Space,place,and the landscapes of slavery

Although framed as a “visual history”, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery is less a pictorial history than a conceptual vantage that uses images as entrée into the material processes and social relations of plantation systems that unfolded in varied sociocultural and historical settings. The authors offer the reader a study of contrasts. While equally shaped by the global market economy and dependent on enslaved African labor, the Mississippi Valley, Cuba, and Brazil present dramatically different settings in which 19th century intensive monoculture based on slave labor matured. The three regional foci were not arbitrarily chosen; they were among the most intensive areas of plantation slavery in the Americas, each flourishing during the 19th century’s burgeoning world markets and each reliant on the industrialization of production. These regions were dramatically different in their particular environments, but each were new geographical frontiers of commodity production uniquely suited to a particular crop, demand for which was driven by the emergent conditions of the world market. By the mid-19th century, the Mississippi River Valley was the world’s largest producer of cotton, Cuba was the source of most of the world’s sugar, while Brazil’s Paraíba Valley produced the majority of the worlds of coffee. The regions afford distinct examples of the industrialized nature of 19th century plantation agriculture during the Second Slavery that can be dramatically contrasted with plantation slavery of the preceding centuries.

Atlantic slavery was integral to the formation of the capitalist world-economy since the 16th century. However, 19th century slavery was dramatically different in its conditions, geographies, and materialities. While modern industry, free trade, and abolitionist legislation are sometimes seen as setting the stage for the end of slavery, in fact, during the 19th century more slaves were transported across the Atlantic World and slaves produced more commodities than in the preceding 400 years (15). This new era of slavery is vividly illustrated in the regions represented, the reorganization of production, the increasing role of technology, and material expressions.

In the Theory of the Dérive, Guy Debord (1958, 2) quotes Marx as saying “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive”. While Marx apparently did not say this, ¹ he easily could have. Marx does not discuss landscape per se, but nature, geography, and historical context always rest in the background, structuring the spaces of capitalist production (e.g., Marx, 1936, 197–206). Slave plantations were not isolated structures, but sites of production articulating with the whole. Some plantations of the 19th century were massive. For example, the sugar plantation of San Martín, Cuba, had 1845 acres of cane fields harvested by hundreds of slaves (99–101). San Martín’s ingenio was fully mechanized; the grinding mill and refining apparatus were housed in a cavernous structure over 400 feet long and 150 feet wide. Conveyor belts fed the mill and removed the crushed stalks, while pumps carried the cane juice to 10 clarifiers that held 1660 L each. Kilometers of railway linked the major Cuban plantations, minimizing transshipment.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery is wide in frame, aimed at the description and interpretation of the productive spaces in which slaves labored. The volume is wonderfully illustrated with over 80 contemporary maps, plans, and figures drawn from archives in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Spain. The images presented were created by, and thus privilege, slaveholding elites (11). The authors are acutely aware of the inherent biases of European images that reified the 19th social order (2–10, 145–148). The plantation communities depicted were “organized through the master-slave relation and sharply divided and mediated by racial, gender, status, and class, distinctions” (6). Slaves are often unrepresented, the arduousness of labor reduced, the scenes presented “almost pastoral” (11–12). Yet, this importunate neglect underscores the volume’s objective in presenting the materialities of slavery. The authors move beyond imagery as expression of social domination to reveal the distinctive materialities of the industrialized plantation systems of the 19th century. The aim of the book not to present a history of plantation slavery or a compendium of plantation imagery. Rather, it seeks to reveal how landscapes embody the unique political and economic formations of the Second Slavery.

The photographs, engravings, plans, and maps presented are striking: glimpses of slave life (71, 92, 99, 137–141); the magnificence of plantation houses (30, 83, 116); lands and regions parced into productive spaces (24, 32, 43, 90, 118, 120, 125, 126); and—most of all—the intensity of plantation production (34, 49, 94, 99, 100, 103–107, 114, 121, 142, 143). The images are not, however, left as a collage of disparate shards, but rather placed in context to illustrate how these varied, locally shaped landscapes were all products of wider social, political and economic pressures.

The volume provides a rich resource and interpretive lens for scholars of the slave trade, the Atlantic world, and 19^th century economic history. I read Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery as an archaeologist. Plantations and slave associated contexts in the Americas have been a major focus of archaeological research, including substantial work in Cuba, Brazil, and the Mississippi valley (e.g., Ferreira and Funari, 2015; MacDonald and Morgan, 2012; Singleton, 1990, 2015; Singleton and Souza, 2009). The landscape perspective, focus on visual imagery, and the materialities of production in Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery valuably contextualize the material record and well resonate with archaeologies of plantation slavery. Plantations were not static, but constantly reformed by the material conditions and social, political and economic settings in which they operated. While situating plantations within the global economy, Tomich and his co-authors see ‘modular,’ nuanced responses to specific local conditions (8).

Archaeology affords unique insights that complement the broader view taken in Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery. As the volume’s authors acknowledge, a self-imposed limitation of the work is its concentration on the “largest, most productive, and wealthiest plantations in each region” (11). The examples presented provide the dramatic illustration of slavery as a well-developed agro-industrial complex. In contrast, much of archaeological research is inherently narrower in focus, dealing with dwellings, features, and artifact assemblages. Archaeology offers microhistories; historical-ethnographic case studies that illustrate the lives of slaves and the messy unevenness of slavery’s varied contexts. In this respect, the material record affords more nuanced insight into slave life than is often provided by the documentary record: studies of ceramics recovered archaeologically reveal aspects of informal economies undocumented, or poorly documented, in written records (e.g., Hauser, 2008); continuities with African cultural practices preserved in the material bits of everyday life (e.g., Ferguson, 1992; Ogundiran and Saunders, 2014); and material clues of slave agency and choice (e.g., Delle and Clay, 2022; Fennell, 2017; Galle, 2010). In this respect, as Singleton and Souza (2009, 449) observe, archaeology’s greater contribution has been to our understanding of the lived experiences of African diasporic peoples.

The authors of Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery do not delve into the quotidian lives of the enslaved laborers, but instead focus on the new, transformative nature of the productive landscapes of the Second Slavery. This methodological and conceptual vantage is a fundamental starting point for the interpretation of the material record of slave life. It particularly resonates with archaeological studies that illustrate the diverse ways in which plantation slavery unfolded, and was variously structured by local conditions and historical settings (e.g., Bates et al., 2016, Delle 2019; Delle and Clay, 2022; Kelly, 2011; Singleton, 2009). Archaeological indicators of slave agency, choice in decision making, and resistance are important avenues of enquiry, but questioning must begin by asking how the activities represented were dictated or constrained by—or benefited—the plantation system (see discussions in Matthews et al., 2002; Orser, 1988a, 1988b; Potter, 1991). As archaeologist Parker B. Potter (1991, 98) underscored, the material record was not the “glue that held the plantation together, slavery was.”

This point is vividly made in Tomich’s (2016, 367–395) study of plantation slavery on Martinique. Slaves were often obliged to produce their own food in provision grounds during their ‘free time’, a practice that provided autonomy and the opportunity for self-organized slave activities; activities that challenged slavery and undermined planter control. Nonetheless, slave-maintained provision grounds directly benefited the slave owner. The cost of maintaining slaves and goods imported for consumption were always expensive and their supply sometimes irregular. Although provision grounds afforded a modicum of independence, they also reduced the plantation owners’ expenses, shifted responsibility for sustenance to the slaves themselves, and kept slaves usefully employed during times when their labor was not needed for the production of the plantations’ cash crops.

Moving beyond the pastoral imagery and the descriptive, sometimes static nature of contemporary illustrations, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery reveals plantations as highly structured, intensively productive settings illustrative of the industrialization of commodity production, and expressive of the political economic configurations of the Second Slavery. The key to these productive landscapes was enslaved African labor. Slaves lived and labored in landscapes that they built, landscapes designed to insure their enslavement and productivity. As James Delle (1998) illustrates in his study of Jamaican plantations, the great houses of the plantation owners and overseers residences reified the social hierarchies of the planter elite, workers, and slaves, whilst also allowing the surveillance—and control—of enslaved workers (e.g., Delle, 1998). This was, however, only one aspect of landscapes that incorporated the most efficient labor regimes, the newest technologies, and built environments designed to maximize production—the embodiment of industrial capitalism.

Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery is a substantive volume that clearly charts the economic histories of key zones of 19th century slavery in the Americas. The studies presented underscore the material constraints within which slave lives were played out. While scholarly, the illustrations complement a readable, accessible text suitable for non-specialists that has wide relevance for anyone interested in the history of the slavery, the African diaspora, and the Atlantic World.