Editors: Nicholas B. Miller (Flagler College) & Ulrike Lindner (University of Cologne)
Publisher: SUNY – State University of New York, 2025 [Open Access]
Few institutions feature as prominently in contemporary notions of colonialism, racism, and environmental degradation as the modern plantation. The racialized plantations of the Atlantic World loom large in the public imagination, namely those of the British Caribbean and the US South. Yet, the plantation has proliferated into the Information Age and has continued to expand across the tropical zone of our planet, surviving the abolition of slavery, the collapse of European empires, and the challenge of generations of anti-colonial thinkers.
To grasp how the plantation has spread and evolved in our modern world, this volume studies what it terms plantation knowledge, or the types of expertise, experience, and information processing that have made and continue to make plantations possible. Drawing on case studies including Ireland, Mexico, Mississippi, Hawaiʻi, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cuba, Brazil, and Central Africa, it examines the global spread of the plantation; the diverse people, beings, and forms of knowledge intertwined with this process; and the elasticity and durability of the plantation as a mode of commercial agriculture.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Plantation Knowledge: Concept, History, and Research – Nicholas B. Miller and Ulrike Lindner
1. Between Irish Plantation and the Plantation Complex: The Down Survey (1654–1658), Projecting, and the Origins of Political Arithmetic – Ted McCormick
2. The Badianus Herbal and Forced Indigenous Labor: Art, Land, and Nahua Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century Central Mexico – Jennifer R. Saracino
3. Sugar and Sovereignty in Hawai’i: John Adams Kuakini Cummins and Waimānalo Plantation, 1878–1895 – Nicholas B. Miller
4. Experimental Paternalism: An Owenite Plantation in Mississippi, 1820–1870 – Claudia Roesch
5. Revisiting the Charduar Plantation: Local Connections, Imperial Portfolios, and the Global Pathways of Assam Rubber – Moritz von Brescius
6. Sugar in Province Wellesley: Converging Streams of Plantation Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Malaya – Christina Skott
7. Cocoa and Coercion: Connected Histories of Sao Tome and the Belgian Congo – Marta Macedo
8. Copra and Conquest: Penal Colonies and Botanical Knowledge in the American Colonial Philippines – Theresa Ventura
9. Cane Farmers Versus Sugar Factories in Post-Emancipation Era Cuba and Brazil – Gillian McGillivray
10. Managing Regulation: Changes of Policy and Continuities of Practice on Indian Tea Plantations, 1901–1931 – Rebekah McCallum
List of Contributors
Index