Plantation World Research Articles

Rhizospheric Bacillus spp. Exhibit Miticidal Efficacy against Oligonychus coffeae (Acari: Tetranychidae) of Tea.

Oligonychus coffeae (Acari: Tetranychidae), popularly known as red spider mite (RSM) is one of the major pests of commercial tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) plantation world over. Many attempts have been made in the past to control this devastating pest using a variety of microbial bioagents, however, area-wise field success is very limited. We carried out an in vitro study to explore the potential of rhizospheric Bacillus spp. (B. amyloliquefaciens BAC1, B. subtilis LB22, and B. velezensis AB22) against O. coffeae through adulticidal and ovicidal activity. The 100% adult and egg mortality was observed with bacterial suspension (1 × 109 CFU/mL) by B. velezensis AB22, showing the lowest LC50 values for both adults and eggs of O. coffeae, i.e., 0.28 × 105 and 0.29 × 105, respectively. The study also throws some insights into the underlying mechanism through electron microscopy study and identification of some putative pesticidal metabolites from all the species. The three Bacillus species were observed to have four commonly secreted putative bioactive secondary metabolites, brevianamide A, heptadecanoic acid, thiolutin, and versimide responsible for their bio-efficacy against O. coffeae. The outcome of our study provides a strong possibility of introducing Bacillus spp. as a biological miticide and developing synthetic metabolites mimicking the mechanistic pathway involved in microbial bioefficacy.

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic

The Indentured Archipelago: Experiences of Indian Labour in Mauritius and Fiji, 1871–1916

There is a pressing need in indentured labor studies for new approaches to examining and conceptualizing the nature and dynamics of the global migrant labor system that scattered some 2.2 million indentured Asian laborers, two-thirds of whom were Indians, throughout and beyond the colonial plantation world between the 1830s and 1920s. In this revised version of his dissertation, published as part of Cambridge University Press's Global South Asians series, Reshaad Durgahee seeks to demonstrate how historical geography can deepen our understanding of the indentured Indian experience in Mauritius and Fiji between 1871 and 1916. Regrettably, his efforts have resulted in a seriously flawed work that makes only a modest contribution to our understanding of that experience.Durgahee notes in his introduction that he wants to escape the conceptual and other limitations inherent in the historiographical propensity to examine the Indian indentured experience in various colonies in isolation from one another. To this end, he argues that the concepts of “the indentured archipelago” and “subaltern careering” allow us to develop a fuller understanding of the historical geographies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century indenture and imperialism. His second and third chapters seek to explore indentured spaces in, respectively, Mauritius and Fiji, while a fourth chapter focuses on the concept of subaltern careering. Chapter 5 examines the development of new indentured migration routes within and beyond the colonial plantation world, a process that he asserts involved the emergence of Mauritius, Fiji, and the British and French West Indies as regional immigration entrepôts. A brief conclusion summarizes the arguments that he advances in preceding chapters.While Durgahee can be commended for wanting to escape from what I have characterized on previous occasions as the “tyranny of the particular” in indentured labor studies—that is, an unwillingness to situate the case studies that characterize this field of study in more fully developed local, regional, and pan-regional contexts—his efforts to do so are less than compelling for various reasons, beginning with his failure to develop a convincing argument about the heuristic value of the notion that an “indentured archipelago” existed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he notes that the colonies in this archipelago did not develop in isolation from one another and calls for the comparative study of the indentured experience in this archipelago, he elects to examine Mauritian and Fijian developments side by side, in parallel, rather than comparatively. In so doing, he largely ignores Mauritian social and economic history before 1871, a thorough knowledge of which is central to understanding indentured life not only on the island but also elsewhere in the colonial plantation world. As a human geographer interested in how space shapes people's lives, he pays surprisingly little attention to changing patterns of spatiality on the ground in both these colonies. There is likewise little sense of change through time in a work of historical geography, much less of the dynamics of these changes, such as the Mauritian sugar industry's dependence on domestically generated capital at a time when the dramatic expansion of beet sugar production transformed the global sugar market. Durgahee's treatment of worker agency is simplistic and fails to consider, for example, the role that changing patterns of illegal absence, desertion, and vagrancy played in shaping indentured life, a serious omission since these manifestations of worker agency have been the subject of a substantial body of scholarship. While his interest in subaltern imperial careering provides welcome new insight into the complexities of indentured Indian immigration, his claims about its historical significance are undermined by the fact that the eighteen thousand individuals in question accounted for less than 2.3 percent of the eight hundred thousand indentured Indians who reached European colonies between 1870 and 1920.The promise inherent in a historical geographical approach to understanding the indentured Indian experience is compromised by Durgahee's failure to engage in the kind of rigorous analysis that this topic requires, a failure made manifest in a surfeit of descriptive narrative prose that also highlights his failure to demonstrate a solid command of important relevant scholarship on indenture in Mauritius and Fiji and the wider colonial plantation world (e.g., David Northrup's Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922). Stylistically, this book contains too many instances of the kind of redundancy that makes it read like a dissertation. The usefulness of the book's maps is limited because of their small size, while most of the illustrations are difficult, if not impossible, to see clearly because they are so dark. Such conceptual, evidentiary, and presentational problems are not what one normally expects to find in a Cambridge University Press publication.

Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

Reviewed by: Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood Max M. Edling Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 228. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-754691-8.) A new book by Gordon S. Wood is always a major event. Based on a lecture series, this volume on constitutionalism draws on the interpretation of the American founding that Wood presented in his magisterial Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) and further elaborated in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991). The overarching theme is the growth of liberty. Despite the title, power is a secondary concern. Wood argues that the American Revolution was a sharp break with the colonial past that marked the transition to political modernity. It entirely recast the social order; Wood remarks more than once that “[t]he Revolution changed everything” (pp. 105, 159). In contrast to the monarchical social order of the colonial period, the new society was democratic because, at least in the North, it was a “middle-class” revolution (p. 9). Constitutionalism was crucial to the realization of individual liberty and equality: the creation of written constitutions expressing the fundamental law of the community, including an enumeration of individual rights; the elevation of constitutional law above statute law; and the delegation of the exclusive authority to interpret constitutional law to an independent judiciary. Slavery has always been the main challenge to attempts to cast the Revolution as a milestone on the road to modern democracy. Wood has sometimes been criticized for downplaying the importance of the institution but treats it here in a separate chapter. He explains that although New World plantation slavery was historically unique, plantation slavery in North America differed from slavery as practiced in the rest of the Americas. In the thirteen colonies, enslaved Africans formed but one of several classes of unfree labor, which blurred the sense of slavery’s distinctiveness. The Revolution emancipated unfree laborers who were not enslaved because “unfreedom could no longer be taken for granted as a normal part of hierarchical society” (p. 105). Slavery itself was also attacked. “The Revolution and antislavery were entwined,” and abolition was “integral to the republican revolutions taking place in the new states,” Wood claims (pp. 100, 112). At least in the northern states, Wood argues, abolition was “remarkably successful” (p. 112). In the upper South, a strong impulse toward abolition came to naught because the plantation economy was so entrenched, and after 1791 the Haitian Revolution killed off the wish to set the enslaved free. After American independence, the North saw setbacks as racial discrimination followed emancipation. Wood thus deftly separates Revolutionary principles from post–Revolutionary practice. Ideals sometimes shape social and economic reality. At other times ideals and reality remain separate and unconnected. To Wood, the Revolution was not defined by the slavery and racism that American constitutionalism upheld after independence. Rather, the Revolution represented “the first antislavery movement in the history of the world” (p. 100). Some will see in this argument a missed opportunity to place slavery and other forms of unfreedom incompatible with the concept of political modernity [End Page 133] at center stage in the founding drama. These paired ideas—liberty and slavery, participation and exclusion, opportunity and oppression—were not unfortunate aberrations external to the Revolution but central elements of the founders’ worldview and, consequently, of the world they made. Only by analyzing how, in the early American republics, the freedom of the citizen required the unfreedom of the noncitizen can historians productively engage with the troubling legacy that the founding bestowed on the modern United States. As Wood himself is the first to recognize, such a critique is part of an ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation of the constitutional history of the founding that will never end in “final truth” (p. 9). Even those who do not agree with every facet of Wood’s interpretation cannot fail to be impressed by the clarity and power of his argument. Beautifully written by a master historian, Power and Liberty succinctly and elegantly summarizes an interpretation of the American founding that, for...

Education Based Tourism Model at Pagilaran Tea Plantation, Keteleng Village, Batang Regency, Central Java, Indonesia

The phenomenon of traveling is now returning to nature, which is a beautiful and naturally identical environment in the village. Rural areas that offer special tourism potential become a separate tourist magnet for domestic tourists from urban and foreign countries.Pagilaran tea plantation is a natural potential of Batang regency which is administratively located in Pagilaran Hamlet, Keteleng Village, Blado District, Batang Regency. Pagilaran Tea Plantation should be one of the leading icons of Batang Regency to be maximized into agro-industry, agribusiness and agro-tourism. PT Pagilaran as part of Gadjah Mada University (UGM) has always been active in carrying out the mandate of the tri dharma of higher education in order to create a sustainable tea commodity plantation world, through various scientific studies by students, lecturers, and researchers as well as the empowerment of National Nuclear Plantation Farmers (Pir). Until now, The Pagilaran tea plantation is used as a place for student practice from the faculty of agriculture from several universities in indonesia. Educational and research activities are going well at the pagilaran tea plantation and there are even researchers from japan who are conducting research on tea plants at the Pagilaran Tea Plantation.

Importing the Plantation: The Greater Caribbean Trade and Loyalist Nova Scotia’s Public Revenue, 1789–1835

Drawing on Halifax customs house reports, Tillotson reveals in broad terms the extent to which, between 1789 and 1835, the public revenue of the Province of Nova Scotia was drawn from taxes on imported goods that had been produced by the harshly exploited labour of enslaved people in the plantations of the greater Caribbean. With trade taxes generating two-thirds of the provincial revenue and the major customs port, Halifax, collecting between 38 percent and 73 percent of its trade taxes on slave-made goods, she argues that, in all of the areas where the Province spent on public goods, Nova Scotians benefitted substantially from a revenue that derived from the labour of enslaved people. One kind of benefit was the funding of economic infrastructure. The other was the payment of salaries to professional men who did government work. In the latter case, she shows, government work often had a social control element, one that reproduced in Nova Scotia the racialized hierarchy of the plantation world. The ideal of independent farming and fishing, one of the touchstones of settler economic life, counted for little against the commitment these professional men showed to the white supremacist culture that defended plantation society.

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.

Ti-Punch, ron y sexo: un acercamiento ecofeminista literario al mundo de la plantación

Raphaël Tardon’s 1946 short story «La Rédemption de Barbaroux» was published in the wake of the French departmentalization law that changed the status of Martinique from a colony to a French overseas department. A (Black) feminist approach to ecocriticism used as a lens to study Tardon’s text manifests the twisted ways Plantation and rum production depend on the gendering of the land and the oppression of female bodies. Tardon brings to the fore an early discussion of the concept known nowadays as the plantationocene. He explores the effect of the colonial past and the impact of Plantation world and its logics, framework on the environment, the body, the economy, and social and human relationships. Thus, in 1946, Tardon also lays bare the foundation for what Malcom Ferdinand calls une écologie décoloniale (a decolonial ecology).

On Nonscalability

Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises.

Kafka, the Caribbean, and the Holocaust

This essay reexamines the figure of Franz Kafka (1883–1924) in light of his largely ignored, recursive links to circum-Caribbean and Black Atlantic processes of racialized exploitation and corporal punishment. When we centre Kafka's extensive biographical and literary engagements with these processes, the persistent debate over Kafka's status as a Holocaust prophet emerges in a new light. Kafka's archival trail connects his lifelong attention to African enslavement and New World plantation economies to his nightmarish vision of murderous bureaucracies – a connection that crystallizes concretely in his 1919 short story “In the Penal Colony.” The archival and aesthetic connections direct us to a historiographical one, namely the increasingly excavated genealogical linkages between the Holocaust and anterior genocidal depredations in Africa and the New World under the auspices of European colonialism. This historiographical reorientation allows us to recast, in a global frame, the debate over Kafka's status as a prophet of world history, a debate that has heretofore operated through the exclusion of the transatlantic slave trade. Kafka's extensively documented attunement to colonial political economies provides formal, figural mechanisms that not only link the juridical–economic worlds of Caribbean slavery and Hitler's Third Reich, but also anticipate, and disable, the dehistoricized, Eurocentric appropriation of his textual archive as a premonition of Auschwitz.

A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian

Reviewed by: A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian Maxine Lutz Daniel J. Vivian. A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-108-41690-0 Hardback: 317 pages Daniel J. Vivian's A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 is an anthropological investigation into the social, material, and cultural lives of wealthy northerners who bought southern antebellum plantations and converted them into country estates. The book is a study of an area confined to a 175 square mile swath in lowcountry South Carolina in the interwar period, within the cultural context of nostalgia for the Old South coupled with prevailing national trends in historic preservation. Vivian uses the material, environmental, and social transformation of plantations into estates as a lens by which to examine how Americans dealt with the material and social vestiges of slavery in the early twentieth century. The plantations were material artifacts of colonial and antebellum periods, but their northern owners cleansed them of remnants of slavery through the destruction of material relics of slavery-based agriculture as they converted them into leisure and sporting estates. However, the new sites became the loci of reproducing racial hierarchies, which emancipation had attempted to upend. In fact, the racial order of the antebellum plantations was replicated in a new social order in which former slaves constituted a vast pool of impoverished labor in the Jim Crow era. Thus, Vivian argues that the intersection of race and class was the fulcrum around which the transformation of the plantations into leisure estates took place. The focus of the book is on seventy-six plantations lying between Georgetown, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, which aristocratic northerners acquired in the early years of the twentieth century. Sportsmen initially came to the South in the late nineteenth century for short periods of time to hunt. As women and children joined them, extended winter tourism became more popular and necessitated larger and more comfortable lodging. After 1910, "the second Yankee invasion," as it was known in the parlance of that period, began in earnest, and by 1925, northerners bought and consolidated huge tracts of land for seasonal residences and recreational venues. According to Vivian, there is a gap in scholarship on northerners' acquisition of southern plantations to establish country estates. He cites numerous memoirs, newspaper articles, books, and treatises written on individual plantations, but none of these accounts probe the correlation between the sociocultural and material realms in the makeover of the plantations into estates. Vivian posits that the northerners' estates on former plantations boosted the interwar national mythologization of the Old South through the omission of the inhumane treatment of thousands of former slaves who had been left in abject poverty in the aftermath of emancipation. The northern newcomers altered the land use, architecture, landscape, and organization of the plantation structures in order to model their new southern estates on the American country houses of the North. In the process, they demolished former slave dwellings, rice fields, privies, barns, and other material relics of slavery. In doing so, they conformed to the prevailing national historic preservation paradigm, which John D. Rockefeller sponsored in Williamsburg, Virginia (1920s and 1930s) and Henry and Clara Ford in Greenfield Village, Michigan (1933). The preservation of these sites comprised selectively preserved and aesthetically pleasing historic architecture, which was further embellished with carefully maintained landscapes that prominent architects formulated. Thus, [End Page 73] these sites were based on a romantic imagination of the past to recreate material worlds that could only be realized through an erasure of the unpleasant aspects of the past. In the interwar period, a national trend emerged in the popular media—film, literature, and advertising—that mythologized the South of the bygone era through descriptions such as "Moonlight and Magnolias" and "happy darkies." These romantic representations perpetuated the myth of the Old South as a golden age of aristocracy. The northerners actively contributed to this national trend of mythmaking through the conversion of plantations into recreational estates. Vivian examines the histories of two significant plantations, Mulberry and...

The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves by Lúcio de Sousa

Reviewed by: The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves by Lúcio de Sousa Geoffrey C. Gunn The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan: Merchants, Jesuits and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Slaves. By Lúcio de Sousa. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 594 pages. Hardcover, €180.00/$217.00. Slavery has taken different forms throughout recorded history and across cultures, though justifiably the traffic in slaves from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries across the Atlantic, from Africa to the New World, and the related plantation slave system have garnered the most attention. Among the European powers involved was Portugal, which indeed pioneered the traffic in Sub-Saharan slaves from the early [End Page 264] fifteenth century. Much less has been written about European slave trading across the Indian Ocean world and in the Western Pacific, and Lúcio de Sousa's study focusing on the Portuguese slave trade with Japan and Macau makes a long-overdue contribution toward filling this gap. The Portuguese Slave Trade in Early Modern Japan spans essentially the period from the arrival of Francis Xavier in Japan in 1549, accompanied by slaves and servants, to the late sixteenth century with the enforcement of proscriptions against missionary involvement in slavery/human trafficking by Catholic missionaries and Portugal's outlawing of the enslavement of Japanese in 1570. To be sure, any discussion of slavery touches upon issues of definition, and de Sousa notes early on the range of Portuguese euphemisms that sometimes disguised the slave trade, including terms referring more generally to children or racially or religiously inflected terms such as negro or cafres. He understands that the word "slave" carries different valences in different cultures and across time. Obviously Hapsburg terminology is hardly consistent with notions of human bondage in the Confucianized cultures of China, Korea, and Japan, and in the book's concluding chapter de Sousa brilliantly analyzes this clash of legal cultures and values. Readers can thus look forward to discussions of culturally specific and even emic terms covering a range of phenomena from servitude to feudal obligations, captured prisoners, gendered relations, and slavery as defined within Iberian/Catholic theology. Nevertheless, as I understood the book a world of difference separates the branded and dehumanized slaves (mostly African) sent off to New World plantations or mining economies from the Portuguese-trafficked, mostly female Asian Catholic converts sent into domestic servitude in Macau or even as far away as Portugal or Peru, and this should have been acknowledged. Sometimes, where the author highlights "slave trade"—as with the title of this work—other terminology incorporating words such as "bondage," "war captives," or "indentured labor" might also be just as appropriate. This is a large book, and larger still because at least 150 of its pages are dedicated to tables, which include lists of individuals identified in the text. It is divided into eight numbered chapters, with the first four devoted to Portuguese shipping to Japan and the Philippines and the accompanying increase in the volume of trade in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean "slaves." The latter four chapters focus on the business of "slave trade" at the Japan end, with case studies and life histories of a sampling of slaves transported to Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. A concluding chapter takes up Hapsburg regulation of Japanese slavery and the trade's eventual decline, which is linked with the first anti-Christian edicts in Japan. Chapter 1 offers background on the first Portuguese mariners to arrive in Southeast Asia and China (early 1500s) and in Japan (1542–1543) and to establish a permanent settlement in Macau (1557). De Sousa devotes some attention to a supposed Portuguese partnership with local wokou (Jp. wakō), which "literally means 'Japanese pirates and bandits,' though many of them were in fact Chinese" (p. 12). Acknowledging that the Macau-Japan silk-for-silver voyages had been regularized between 1557 and 1568, the author makes the statement that "metal ore was not enough to fill the [End Page 265] spaces that had been previously occupied by silk and other merchandise; hence, the remainder was filled with slaves" (p. 23). This is an evocative statement that conjures up...

A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian

A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940 by Daniel J. Vivian

"Goin' tuh Zar … de other side of far": New Worlds of Writing and Reading about the South

"Goin' tuh Zar … de other side of far":New Worlds of Writing and Reading about the South Keith Cartwright The US South as we know it, with its larger national and transregional connections, was born of a long globalization process emergent from the wake of the Spanish colonial system and its British, French, and other variants of New World plantation economies built on conquest and slave labor. It was not until a 2002 symposium in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, however, that we could say that a new southern literary studies was fully launched to account for the US South's global scales. Its routings were mapped and established via Caribbean thinkers such as Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, and through novel kinships with Yoknapatawpha and the Okeechobee Muck expressed in fiction by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Erna Brodber, among others. In spite of this awakening to a wider and even darker history writ large, the tone of early new southern studies was often celebratory in its reclamation of kinships across borders further south, and celebratory of new understandings of cosmopolitanism out of spaces long considered to be stagnant cultural backwaters. But as Martyn Bone insists in his recent book, much of what the US South shares with the larger Global South has come from its "fraught regional history of racialized labor: slavery, sharecropping, convict labor, and anti-unionism" (19). Bone reminds us too, that by around the time when H. L. Mencken was proclaiming the South to be a "Sahara of the Bozart" (1917)—a period when the rest of the nation was receiving an influx of immigration—only about two percent of the South's population was foreign-born (6), and the region's apartheid systems and low wages made for a stronger wall against immigration than any material wall that our current president is proposing. Still, by the end of [End Page 155] the Civil Rights Movement (1965) and the advent of the new world order of globalization (1980s), migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean had played a role in reshaping a transnational US South that by the start of the twenty-first century was again a "kind of contact zone between Global North and South" (13), setting off fears and reactions from our moment's vocal, clearly national white supremacy well beyond Dixie. Enter Bone's well-researched and very welcome intervention, Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales (2018) from the University of Georgia's New Southern Studies Series. In this book, Bone examines fictional representations of "the labor exploitation that has recurred in shape-shifting fashion" in a region that, from its birth as region, has "been inextricably bound up with transnational trends and processes, especially the forced migration of African slavery" (xii). He examines writing that engages "the capitalist worldsystem that, circa 1981 or so, came to be called 'globalization'" (xvii), and offers, as he puts it, an "historicized and materialist attention to migration and labor" (20). Bone does well to make his cornerstone an initial chapter on Zora Neale Hurston and migrant labor. Subsequent chapters draw on patterns of exploitation of migrant labor in the South in ways that underscore underappreciated aspects of Hurston's acuity of vision. Most interesting is Bone's discussion of Hurston's unpublished typescript drafts of a proposed 1958 series of articles in the Miami Herald on migrant workers in Florida. He attends to patterns of black southern migrant labor circulating through Florida, registered in Jonah's Gourd Vine as well as in Their Eyes Were Watching God. But it is the focus on Bahamian workers in Their Eyes, and on Caribbean, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers in a remarkable unpublished article, "Florida's Migrant Worker," that shows Hurston's sensitivity to labor and to machineries of exploitation. In "Florida's Migrant Worker," Hurston asserts that as "the imagination, enterprise and daring of the growers grew, the migrant worker device grew with it until now in 1958, it has … evolved into a production machine, a device, an apparatus, an invention, under the supervision of both state and government" (49). By...

International Biotechnology Conference on Estate Crops 2017

PrefaceBiotechnology techniques are carrying forward plantation crop development in attempts to understand the genetic basis of the crops, to produce tissue-cultured plantlets on a large scale, to employ molecular breeding of new cultivars for increased yield, resistance to pests and tolerance to environmental stresses, and to use microorganisms for bio-based products, soil healthiness and waste treatment.The Indonesian Research Institute for Biotechnology and Bioindustry (IRIBB) has organized an International Biotechnology Conference on Estate Crops 2017 on 18- 20 October 2017 in Grand Sahid Jaya Hotel Jakarta, Indonesia. This Conference was in conjunction with the World Plantation Conferences and Exhibition 2017 (WPLACE-2017) on 18 October 2017. WPLACE-2017 provided General Topics (GTs) on related subjects.It is truly meaningful for the Indonesian Research Institute for Biotechnology and Bioindustry (IRIBB) to hold the first International Biotechnology Conference on Estate Crops 2017 (IBCEC-2017), an international forum for biotechnology and exposition. The institution was founded in 1901 by the Dutch colonial government under the name of Centrale Proefstations Vereniging (CPV). In 1957, during the expropriation firms of the Dutch plantations in Indonesia, CPV was repossessed by the Indonesian government. For many years since the CPV, it has undergone many name changes until 2015 in which the Indonesian Research Institute for Biotechnology and Bioindustry (IRIBB) was officialised. The IRIBB carries a vision to be an innovative and internationally research-based institution in biotechnology and bioindustry.The conference program included honourable lectures from eminent experts on the success stories and the recent development of biotechnology such as bioinformatics, genome editing, genomic selection, in vitro propagation, phytobiome, biostimulant, bioplastic, biopesticide, and biofermentation.

Women, the ‘ongoing Process of Worldwide Primitive Accumulation’ and Female Plantation Workers of Sri Lanka: A Marxist Feminist Analysis

Women, the ‘ongoing Process of Worldwide Primitive Accumulation’ and Female Plantation Workers of Sri Lanka: A Marxist Feminist Analysis Prajna Seneviratne Abstract Contemporary feminist theorists while drawing upon original Marxian propositions, differ from the Marxist view of seeing primitive accumulation as preceding capitalist accumulation. Rather they view primitive accumulation as an ‘ongoing’ process simultaneous with capital accumulation, and more importantly place ‘women’ at the centre of this worldwide process of expropriation and deprivation of power. In this paper, I attempt to read my ethnographic experiences with female plantation workers of a third world/post colonial location – Sri Lanka; in the light of this alternative theoretical claim - stemming from a Marxist analysis yet with a feminist turn. The paper is woven around the birth of Madumani’s daughter, a baby girl born to an ‘estate mother’ during my stay at the estate and my many close interactions with the young mother and daughter and their many female relatives all of whom are working as laborers in the estate. Their stories as I narrate here shed light on the manner in which women, especially proletarian women of the third world, are placed at the center of an ‘ongoing process of worldwide primitive accumulation’- as argued by Marxist Feminist writers- and robbed not only of their labour but also of their bodies, their knowledge and their skills; struggling to make a living in these third world plantation estates. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v5n1a8

Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson

Reviewed by: Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance by Ronald Angelo Johnson Philippe Girard (bio) Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance RONALD ANGELO JOHNSON Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014 241pp. US historians of the colonial and Revolutionary eras have realized the need to eschew parochial celebrations of American exceptionalism and to situate historical developments within a wider (the buzzword is “Atlantic”) context. More specifically, US debates on race and slavery in the 1790s were directly inspired by the events of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In his classic From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), Eugene Genovese used [End Page 793] that revolution as the pivotal moment when slave resistance in the Americas transitioned from narrowly focused uprisings aimed at escaping the plantation world to full-fledged revolts that challenged the very notion of human bondage. Early America may have been a “city upon a hill,” but it did not develop in isolation from neighboring towns. A field that lends itself particularly well to cross-national approaches is foreign policy, especially since the early US Republic was not yet a hegemon and it had to contend with the demands of its partners. Scholarly interest in the diplomatic relations between the United States and Haiti (known before 1804 as French Saint-Domingue) goes back to the 1930s, following a nineteen-year US occupation of Haiti. Early works included Charles Tansill’s The United States and Santo Domingo (1938), Ludwell Montague’s Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (1940), Rayford W. Logan’s Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), and Alexander De-Conde’s The Quasi-War (1966). These authors embraced the traditional approach dominant at the time, both in style and substance: readers were treated to a series of diplomatic dispatches written by great men eager to defend national security interests for the greater good of the country. The culture wars inherited from the 1960s did not leave the field untouched. As part of a larger reassessment of the Founding Fathers and their involvement in plantation slavery, revisionists denounced their policies toward the Haitian Revolution. According to Tim Matthewson’s A Pro-slavery Foreign Policy: Haitian-American Relations during the Early Republic (2003) and Gary Wills’s “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), US policymakers were motivated at best by their financial interests and at worst by their racist impulses. Those two factors overlapped when it came to one key issue, slavery, and they underpinned the knee-jerk opposition of Virginian planters like Thomas Jefferson to the Haitian Revolution. As often with historiographical developments, the pendulum has now swung back. The most outspoken member of this postrevisionist school is Arthur Scherr, whose long and argumentative Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011) took no prisoners as it strove to rescue Jefferson’s unjustly maligned reputation. Gordon S. Brown embraced a more nuanced and convincing approach in his Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), which took into account the legitimate questions raised by the revisionists while underlining the manifold priorities of US policymakers torn between their eagerness to [End Page 794] foster close relations with Haiti for commercial purposes and their desire to contain its slave revolt for national security and racial reasons. Into this crowded field steps Ronald Angelo Johnson, an associate professor of history at Texas State University in San Marcos and the author of Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. Like Brown, Johnson may be labeled a moderate postrevisionist. He champions President John Adams and his secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, whom he largely portrays as well-intentioned statesmen. Under their leadership, “the United States financed a fight for universal emancipation and independence for people of color” (4). Johnson is not blind to the inability of these men to fully escape the racism prevalent in their time, but he emphasizes their willingness to engage their Haitian partners almost as equals, which stood in sharp contrast with Jefferson’s later attitude. Johnson would not have added much to Brown’s own work if he...

Grey Zone in Caribbean Islands: Socio-Racial Struggles around the Martinican Carnival

Few researchers have attempted to show that colonialism was associated with an on-going task of division between slaves. This article intends to highlight the functioning logic of the colonial plantation world. In the Caribbean area, whether that of English, Dutch, Spanish or French colonialisms, the morphological existence of a minority of Whites and an<br />overwhelming majority of Blacks in a permanent state of rebellion, as Patterson’s (1982) work demonstrated, was the basis for the creation of intermediate groups as “buffers”. These auxiliary people (domestics, hunters of fugitives, executioners, free people in militias; but also, by mimicry, the Black owners of slaves) are only part of a larger system requiring a strong dependency between the free people of color, that is of mixed heritage - Mulâtres in French colonies, Mulattos in English colonies1- and White masters. This model of the tripartition between the rich White class, the free middle class of mixed heritage, and the proletarian Black people, can define itself as a society in which the “colortocracy” (Anderson, 2000) became a “grey zone” in the sense of Primo Lévi's (1989) analysis of Nazi concentration camps. Neither subaltern studies nor the social science of creolization really bind this social stratification to long-lasting effects of domination between Blacks themselves. Nowadays, the political power is detained by this brown upper class. Thereby, this type of socio-racial structure has been maintained long after the official demise of<br />colonialism and it continues to affect the political and economic organization of Caribbean islands. In this rigid framework, in which individuals and people are increasingly dominated (structural joblessness, migration to the metropole, racism and whitening, lack of economic<br />independence etc.), the Black proletarians have developed a counter-culture among which the best known forms are carnival and a daily Maroon behavior, namely many protean resistances against the White world and colortocracy. This paper discusses the situation of the Martinican carnaval taking place on the French island of Martinique.

Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 by Trevor Burnard

Reviewed by: Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820by Trevor Burnard Chris Evans Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820. By Trevor Burnard. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. x, 357. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-28610-5.) This is a book that exhilarates. It is also one that will vex many readers. The exhilaration stems from Trevor Burnard’s geographical reach and conceptual ambition. This is a bold, bravura performance that ranges from the Chesapeake to Demerara. As the author insists, before the American Revolution sundered the American South from the Caribbean they formed a single plantation zone. Burnard’s subject is therefore the British plantation world in the round, although Jamaica, the richest spot in eighteenth-century Anglophone America, takes center stage. This book is billed as a study of planters, merchants, and slaves. Much is said about planters, rather less about merchants, and very little about the enslaved—not as historical actors, at least. A decisive role is reserved for quite another group, one that does not feature in the book’s title: white managers and overseers. The “large integrated plantation” that first appeared in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century presented major organizational problems (p. 1). The difficulty of restraining “traumatized, hostile, and potentially violent African slaves” kept workforces small (p. 27). Scaling up plantation agriculture required supervisors who were thoroughly inured to violence. The timing of plantation growth is therefore explained not by the supply of slaves but by the supply of non-elite whites willing and able to terrorize black captives. Military veterans were ideally suited to the role, for they had themselves experienced the savage discipline of European armies. The foundation of the plantation world in Barbados was thus linked to the civil wars that engulfed the British Isles in the 1640s. The subsequent consolidation of the plantation system on Jamaica and its extension across South Carolina and the Chesapeake are explained by the arrival of a new cohort of thuggish white men, schooled in violence during the cycle of European warfare that began in 1688. Yet the evidence for this connection is, the author concedes, “scanty and inconclusive,” and his attempts to link developments in the plantation world to Europe’s early modern “military revolution” are strained because there is no agreement on what (and when) the military revolution was (pp. 27, 78). The British plantation world was built on unremitting violence, but, Burnard insists, it worked. It grew by leaps and bounds and made planters stupendously rich. It was a volatile world, but it was not, Burnard maintains, threatened by slave rebellion. On the contrary, the plantation system was secure. There were no internal forces capable of bringing about its overthrow. Indeed, for all the volatility of the plantation world, Burnard portrays it as strangely serene. Planters were anything but anxious. Slave resistance was [End Page 902]never likely to succeed, and the slaves knew it. But did they? Eighteenth-century Jamaica was dominated by freshly imported Africans. The plantation system was not for them something adamantine that had stood for generations; it was a freshly discovered enemy, just as it was for their contemporaries in Saint Domingue. As this critique might suggest, Burnard has little time for slave agency. Historians, he suggests, can take a Hobbesian or a Panglossian view of slave society. Burnard is, with regret, a Hobbesian, seeing “physical grief” and “spiritual terror” at every turn (p. 272). But to counterpose Dr. Pangloss to Hobbes is a false dichotomy. One of the great merits of this book is its insistence that the plantation world was an artificial thing. It did not arise unbidden; it was created. To think that a world that was protean in so many respects offered no contingent possibilities whatsoever to the enslaved is at odds with this underlying premise. Besides, as the worldview of the slaves is scarcely broached, it is a little early to settle on either a Hobbesian or a Panglossian outcome. Some of Burnard’s most striking observations come in his analysis of the American Revolution. Jamaican planters did not join the revolt against...

Motive Power: Fans, Punkahs, and Fly Brushes in the Antebellum South

In many elite Southern homes, punkahs, ceiling-mounted fans manipulated by enslaved workers, were an integral part of the architecture of the dining room in the antebellum United States. Paralleling their relationship to American slavery was their use in British India, where the fans had a long history of being powered by low-caste workers. Pushing past the fans’ decorative and utilitarian qualities, this essay examines the devices’ shifting relationship to slavery and freedom through an examination of their operation within the spaces of elite homes. Both planters and their workers benefited, albeit differently, from their interactions with the fans. Elite planters enjoyed the fans’ cooling breezes, insect-free mealtimes, and the opportunity to display their wealth and refinement. Even though they were consigned to labor at the fans, enslaved workers likely used their proximity to elite whites to learn “genteel” codes of behavior, while gleaning information about the plantation world and beyond. The end of slavery did not mark the end of punkahs; rather, the fans were used to celebrate the “noble” history of the Old South while eliding any reference of slavery.