Hawai`i was communally owned and not treated as a tradable commodity. However, forced to settle foreign debts, the Hawai’ian government instituted land reform intended to raise money and maintain Hawai’ian sovereignty. Given the constant threat of annexation by Western powers and the pressures of the settler lobby, this Hawai’ian land legislation was critically flawed, transferring vast amounts of land to white settlers, creating a plantation economy and ultimately leading to the destruction of Hawai’i as it was. Corruption, bad economic decisions and constant settler pushback created imperfect legal processes, which led to haole accumulation of land and subsequent economic dominance and the simultaneous environmental and economic destruction of native, particularly maka’āinana, lands. This paper examines how these two phenomena led to native Hawai’ian impoverishment, a growing settler influence on the government and the eventual overthrow of the native-led government.

The Branson Hillbilly: Commingling Power and Marginalization on the "Heartland" Stage

The Branson HillbillyCommingling Power and Marginalization on the "Heartland" Stage Joanna Dee Das (bio) and Jay Buchanan (bio) In 1967, nineteen-year-old Gary Presley did not put on a tie-dye T-shirt to participate in the iconic "Summer of Love." He also did not throw a bottle to participate in the more than 150 rebellions against racism and police brutality erupting in American cities across the country. Instead, he donned his grandfather's oversized overalls, plopped a broken straw hat on his head, and blacked out several of his teeth with an eyebrow pencil to transform himself into Herkimer, a hillbilly, for his family's variety show three miles outside of Branson, Missouri. The Mabes, who had been running their own variety show out of a municipal building downtown, opened a theatre across the highway one year later, featuring Jim Mabe as hillbilly Droopy Drawers. The entertainment industry in this Ozark Mountain small town exploded in the decades thereafter. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than forty-five theatres were operating over one hundred shows, many with their own hillbilly characters, for more than nine million tourists a year.1 While New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas are more nationally recognized US entertainment centers, Branson holds its own as a popular destination to see live performance, particularly for residents of the South, Midwest, and Southwest regions of the United States. Dominated by variety shows, Branson's entertainment industry abides by a motto called "The Three F's": Faith, Family, and Flag, a triumvirate of values linked to the rise of what is called "movement conservatism" in US politics.2 Yet vague assertions of values will not attract audiences; a show needs a character to embody these principles. Enter the hillbilly. The hillbilly is a stock character, [End Page 88] blending the long-standing "wise fool" archetype (e.g., Feste from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) with stereotypes about poor whites from the Southern mountain regions of the United States. In early-twentieth-century US American theatre, the hillbilly stock character had a specific name—Toby—a "red-wigged, freckled, clownishly garbed country bumpkin who was the foil of the evil, conniving urban characters that tried to take advantage of simple rural people."3 The archetype was so popular that for several decades an entire genre of rural itinerant performance, the Toby Show, was built around it. This type of touring tent show faded into obscurity in the early 1960s, precisely when Gary first appeared as Herkimer and the rapid expansion of leisure nationwide enabled Branson's success as a tourism destination.4 At Presleys' Country Jubilee in the early 2020s, septuagenarian Gary has stopped blacking out his teeth, but he still bounds onstage in overalls six nights a week, ten months of the year, to tell jokes and engage in physical comedy. When asked why the Jubilee remained popular with audiences after several decades, he stated, "When you go to Hawaii, you want to see the Hula Girl. When you go to Branson, you want to see the hillbilly."5 The persistent popularity of hillbilly performance in Branson from the 1960s to the 2020s warrants a reconsideration of how expressive culture functions to create and sustain power structures in the United States. Power comes not simply in the form of wealth or in control of government; power comes in the form of being seen as someone who has influence, recognition, and admiration. How these affective registers of feelings interact with more traditional levers of power to determine one's standing in society is a subject of major debate. Historically peripheral to the plantation economy of the antebellum South, economically disadvantaged, and culturally scorned in the centuries thereafter, the hillbilly figure nevertheless bears a primary indicator of power and centrality in the United States: whiteness. And while there are hillbilly women, the classic hillbilly archetype is a man, so it also bears the privileges of masculinity.6 The hillbilly's commingling of marginalization and privilege plays out both onstage and off in Branson. Tourism boosters express frustration about the city's negative reputation as cheesy and backward, yet the destination's differentiating characteristic in a...

Creolizing the Nation

Creolizing the Nation

The Making of a Periphery Revisited

Many books have been written about the incorporation of the Caribbean region, South Asia, Africa and Latin America into the global economy. Remarkably, few have dealt with Island Southeast Asia or Maritime Southeast Asia as a macro-region. For the Caribbean nations, it has been amply discussed how the legacies of the plantation economies consisted of meagre economic growth and massive unemployment. Conversely, scant attention has been given to the question how societies in Island Southeast Asia were turned into providers of cheap commodities and how this impacted their long-term development prospects. This silence is even more remarkable considering some striking parallels with Caribbean socio-economic trajectories. Today, emigration of millions is the fate of Island Southeast Asia, as it is for the Caribbean region. To break the silence and to invite further discussion I wrote The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter. After reading the review by Dr Aguilar on this book in a previous issue of this journal, I felt that it could be worthwhile to highlight some of the main points of my argument about the peripheral integration of Island Southeast Asia in the global economy. I am grateful to the editors of the International Journal of Asian Studies for granting me the opportunity to do so.

Capitalist Transformation and Settler Colonialism: Theorizing the Interface

ABSTRACTAnthropological theory has approached Indigenous experiences of colonialism through frameworks of capitalist expansion or, more recently, through those of settler colonialism. Given their different attentions, these frameworks in conjunction provide a more nuanced account of the colonizing and displacement process than either does alone. The history of Hawaiʻi from 1778 to 1860 provides a valuable illustration of the entanglements of economic transformation and settler colonialism over time, showing the need to combine analyses of settler colonialism with those of political economy to understand the emergence of new systems of governance, law, and exchange. The establishment of settler colonialism was neither quick nor uncontested, entailing Indigenous strategic appropriation along with political, legal, and social changes that created the space for settler dominance. Settler colonialism was fostered by the prospect of a profitable plantation economy. In Hawai‘i, chiefs managed to avoid a Euro‐American capitalist takeover during the first eighty years of contact but began to lose control as the settler population grew and the capitalist economy expanded. [settler colonialism, capitalist transformation, land alienation, Hawaiian history]

O massacre dos libertos: Sobre raça e república no Brasil (1888–1889)

Historians of Atlantic slavery live in a brave new world. Some years ago, books crossing national borders via comparison, connection, or synthesis were considered pioneering works at best and mere oddities at worst. That is no longer the case. While the traditional concerns and approaches of the different national historiographies of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba continue to be alive and kicking, these historiographies now exchange topics and approaches more often. Matheus Gato's O massacre dos libertos (The freedpeople's massacre) is part of a new Brazilian historiography seeking to understand how racial projects were key to not only social inequality but also political debates at the time of abolition in 1888—a concern that echoes those of historians such as Tâmis Parron, Flávio Gomes, Maria Helena Machado, and Petrônio Domingues.Gato investigates a shooting that took place in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, on November 17, 1889—18 months after Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law abolishing slavery. While the incident has remained poorly understood ever since, for Gato it was a key expression of, and a penetrating window into, the process of racialization taking place in Brazil during the immediate postabolition years (pp. 27, 104, 117–18). After a methodical analysis of how journalists, historians, and memorialists presented the incident, the author discusses Maranhão in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like other Brazilian provinces Maranhão had a thriving plantation economy in the early 1800s, but in Maranhão, unlike in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, that economic sector did not survive the end of slavery. By the time of abolition, most of Maranhão's plantations, dedicated to cotton, were either in decline or extinct, and the province hosted a large free Black population who primarily stayed in the countryside, owned land informally, and did not have access to the means for agricultural modernization.While under slavery Brazilian elites always made sure to create multiple and overlapping hierarchies—Brazilian-born versus African, free Black versus slave, urban versus rural—in order to avoid the formation of racial identities, by the mid-to-late nineteenth century the proximity of abolition racialized public debates. Former slave owners and state officials started referring to freedpeople as a “social problem,” a primitive and anticapitalist type of worker who was to blame, they argued, for the decadence of the province's agriculture (p. 60). Maranhense elites pushed for vagrancy laws and other coercive measures after 1888, maintained physical punishment for labor control, and aggressively lobbied the imperial parliament to compensate former slave owners for the loss of enslaved labor. They also organized the republican movement in Maranhão, an elite-led attempt at creating a republic that brought order and technocratic rationality to Brazilian institutions without the participation of popular groups. To planters and white elites in the province, Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II's sympathy for abolitionism felt like a betrayal, and it gradually pushed them toward republicanism. To Black Maranhenses, Dom Pedro II's sympathy had the opposite effect. In a move that recalled when Rio de Janeiro's freedmen organized the Black Guard to support Princess Isabel in a context of increasing republican agitation, in Maranhão the free Black population became devout monarchists. The republican cause came to be seen as the whites' freedom, while most Black Maranhenses saw the imperial family, and by extension the monarchy, as the guarantors of abolition in the Brazilian empire.When the first and somewhat confusing news of the republic's proclamation in Rio de Janeiro on November 15, 1889, reached São Luís, the province's army officers chose to wait for official confirmation. A crowd of mostly Black workers (stevedores, market vendors, artisans, urban dwellers) marched on the morning of November 17 to the city government's headquarters, where the republic was supposedly going to be publicly proclaimed—and, according to rumor, slavery was going to be reinstated. Facing popular and Black hostility toward the public proclamation, however, local authorities canceled this event. When the same demonstrators marched to the republican newspaper O Globo that afternoon to defend the imperial family and reject the republic's proclamation, the troops stationed there opened fire, killing at least three in the crowd and injuring eleven, in what became ingrained in popular memory as “the freedpeople's massacre.”The republican government in Maranhão took steps over the following years to whitewash its image, such as creating a red, black, and white state flag to symbolize racial fraternity in the new era. However, as Gato emphasizes, such symbols could not erase the idea that the new government's alleged racial fraternity was built on a massacre embodying multiple forms of racial and social exclusion. While the author occasionally abuses block quotations and tables, which at times prevents a more fluid narrative, this book is a much-needed and excellent analysis of the politics of abolition in the understudied but fascinating northern state of Maranhão.

Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690

Historians' interest in the seventeenth-century Caribbean has surged in recent years. Juan José Ponce Vázquez's revised dissertation analyzes the role that smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical development of Santo Domingo from the end of the sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. The author focuses on local communities that reflect shifting opportunities for the population during a period when hostile powers penetrated parts of the Spanish empire, including the island of Hispaniola, and established their own colonies in the Caribbean.Based on extensive research in the Archivo General de Indias, Ponce Vázquez shows that the development of plantation economies was not the only viable option for settlers in colonies neglected by the Spanish crown's preference for resource-rich parts of the New World. Some people found other means of survival, and the reason that Hispaniola trod a different path was its access to the lucrative contraband economy. Illicit trade, as it turned out, generated income for a substantial portion of the island's population. The author convincingly demonstrates that the colony was not lingering on the periphery of the Caribbean, as it has long been depicted, but was an active participant in the Atlantic economy that transcended the mercantilistic policies of the European rulers.The book is organized in chronological order. The first chapter covers most of the sixteenth century, when Hispaniola evolved from the center of Spanish imperial expansion to an impoverished backwater with limited opportunity for its inhabitants. In chapter 2 Ponce Vázquez describes how smuggling emerged as the predominant sector in the island's economy toward the end of the century. Contraband trade with Dutch merchants flourished, and many settlers profited from this form of commerce. The third chapter outlines the well-known forced depopulation between 1604 and 1606 that left large parts of the island's north and west open to foreign intrusion. The author then examines how Santo Domingo's inhabitants consolidated control over colonial government and forged new relationships with non-Spaniards and the authorities in the motherland. The focus on Rodrigo Pimentel's remarkable career as officeholder and ruthless businessman in the next chapter provides fine insights into the political culture of this neglected colony. The final chapter considers the relations with intruders, particularly the French who, beginning in Tortuga in 1629, seized the western coastal regions of the island and established the colony Saint-Domingue at a time when the Spanish crown barely managed to protect major Caribbean ports from foreign assaults.The surviving sources do not seem to be as rich as for other Spanish colonies like Mexico or perhaps Panama, but Ponce Vázquez paints a vivid picture of the development of Santo Domingo from the failure of plantation economy to the war against the French in 1690. The descriptions of the social and cultural implications of the reliance on illicit trade belong to the great strengths of this book. The author shows how the cabildo (governing council) became a “select club where friendships were established, profitable deals were struck, but also where members could become life-long enemies” (p. 144). While the local elites used the power of political office for their own advantage, the dirty work was often carried out by slaves. A few examples make the stories of various individuals come alive as well as further contribute to a better understanding of colonial society.Although this book covers much new territory, for historians of the Atlantic world the crucial intersection with the French remains a bit of a mystery. The author, for instance, describes a number of raids and counterraids in the 1660s and 1670s, but it is not clear whether there was any peaceful trade between these parties during this period. The lack of references in the Spanish correspondence is a major roadblock. Some papers in French archives suggest that merchants from Normandy specifically sought customers among the island's Spanish settlers. The potential profits seem to have outweighed the risks. The French and the Dutch sides of these illicit transactions wait to be explored in future research projects.In sum, Ponce Vázquez's work is an important contribution to the growing body of studies of smuggling and contraband trade in various parts of the Spanish empire. This excellent book is rich in detail and illuminates Hispaniola's history during a crucial phase of development. The author has done a fantastic job in bringing the many facets of colonial life outside the centers of prosperity to light. It is regrettable that the exorbitant price will severely limit the readership. Not only historians of Latin America and the Caribbean but also a broad audience with a more general interest could profit from the wider distribution of this study.

Runaway Slaves and the Aftermath of Slavery on the Swahili Coast

Abstract Along the East African coast, marronage increased in the 19th century as a consequence of the intensification of the slave trade and the development of a plantation economy based on slave labor. Research on the fugitive slaves on the Swahili coast has been conducted since the 1980s and has mainly highlighted the ambivalent relationship (between rejection and belonging) of maroons with the dominant coastal culture—that of the slave owners, shaped in particular by Islam and urbanity. This article goes beyond the existing interpretations by showing that the aftermath of slavery often consisted of a range of options, less static than those described so far and less focused on opting either into or out of coastal culture. Relying on a case study in present-day Kenya and drawing from European written sources and interviews, I examine what happened to escaped slaves in the Witu region, where a Swahili city-state was founded in 1862. Their history is examined through a spatial analysis and the modalities of their economic and social participation in regional dynamics, showing that no single cultural influence was hegemonic in this region.

Racialized and Gendered Constructions of the “Ideal Server”: Contesting Historical Occupational Discourses of Restaurant Service

This essay takes a discourse-centered approach to understanding the historically contingent construction of restaurant service as a devalued occupational identity, showing how service is actively constructed as low wage and organized along hierarchies of gender, race, and class. These discursive constructions shape the relative visibility and legibility of workers as fully deserving of rights, compensation, and dignity. Building on prior research on the struggle over meanings of work, occupational identity, and gendered and racialized job segregation, the essay begins by tracing constructions of the “ideal server” predating the contemporary rise of restaurants from relations of servitude within and beyond the plantation economy, to the eventual entrenchment of tipping, and the gendered and feminized constructions of domestic service. It discusses racialized and gendered relations of servitude in the Pullman Company's dining cars and the eventual white feminization of waitressing. Adopting a historical narrative built on secondary literatures, it demonstrates the centrality of race, gender, and class to early occupational formations of service. It highlights how employers have cultivated occupational hierarchies and divisions as well as efforts by restaurant workers to transform how their labor is valued and compensated.

Caribbean Economic Thought: Advances, Retreat, Current Challenges

The reflections provided in this article were presented in the 4th Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture, delivered at the SMAIAS/ASN Summer School in January 2021. The article focuses on the critical tradition of economic knowledge and thought about the socio-economic development of the Caribbean, which began in the last decades of the colonial era. The advances made through the early Independence period were concerned with the problems of individual countries and the region as a whole. The objective was to improve the material economic welfare of the broad masses of Caribbean people while generating the requisite economic growth to sustain an improvement in the general conditions of life. From the thought of W. Arthur Lewis to the Plantation Economy theorists and subsequent critiques, a rich critical tradition emerged, only to be displaced by the onset of the debt crisis and neoliberalism. This article reviews the main elements of this critical tradition, its advances, and retreats, as well as the new challenges presented to it today.

Between unfreedoms: The role of caste in decisions to repatriate among indentured workers

AbstractIndian indentured labour migration followed slavery in providing cheap labour to British plantation colonies. To make this migration characteristically distinct from slavery, the workers were offered a subsidized trip back at the end of the indenture period. However, despite this guaranteed and subsidized return passage, only about a third of the workers returned to India. In this article, we consider the role of caste in the decision to return home using data from ship registers for more than 16 000 Indian indentured workers in British Guiana between 1872 and 1911. Our results indicate that individuals from very low castes were significantly less likely to return home in comparison to other caste groups. We argue that this was because while caste hierarchy played a very significant role in every aspect of the workers’ lives back in India, their lives in the plantation economies did not allow the reproduction of caste hierarchies. Low caste workers who stayed on in British Guiana were therefore able to escape the unfreedom of caste. This trend is not robust for other caste groups. While the association of higher caste groups and return is positive and significant, the significance disappears when we include economic conditions.

Empire remembered: the intimate economy of tea in Assam and the making of ‘Chameli Memsaab’

ABSTRACT This essay examines the complex intertwining of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities in the making of memories about the colonial past. The essay uses literature and cinema as archive and intersubjectivity as the lens to argue that memories of the Empire are culled in the complex intersection of the subjective experiences of the individual and a community's collective perceptions of the past and the present. Accordingly, the essay calls for due diligence to the immediate postcolonial context in which the colonial memory project is ordained. At a more elementary level, the essay argues that the reduction of colonial experiences to a conflictual negation of the imperialist project impairs our understanding of the myriad factors mediating the colonial encounter. The polysemy of colonial memories reflects the multiplicity of intersubjective exchanges within a community. In this case, the Assamese short story, ‘Chameli Memsaab', written by Nirode Choudhury, and describing the affection of a benign planter sahib for Chameli, a coolie woman, becomes our focal point for entry into the neglected domain of Assamese literary representations of the European planter, that put a gloss on the dark side of Plantation abuses in Assam, to project the plantation economy as a desirable addendum to the Raj. Our survey of short stories written in Assamese, in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, reveal a profoundly ambivalent attitude towards the unequal sexual exchange between the European sahib and the coolie woman, which we call ‘the intimate economy of tea’ in Assam, and which, as the coercive underside of the economy, denuded the production relations on the plantations of their putatively capitalist character.

Changing Caribbean geographies: connections in flora, fauna and patterns of settlement from Indian inheritances

There can be no doubt that Indian immigration to the plantation colonies changed the geography of those colonies. However, most analyses have dealt with the sugar industry in the colonies after the abolition of slavery. This paper will argue that, apart from the sugar industry, Indian labour and ingenuity made other significant contributions to plantation economies. The girmityas (agreement signers) were well aware that they were going to agricultural occupations so they took with them an amazing array of dried fruits, seeds and cuttings, which survived the long crossing, adding to the flora of the plantations. Armed with this foreknowledge, the jahajis packed these items into their jahaji bundles alongside the Tulsi Ramayan and the Holy Qu'ran. Animals too formed part of this international trade. Sheep, goats and poultry which were not eaten on the outward voyage were sent to the estates, where they multiplied. When dangerous snakes threatened plantation security, cages of mongoose were dispatched to the Caribbean where they bravely tackled venomous creatures. At the urging of Indian labourers with long experience in the sugar industry, the plantations' owners imported Brahma bulls and Zebu cattle, which revolutionised transport on the estates and provided leather, manure and meat to the wider population. There is also the amazing story of the importation of hundreds of water buffaloes (bhaisa) from the Indo-Gangetic plains. Some nine breeds were imported and in the twentieth century Caribbean bio-geneticists were able to blend the best qualities of those Indian animals and created a new hybrid, the buffalypso, which combined the scientific name with Trinidad's fame as the land of the calypso. The buffalypso became a prized animal for haulage, meat, milk and leather and an item of export to Venezuela, Colombia, Miami and the wider Caribbean. Indian cultivars were continuously exported to the botanic gardens in the Caribbean and Indian forestry experts were sent to the region to advise on forest rehabilitation in the wake of large-scale deforestation, which sugar cultivation required. In these and other ways the physical character of the Caribbean underwent permanent change, which manifests itself today.

The persistent conditions of plantation economy and the fraught spaces of encounter in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana

This article examines how social and economic structures of historic plantation development manage to persist over time and to rearticulate over space. In the early 1900s, the historic plantation sugar economy in St Bernard Parish, Louisiana, suddenly collapsed. Despite efforts by local elites to seize this moment to finally launch a diversified industrial development path, the parish nevertheless sank again into a new cycle of plantation domination and dependency. The dominating sugar sector was broken up only to be rapidly replaced by a vast new monopoly—in, of all things, systematized fur production—whose land tenure and labor regime nearly replicated that of the earlier plantation estates. I examine this folding-over-anew of the plantation, from sugar to fur, in two ways that contribute to recent growing literature on persistent plantation geographies. First, I draw upon theories of Caribbean underdevelopment to identify three persistent conditions of plantation economy. Upon the collapse of sugar in St Bernard, the conditions of estate-based land monopoly, racialized extra-economic labor coercion, and external market/primary commodity dependency constrained the possibility of structural transformation and rearticulated in a new commodity regime based in fur. Second, I turn to consider the experience of workers bound up in the new fur economy who were not, in the main, the debt-bound black workers from the old sugar plantations but a racially and spatially marginal group known as isleños. I draw on a unique set wry folk ballads that isleños maintained as part of local oral tradition to examine the voices of trappers themselves as they negotiated the rearticulating structures of the neo-plantation regime. Thinking with McKittrick's concept of plantation “spaces of encounter,” I find these neo-estate workers forged fraught spaces of discursive and material autonomy that at times resisted, and at times reproduced, the ongoing plantation regime.

Old ways in new places? Experimenting with plants in the early plantation setting

ABSTRACT Plants and foodways have long been recognized for their importance to the construction of identity and culture in plantation settings. Yet despite this focus on plants and foodways in plantation archaeology, there is a need for more archaeological documentation of the types of plants and fields being cultivated in newly formed plantations in the New World. We combine historical documentation with an assemblage of recovered plant remains from the Lord Ashley site (38DR83a) to examine plant use during the formative years of a plantation economy. A renewed focus on experimental cropping in the New World plantation system at this site, along with one of the most well documented enslaved African populations before the 1690s in South Carolina, point to the influence of cross-cultural entanglements in building New World agricultural systems. The recovery of watermelon, an African cultivar, found alongside an assemblage of artifacts and other archaeobotanical remains associated with the enslaved Africans at the site, also point to the role of first-generation Africans in establishing New World foodway traditions.

The Nature of Ruins

The nature of ruins is that they consist of entangled narratives, the human story often becoming concealed and at one with the landscape. A ruin is described as something in a state of deterioration caused by lack of maintenance or by a willful act of destruction. This can be extended to our mental well-being. Theories of ruin and entanglement provide models for reflection and unravelling of uncomfortable truths revealed in postcolonial landscapes and related migration stories. Plants offer an element of balance and healing.Textiles played a significant role in African history, with traditions of skillful weaving and dyeing that can be traced back thousands of years. Textiles were also hugely important in Caribbean plantation economy, traded alongside and sometimes for enslaved Africans. The interweaving of warp and weft forms the structure of cloth. Pulling threads symbolizes a controlled manipulation of the cultural fabric of societies, weakening the structure. Reconstructed threads create a hybrid, giving life to something damaged or ruined. Once pulled, do threads retain traces of their original source? Working with textiles and natural dyes allows for a more sustainable and rooted practice, with metaphorical “play” helping in processing the complexities of intertwined history and cultural identity. The unspoken, the dislocation, the hole is often where the healing lies.Our history blows in the wind, and threads unravel with time. Empty patches of knowledge lost, some never to be regained. How do we weave new narrative and connect to the lands where we live? It is interesting, the sense of urgency I felt to connect to a stone pillar of Nubian design seen on a ruined 1835 flax mill in Northern England. The pillar kept me strong, helped me identify with an ancient part of my African heritage in a land where I was classified as “minority ethnic.” Great Britain, land of my birth, land that fought for ownership of Waitukubuli. Her tall green body divided into tiny economic plots, sold, abused, and then abandoned.After many years of mental tug-of-war, I have returned “home” to Dominica, land of sunshine, hurricanes, and volcanic energy. Living here, I feel a greater sense of belonging and connection to my drumbeat pulse. Nature lures me to the rusty sugarcane rollers shrouded by an entanglement of healing herbs. Roots dig deep, cracking solid stone walls of abandoned mills, reducing them back to dust. I dig hands in rich red soil, grow things and extract botanical color for textile works. It is the plants such as the wah-wah and noni that speak, revealing hidden stories of survival and African retention. Wah-wah, an indigenous wild yam (Rajania cordata), a means of survival for the Maroons who escaped the plantations.I feel there is also a sense of loss and pain buried in the core of every living thing that roots itself here, for even the plants have been transplanted. What connects us to the soil as Caribbean people? We plant, pick bush, talk herbal talk. Elders speak of bush baths and rubs for achy joints. What do we use here to heal residual trauma?I think of Stuart Hall, the sadness in his eyes, and know that through his struggle, through his work, he too, like the Nubian pillar, has strengthened me, kept me upright in times of yearning to be home. Can we, I wonder, as Caribbean people, ever embrace ruins from a purely romantic stance?

Economic Aspects of Slavery in the Triangular Trade in the Early Modern Period

Slavery has existed since the beginning of human civilisation. However, there was a great upsurge in slavery during the early modern period and the Age of Discovery, when it gained enormous popularity and took new forms. The greatest European powers at the time conquered new territories in Central and North America, developing plans how to exploit them in the most profitable way possible. To unlock the economic potential of these territories, colonial countries started organising a plantation economy by using slave labour. Consequently, colonial countries generated large profits, while the international trade began to flourish. Since there was a labour shortage due to an increased volume of economic activities, colonial countries engaged in the triangular trade, which ensured cheap and large workforce – slaves. As a result, slaves from Africa were brought to plantations in the New World, the most sought-after products, such as sugar, cotton and indigo, came to Europe from colonies, while almost all products that were scarce in colonies were imported from Europe. Therefore, the objective of this paper was to analyse the impact and costs of slave labour and plantation economy on the efficiency of the triangular international trade.

'Being Chinese' in Mauritius and Madagascar: Comparing Chinese diasporic communities in the western Indian Ocean

Chinese migration to the Western Indian Ocean since the 1800s was part of an earlier historical trend that saw European colonial powers setting up plantation economies that required foreign laborers. Migrants from Southern China arrived in Mauritius and Madagascar first as indentured laborers, and later as free merchants. Despite many similarities between the two diasporas, they differed in terms of their cultural and linguistic propensities. Furthermore, since the 1990s, both Mauritius and Madagascar have been experiencing rising influences of Mandarin-speaking Chinese immigrants working in infrastructure construction, commercial and educational sectors. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in these two Western Indian Ocean countries between 2015 and 2020, this paper applies the theoretical lens of ‘diaspora-for-others,’ featured in this special issue, to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese migration trajectories to Mauritius and Madagascar, and their respective diasporic identity formations. Local socio-historical contexts in Mauritius, Madagascar, and China influence the transnational experiences of Mauritian and Malagasy Chinese communities, which further contributes to their heterogeneous, fluid and changing cultural identities. In addition, the People’s Republic of China’s increasing engagement in Western Indian Ocean countries as a gateway to Africa in the past two decades has also created more nuances in the distinguishable boundaries within the Chinese diaspora communities in the region.

Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

In Great Crossings, Christina Snyder documents the creation, development, and eventual closure of the Choctaw Academy located in Great Crossings, Kentucky. US expansion, racist rhetoric, and a Jacksonian ideology of white American identity during the era of forced Indian removal are all common themes as Snyder uses the Choctaw Academy and its locale to chart an “intimate view of the ambitions and struggles of Indians, settlers and slaves” in the antebellum period (16). Great Crossings itself illustrated the transformation of American identity, from one that the Indian students at the Choctaw Academy could personally join in constructing, to one of racial exclusion and forced removal. With a compelling narrative and an intertwined history located at the heart of the continent, Snyder defines a changing America through the eyes of Choctaw Academy students.The residents, enslaved peoples, instructors, and Native students of the school and community illustrate the complexities and contradictions inherent in the tri-racial antebellum South. Choctaw Academy founder Richard Johnson illustrates this dichotomy, as he championed the education and so-called civilization of Native communities, publicly displayed his relationship with enslaved Black woman Julia Chinn, and even covertly used the Choctaw Academy to educate their two daughters while he actively participated in the slave market and plantation economy. Native students also complicated the racial and social characteristics in Great Crossings, as they were often connected to elite families in their nation and refused to be treated as a racial underclass. Snyder deftly illustrates the agency of Indigenous and Black actors as they “asserted that they were not savages or wenches, but rather gentlemen and ladies” (123).The primary foci of Snyder’s work are the Choctaw and other Native students at Great Crossings. Choctaws themselves were at the “vanguard of the education movement,” but many other Indian communities from throughout the eastern Plains and Trans-Appalachia sent young men to the Choctaw Academy (13). Hundreds of students attended the Choctaw Academy, and Snyder painstakingly details the lived experiences of these students as they “became a different type of warrior,” one that used their education at the Choctaw Academy to advance themselves and defend their nations from American predation (40). Students learned skills such as Italian bookkeeping and surveying, while a select few learned advanced degrees in law and medicine. By the 1830s, however, forced removal and the hardening of racial identities in the United States had repercussions at the Choctaw Academy, as education now included manual labor as well as poorer food and lodging. Snyder catalogs how the students responded to these shifts and their agency as they fought to change the Choctaw Academy, shutter it, or go home. As Snyder notes, these battles over the curriculum of the school illustrate the influence and agency of students like Potawatomi Joseph Bourassa and Choctaw William Trahern. As Johnson fell into debt, he “increasingly relied on them to act as spokesmen, monitors, and teachers” to maintain school funding, and these students demanded he provide them access to advanced studies in return (183).The dissolution of the Choctaw Academy in 1848, and the forced removal of Choctaws to Indian Territory, was not the death knell of Choctaw educational programs. Instead, Snyder’s final chapters describe the considerable educational advances in Choctaw country, the foundation of public-school systems, elite academies, and women’s education that preceded the educational revolutions in most of the United States. Leaders of the new school systems, led by Peter Pitchlynn and other Choctaw Academy graduates, changed American conceptions of educational pageantry, such as the annual examinations of students at Choctaw Academy, from a “showcase for a white audience” to a festive event for students’ families (276).Snyder’s concluding chapter reads more as an epilogue, detailing the lives of Choctaw Academy graduates after the Civil War, and it connects the history of Indian country to that of the development of the United States. Through her history of the Choctaw Academy, Snyder uncovers a multicultural and intertwined American South, in which Indian students, white settlers, and enslaved Blacks navigated the “thousand anxieties over race, citizenship, and America’s destiny” that consumed the antebellum era (17). Aptly named, Snyder’s book illustrates the necessary inclusion of Native voices, agency, and dispossession in the creation of an American identity.

Here be dragons: the untapped archaeological potential of São Tomé and Príncipe

ABSTRACT Africa has thus far contributed little to debates in the field of island archaeology. This paper explores the potential of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island state in the Gulf of Guinea that may be the only country in the world where no archaeological fieldwork has yet been undertaken. This contrasts sharply with its importance as a focal point in the development of plantation economies based on unfree labour, campaigns of resistance to these, the transfer of crops between the Old and New Worlds, and the emergence of new, creolized societies, as well as with its enmeshment in systems of international trade and exploitation foundational to global capitalism. This paper discusses the contributions that archaeological research in the archipelago could make to these and other themes, including the environmental impacts of human settlement, and identifies parallels with work on islands in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean.