Abstract
This essay is an examination of the processes through which plantation landscapes, bodies, and visual representations of them circulated and interacted in the sugar economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Caribbean island of Dominica. We refer to this process as a visual economy. As an instrument of empire, the visual economy distorted and legitimated the violence of the slave system upon which its rule was founded. By analyzing one plantation settlement known as Sugarloaf plantation, we examine both the mechanism through which it functioned and the local material realities made to be invisible by the visual economy. To accomplish the first, we juxtapose the landscape of Sugarloaf plantation with painted depictions of similar landscapes in Dominica and the Caribbean. The comparison suggests that Sugarloaf was a direct product of the visual economy and European aesthetics. In the second part, we examine the flip side of this visual economy to understand the material realities of enslaved laborers within it. Despite the participation of enslaved laborers in local markets elsewhere on the island, the scant and homogenous material assemblage recovered from the domestic area of the enslaved population at Sugarloaf attests to rigid social boundaries for the enslaved laborers living on this plantation. By refocusing archaeologically on the human scale of broader structural changes we can recognize local variability of experience and see beyond the narrative of imperial rhetoric.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1686 the French and English agreed to a Treaty of neutrality making Dominica a neutral island. Increasingly, however, the land was contested and settled disproportionately by the French.
- 2.
Geophysical sampling was conducted by a team led by John Steinberg at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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Cossin, Z., Hauser, M. (2015). Sugar Economics: A Visual Economy of the Plantation Landscape in Colonial Dominica. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_17
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