Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery
A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World
Dale W. Tomich
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/2021
Pages: 176
Subject: History, Political Science, Social Science
Print ISBN: 9781469663111
eBook ISBN: 9781469663135
DESCRIPTION
Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this
innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive
organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century
Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower
Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee
plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the
restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation
of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these
environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such
labor played in the expansion of the global economy.
Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.
Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.
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