Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Plantation life – history »

This article explores the social history of Suriname’s first bauxite town, Moengo, founded in the late 1910s. It recounts the rise of a new industry that drew workers away from the plantations and urban artisanal occupations to work in a massive, highly organized and orchestrated organization-cum-social community. Using oral narratives about life in Moengo, as well as census and other statistical data, this contribution asks whether everyday life in the mining enclave echoed features of the plantation.

This article aims to reconstruct the history of Javanese migration to Asahan during the Dutch colonial period. The migration of Javanese to Asahan was the impact of the labor demand in the massive plantation industry sector on the East Coast of Sumatra. This study uses historical research methods using primary and secondary sources. The rapid development of plantations in Asahan made entrepreneurs bring in Javanese to sustain the company. To fulfill the needs of Javanese coolies, an agency was formed that has a special task of bringing in workers from Java Island. The life of the coolies is built with various facilities such as hospitals, cleanliness, housing, public kitchens, schools, and many others. Plantation entrepreneurs issue special monetary policies that aim to narrow the space for coolies by printing “kebon money” which only applies to plantations. The Javanese who migrated to Asahan were not able to achieve the hope of living a more decent life than their hometowns in their hometowns, they were instead caught in the trap of capitalists whose labor was exploited as coolies in remote areas of the plantation.

We examined the composition of understory vascular plant species in managed forests to determine how life-history attributes influence plant response to disturbance. Forest types investigated were plantations on old fields (31–77 years old, n = 6), plantations on cutover land (19–64 years old, n = 8), young forests naturally regenerated after clear-cutting (27–66 years old, n = 6), and mature natural forests with no recent harvesting activity (80–100 years old, n = 6). Species were categorized by habitat preference (forest, intermediate, disturbed), growth form (12 categories), and life form (15 categories). Forest-habitat species dominated both natural stand types, whereas disturbed-habitat species dominated both plantation types. Mature natural stands contained higher frequency and cover of many herb growth forms, and cutover plantations contained higher values for shrubs. Old-field plantations contained low values for all growth forms. Two life forms, geophytes and rosette hemicryptophytes, were not well represented in either plantation type. All plant functional groups were present in each stand type, suggesting that differences among stand types occur as shifts in the relative abundances of functional groups. We hypothesize that some species may be at risk of local extirpation in plantations because of their limited growth rates and reproductive characteristics.

This article aims to look at the realities of Indian life in Deli tobacco plantations throughout 1872-1900. By using a research method that combines the historical study of East Sumatra plantation communities with the study of Indian coolies photos in the area taken from the Digital Collections Leiden University Libraries website, the reality of Indian coolies' life has never been written by Indonesian historians. The daily reality of Indians captured in photographs is the everyday side of working in Deli tobacco plantations. Differentiation of work, appearance, and settlement based on race is a picture of their lives while living on plantations. While working on plantations, Indian coolies earned an inadequate wage and had to bear the tremendous burden of life. Through photo narration, it can be understood how the reality of daily life of Indians in East Sumatra, which is currently a marginalized group in Indonesian history textbooks.

Plantations in Indonesia are quite interesting to discuss, this article is written to discuss one of the plantations in East Java, more precisely in the Blitar area which has a tea plantation called Sirah Kencong tea plantation. Writing this article examines the role of PT. Perkebunan Nusantara XII on the socio-economic life of the Sirah Kencong community. The method used in this paper follows the stages of historical research methods, starting from heuristics, criticism, interpretation and historiography. The results of the research are in the form of a discussion of the early history of plantations, developments that occurred in the plantation environment after the clearing of plantation land such as the construction of public facilities, as well as the construction of health facilities for communities around the plantations.Perkebunan di Indonesia merupakan hal yang cukup menarik untuk dibahas, artikel ini ditulis untuk membahas salah satu perkebunan yang ada di Jawa Timur, lebih tepatnya di daerah Blitar yang memiliki perkebunan teh dengan nama perkebunan teh Sirah Kencong. Penulisan artikel ini mengkaji mengenai peran PT. Perkebunan Nusantara XII terhadap kehidupan sosial ekonomi masyarakat Sirah Kencong. Metode yang digunakan dalam penulisan kali ini mengikuti tahap-tahap metode penelitian sejarah, dimulai dari heuristik, kritik, interpretasi dan historiografi. Hasil dari penelitian berupa pembahasan mengenai sejarah awal perkebunan, perkembangan yang terjadi di lingkungan perkebunan setelah adanya pembukaan lahan perkebunanan seperti pembangunan fasilitas umum, serta pembangunan fasilitas kesehatan untuk masyarakat di sekitar perkebunan.

In 1824 a young Virginia aristocrat named Richard Thompson Archer migrated to Mississippi. Joining in the boom years of expansion in the Magnolia State in the 1830s, Archer built a vast cotton empire. He and his wife, Ann Barnes, raised a large family at Anchuca, their home plantation in Claiborne County, Mississippi. From there Richard Archer ruled a domain that included more than 500 slaves and 13,000 acres of land. On the eve of the Civil War he was one of the wealthiest men in the South. This work examines the life of Richard Archer from his origins in Amelia County, Virginia, to his death in Mississippi in 1867. It takes as its thesis the theme of Archer's life: his burdens as proprietor of a vast cotton empire and as father figure and provider for a large extended family. This theme weaves together the strands of Archer's life, including his rise to the position of great planter, his duties as husband and father, and his political beliefs and activities. Archer's story is told against the background of the history of Mississippi and of the South, from their antebellum heyday, through the Civil War, and into the early years of Reconstruction. Archer was an aristocrat but also a businessman, a paternalist but also a capitalist. He enjoyed his immense wealth and the power of his position, but he maintained a heavy sense of the responsibilities that accompanied that wealth and power. Archer pursued his business and his family interests with unyielding tenacity. To provide for the well- being and security of his large extended family and of his slaves was his life's mission. Although the Civil War destroyed much of Archer's empire and left him in a much reduced financial state, his family survived the war and Reconstruction with several of their plantations intact and with their social position preserved.

This dissertation examines the relationship between race and bodily health in the British West Indies and the Carolina/Georgia Lowcountry from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, planters often justified African slavery by claiming that Africans, unlike Europeans, had bodies particularly suited to labor in warm climates. Historians have tended to take these claims as evidence of a growing sense of biological race in plantation societies. Much of this work, though, relies on published sources. This dissertation examines these public sources, including medical manuals, natural histories, and political pamphlets, alongside private sources, particularly the personal correspondence of planters and slaveholders to uncover a different story of race and slavery. These two source types reveal significant discrepancies between planters’ public rhetoric and private beliefs about health, race, and the environment in plantation societies. First, correspondence between the Greater Caribbean and Britain demonstrates that health and disease did not contribute to the development of racial slavery in the Atlantic. Second, these sources show how and why planters manipulated public conceptions of climate and health to justify and maintain a system of racial slavery. Planters insisted on climate-based arguments for slavery in spite of their experiences in the Americas, rather than because of them. Slaveholders contributed to the construction of a biological concept of race by making arguments about health differences between Africans and Europeans that they neither experienced nor believed. Nevertheless, their arguments entered the public record and consciousness, and the resultant development of racial thinking had profound consequences that continue to the present day. This dissertation demonstrates the critical importance of the environment to the history of race.

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Jean Goupy, author of the manuscript that is the principal source of this book, worked on the Rémire sugar plantation of Cayenne from 1688-90. This chapter outlines his life and reveals that before becoming a sugar planter, Goupy spent four years in West Africa as a slave trader and consequently had much greater knowledge of African states and ethnic groups compared to other sugar planters. Goupy’s personality and attitudes are compared to those of other planters. The chapter also provides information about the Rémire plantation’s history and Cayenne’s place in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century.

City annoyances—plantation regrets—my mistress, Miss Sopha—her history—her kindness to me—my master, Hugh Auld—his sourness —my increased sensitiveness—my comforts—my occupation—the baneful effects of slaveholding on my dear and good mistress—how she commenced teaching me to read—why she ceased teaching me—clouds gathering over my bright prospects—Master Auld’s exposition...

Chapter 10 investigates the life of enslaved Africans at Betty’s Hope who numbered in the hundreds for this large plantation. Excavations of the slaved quarters in 2014 and 2015 revealed information about slave housing, subsistence, and lifeways. The archaeology and archival records support a life under difficult conditions, with few options to exercise any agency. Yet evidence of agency is manifest in the recovery of hundreds of pieces of Afro-Antiguan wares, as well as ceramic game tokens, repurposed bottle glass, a musket ball converted into a fishing weight, and four cowrie shells probably used as a form of currency or talismans. The practice of Obeah is briefly discussed as an act of cultural resistance among those enslaved at Betty’s Hope.

Chapter 2 discusses the Great House at Betty’s Hope, which was excavated from 2007 to 2012. The plantation was owned by the Codrington family from 1674 until the plantation was sold in 1944. Ownership began with Christopher Codrington II, the son of a Barbadian sugar planter. Although the house itself is long gone, the house and grounds at Betty’s Hope follow certain basic characteristics of Caribbean plantation architecture and landscapes. The overall material culture of the Betty’s Hope Great House is similar to other British colonial sites, with a predominance of eighteenth-century British ceramics and artifacts reflecting domestic life. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggest that the house was destroyed by the time of the sale of the property in 1944.

City annoyances — Plantation regrets — My mistress — Her history — Her kindness — My master — His sourness — My comforts — Increased sensitiveness — My occupation — Learning to read — Baneful effects of slaveholding on my dear, good mistress — Mr. Hugh forbids Mrs. Sophia to teach me further — Clouds gather on my bright prospects — Master Auld’s exposition of the Philosophy of Slavery — City slaves — Country slaves — Contrasts — Exceptions — Mr. Hamilton’s two...

Fanny Coker is the focus of this chapter by Christine Eickelmann. She represents a group of women whose stories have been mostly lost to British history—plantation-born domestic servants. Eickelmann outlines what we know of Fanny’s timeline: Born on the Mountravers sugar plantation on Nevis to an enslaved black woman and, likely, the white plantation manager, Fanny spent her adult life in England working for the family of Mountravers’ owner, John Pinney who freed and educated her. Settling in Bristol with the Pinneys, Fanny was separated from family and the plantation community and left to navigate a new country and employer dynamics on her own. Choosing to stay with the Pinneys her whole life, Eickelman describes how she maintained connections to family in the West Indies through letters, gifts and one extended visit, and was part of a larger network of information and economic exchange across the Atlantic. Operating under the strictures of her employer as a lady’s maid under annual contract, she managed to be baptized in the Baptist church, build financial security through investments and an inheritance and, unlike most of her plantation counterparts, realize some agency over shaping her life. Learning about Coker’s life, says Eickelmann, is an important window into the stories of black servants, especially women, in Georgian England.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the volume’s organization, and current background literature on plantation archaeology in Caribbean historical archaeology as it pertains to the study site, Betty’s Hope plantation. One theoretical perspective in examining life at Betty’s Hope is through Entanglement Theory, although it is not the only theoretical perspective discussed in the volume. The Betty’s Hope project is partially aided by the Codrington Papers archive housed in the National Archives of Antigua and Barbuda. The archive is then compared to the archaeological discoveries made at Betty’s Hope from 2007 to 2015, yielding rich comparative data from one site. The volume is not limited to site-specific information but also incorporates Betty’s Hope in the broader scheme of the Caribbean regional developments.

This chapter examines the significance of the imagination, beauty, madness, and Manichean despair in the ghetto as represented in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. James’s novel suggests the imagination’s importance to the slave sublime condition and apperception of tragedy and ghetto life. James describes Trench Town, a West Kingston garrison where Bob Marley once lived as a “Third World slum” that “defies beliefs or facts,” as a place that “immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque” within the “imagination.” James’s representation underscores the central importance of the imagination, and the fact that he articulates this focal idea of the slave sublime validates the urgent need for this term as an aesthetic, critical tool and vocabulary. Using a Foucauldian lens, this chapter also explores the issue of madness in relation to slave sublime experience stemming from the logic of capital and the pervasive Babylon system: how the ghetto, for instance, is a plantation structure—as a space of confinement depicting Babylon’s Manichean divisions and use of the Jamaican police (who have a genealogical connection to slave drivers and constables during slavery and apprenticeship) in efforts to contain the so-called unreason linked to Blackness and poverty.

Weeksville was founded in 1838 by formerly enslaved persons and freedmen who sought to create a self-sustaining utopian community in Brooklyn, New York. Distinguished by its urbanity, size, and relative physical and economic stability, the community provided sanctuary for self-emancipated persons from Southern slave plantations, and for free Black people escaping the violence of New York City’s Draft Riots in 1863. The second largest African American community in the U.S. was absorbed by the forces of real estate development in New York City. After almost fifty years of community led persistence and vision, in 2014 the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) introduced a new Cultural Arts Building and interpretive landscape on the same campus as the original community. “Connecting to the Archive: Counter-Gentrification Tactics in Central Brooklyn,” strengthens community development activities as a counterforce to gentrification through several processes that center around the ongoing development of archival and oral history collections held by the Center. Through academic partnership with Pratt Institute in the Pratt Weeksville Archive students and faculty work together with the Center’s staff and community members on the ongoing archiving project, which seeks to support the Center’s efforts to preserve and add to the archive, provide access to, and interpret the archival microhistory of community development and documentation activities that led to the formation of the Society and its growth. Historic Black nineteenth century self-supporting communities can become a model for empowerment in twenty first century shrinking Black communities rendered apolitical and ahistorical and little hope for a future. Central Brooklyn is arguably the largest African American community in the U.S., with a population that is shrinking in numbers due to white gentrification and beset by the traumas caused by anti-Black racism, generational displacement and poor access to public services. To assist in this effort, the project engages with local residents in oral history and critical ethnography practices so as to decentered the privileged position of the ethnographer. Based on the multidimensional method of Edgar Morin and everyday life practitioners, the goal is to empower residents to utilize the archive through interviewing, self-documentation, storytelling, and appreciation of archival and oral history methodologies. The project connects the Center to its immediate community and the immediate community to the Center through the effort to document the memory and experience of the neighborhood in the past, present, and future, to engage with and expand the archival collections held at the Center so as to create a place of refuge, delight and individual and collective history as a counterforce to the forces of global neoliberalism that continue to degrade, marginalize and challenge BIPOC community building.