Plantation Legacies

This is the first in a series of posts on the Plantationocene—a proposed alternate name for the human geological epoch often called the Anthropocene. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Wisconsin–Madison will host a John E. Sawyer Seminar, which will include public talks, roundtables, workshops, film screenings, and library and museum exhibitions running from February of 2019 to May of 2020, to explore and deepen the concept of the Plantationocene. The seminar interrogates the past and present of plantations, their materialities, the economic, ecological, and political transformations they wrought, and their significance to the making of human bodies, capitalism, and land over the course of four centuries. Series editors: Laura Perry and Addie Hopes.

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“Plantations are back,” wrote anthropologist Tania Murray Li in 2018, referring to a recent wave of oil palm expansion in Indonesia. Or, rather, they never really went away. Today, we are witness to a wave of industrial plantation agriculture in a global rush for land comparable to an earlier era of plantation economies. Estimates suggest that 75 million acres of land worldwide have been sold or leased in the past decade to foreign investors for large-scale oil palm, rubber, and other agricultural concessions. Yet the changes brought about by these recent expansions are only the latest instance of a transformation in relations between bodies, capital, and land that has its roots in the 16th century. By the early 1500s, Spanish and Portuguese colonists had begun importing to the Americas models of plantations they had first developed in the Atlantic Islands in the previous century.

Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable than others to warming temperatures, rising seas, toxic exposures, and land dispossession occurring across the globe. As the wide-ranging dangers of climate change become increasingly impossible to ignore, scholars and scientists search for ways to chart the unprecedented impact that humans are having on the planet. A host of global indicators suggest that since 1950 we have entered a period where rates of human activity, including population growth, energy use, and fossil fuel and fertilizer consumption, have so rapidly increased that they are altering Earth systems in profound ways. Global change scientists refer to this as the Great Acceleration.

The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene—a new Age of Humans. For the first time in Earth’s history, Homo sapiens has become a geomorphic force on the planet, altering the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and precipitating an era of rampant species extinction. But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries.

The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise integral to the historic rise and growth of capitalism. The plantation and its accompanying rearrangements of life are produced through processes of land alienation, labor extraction, and racialized violence. As such, the plantation marks an important site to consider the ways in which land, labor, and capital have been ordered to profit some, while imperiling the lives and livelihoods of others, across the globe. These legacies, “of slavery and the labor of the unfree,” as Black Studies scholar Katherine McKittrick notes, “both shape and are part of the environment we presently inhabit.” Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa, as countries like Liberia seek capital investment, trading land and cheap labor for quick cash that will likely impoverish future generations.

In August 2016, the Working Group on the Anthropocene officially recommended 1950 as the birth of the Anthropocene. By the 1950s, plutonium fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons became a detectable global signature of humankind’s transformation of the planet. But other scholars have looked to different markers for the start of the Anthropocene. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, climatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants as a result of “war, enslavement, and famine” brought about by European contact.

Dating the origins of the Anthropocene to the onset of settler colonialism in the Americas during the early modern period helps make visible a violent history often erased in scaling up to species thinking and global environmental change. Yes, humans constitute a single biological species, Homo sapiens. But not every member of our species contributes equally to the environmental challenges facing our planet. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it.

Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale.

We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. In doing so, we put this emergent concept in dialogue with long-standing traditions of Black, Caribbean, and Indigenous radical thought confronting the enduring legacies of plantations and the transformations of land, labor, bodies, and systems of value that have accompanied their making. Invoking the Plantationocene in this way is at once a provocation and a reflection meant to challenge the species-level thinking of the Anthropocene. It helps to make visible power relations and economic, environmental, and social inequalities that have made ways of being in a world undergoing rapid climate change, accelerated species extinction, and growing wealth disparity more precarious for some human and nonhuman beings than others. It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death.”

The case of Haiti provides one of the best-known examples of the relation between the rise of modern plantations and the types of environmental, political, and social changes that we intend to explore. With the development of intensive models of monoculture plantations (sugar, tobacco, coffee, and indigo) starting in the late seventeenth century, Saint Domingue became one of the wealthiest plantation societies of the early modern era. The riches that Saint Domingue produced were only made possible by the voracious consumption of human bodies and arable land, and the development of consumer markets, that characterized the new world of plantations emerging in the early modern Atlantic world.

In Haiti’s hinterland, however, distant from the coastal region where plantations and colonial centers of power prevailed, Black radical agrarian traditions took root. On Haiti’s Central Plateau, where the enslaved planted gardens, and where maroons sought refuge, quite different aggregations of life and value emerged alongside and against the plantation. Haitian sociologist Jean Casimir  locates these practices of land and labor struggle within an enduring “counterplantation” system.¹ Forms of counterplantation life have included not only the maroon settlements of colonial and revolutionary Saint-Domingue, but also the guerrilla soldiers, called Cacos, who fought against the U.S. Occupation of the early 20th century, and the peasants’ movements that continue to flourish in Haiti today. As scholars including C.L.R. James, Clyde Woods, and Jean Casimir have pointed out, those who dwell in Haiti’s hinterland have cultivated forms of counterplantation life that continue to resonate across the Afro-Americas today.

Rural social movements like the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP, or the Peasants’ Movement of Papaye) offer one key example of ongoing efforts to cultivate other agrarian futures beyond and against the plantation. In the part of the high Central Plateau where MPP was founded in 1973, cattle and goats graze hillsides that were never planted with sugarcane or coffee like the plains to the West or the North. Working in collective labor formations called gwoupman, peasants put the agroecological methods that MPP’s organizers and trainers teach to use in their small garden plots. As in the provision grounds that sustained enslaved persons at the margins of the plantation, in these gardens, peasants grow maize, vegetables, and fruit for household consumption and the local market. Through movements like MPP, rural dwellers in Haiti’s hinterland struggle to hold onto a mode of agrarian life that affirms economic autonomy, socio-ecological sustainability, and political sovereignty, even as emergent formations of power and capital continue to reproduce plantation worlds.

Interrogating the Plantationocene entails the recognition of plantation structures and their characteristic organizations of life and labor—particularly of racialized persons—in sites where they’ve been forgotten or remain hidden, yet are still very much present. On this point, we might also consider the Georgia Sea Islands, now mostly known for luxury hotels, golf resorts, and heritage tourism focused on the Gullah Geechee people. For seventeenth and eighteenth-century imperial powers, these barrier islands of the North American mainland were in easy distance to Caribbean locales. Like the Caribbean islands more famously associated with plantation agriculture and the ecological and human consequences they wrought, the Sea Islands were also coveted and contested plantation grounds for Spanish, Creek, English, and French imperial powers.

These Sea Isle plantations were also worked by Indigenous and diasporic African persons. As in Haiti, the human beings subjected to the extractive logics of plantations on the Georgia Sea Islands have never passively accepted the instrumentalization of their lives and labor. In the eighteenth century, for instance, persons ranging from Creek merchants to Scots transplants to Afro-diasporic laborers produced robust alternatives to the agribusiness model of the plantation. These included small-scale agricultural projects and trading economies among various marginalized people, like those advocated by the Creek political mediator Coosaponakessa (also known as Mary Musgrove).

Sapelo Island, one of the Sea Islands, offers a particularly salient example of an alternative to the imperial, agribusiness, and industrial prison complex plantation model. Settled by Spanish, English, Scots, French, and then U.S. plantation interests, by the early 19th century the island had witnessed the emergence of autonomous black communities that turned the ground at the edges of indigo, cotton, and tobacco plantations to small-holding agricultural and fishing projects that persist to this day, despite state and business interests that wish to relegate them to vestiges of the past.

The plantation is a transformational moment in human and natural history on a global scale. Our inquiry remains attentive to–and is located within–structures of power embedded in imperial and capitalist formations, the erasure of certain forms of life and relationships in the making of industrial agricultural landscapes, and the enduring histories and legacies of plantation economies that persist the world over. Racialized violence, land alienation, and species loss are recurrent themes of the Plantationocene. They open a conversation to other ways of theorizing the worlds produced within and against colonial and imperial relations of power—dynamics that are often obscured by the troubling whiteness of environmentalism. These include long-standing traditions of Afro-diasporic economic and political thought, as well as more recent turns to the plantation as a site for thinking through the workings of racial capitalism, freedom struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty, carceral geographies, and the embodied and emplaced legacies of racial slavery. When Los Angeles Laker forward LeBron James recently called out “the slave mentality” of “old white men” owning teams in the National Football League on his HBO show, The Shop, he reminded viewers of the painful persistence of plantation logics—patterns of thought and economic and social structures—that continue to shape the distribution of capital and the differential treatment of human life to this day.

We aim to provoke new questions about the world-making effects of global capitalism, colonialism, and racial slavery. The questions at stake are both empirical and theoretical. What might the theorization of racial capitalism in the Black Radical Tradition or the valuation of enslaved persons in the early modern Americas offer in thinking through genealogies that inform what historian and feminist science studies scholar Michelle Murphy describes as the “economization of life?” What different understandings of land and of life emerge? What alternative modes of survival and flourishing arise in attending to the uneven geographies and legacies of plantation worlds? What are the material transformations the plantation has produced? And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways? Taken together, such questions might ultimately begin to help inform a provocative question raised by Caribbean Studies scholar Malcom Ferdinand: what might environmentalism look like if we began, not from wilderness, but the plantation?

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The authors would like to extend special thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their support of the John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Plantationocene.  Research for portions of this essay was also supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Featured image: Over the past 500 years, the plantation has transformed ecological, economic, and social worlds around the globe. Image created by Danielle Lamberson Philipp for the Plantationocene Sawyer Seminar, 2018.

Sophie Sapp Moore is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Research on the Plantationocene at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sophie earned her Ph.D. from University of California, Davis in 2018, in Cultural Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Her interdisciplinary research examines the intersection between processes of political and environmental transformation in the Caribbean. Sophie’s current project focuses an ethnographic and historical lens on the making of radical Black geographies in Haiti’s central borderlands since the early 19th century. Contact. Twitter.

Monique Allewaert is Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She studies the ways that colonial structures and flows shape the Americas. Her book Ariel’s Ecology: Personhood and Colonialism in the American Tropics, 1760-1820 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) explores how plantation colonialism inflects conceptions of the body, aesthetic practice, as well as scientific and environmental knowledge. Contact.

Pablo F. Gómez is Associate Professor in the Departments of Medical History and History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His book, The Experiential Caribbean, explores belief making and the creation of evidence about the human body and the natural world in the early-modern black Caribbean. He is currently working and on a history of the quantifiable body in early Atlantic slave trading societies. Contact.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His most recent work includes The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016), a documentary co-directed and co-produced with Sarita Siegel on history, memory, and land rights in Liberia, and Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, co-edited with Marco Armiero and Robert S. Emmett (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Contact. Website. Twitter.

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1. Jean Casimir. La culture opprimée. (Delmas, Haiti: Lakay, 1981). ↩