Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery

“Stunning . . . . [A] brilliantly illustrated survey of how plantations worked to produce, through enslaved labor, coffee, sugar, and cotton for an expanding global market.”—American Historical Review

“An important contribution to our understanding of how the physical landscape and its manipulation shaped not only the slave societies but also the ecology of the regions in which cotton, sugar, and coffee plantations operated.”—Journal of Southern History

“Landscapes take shape not simply as a way of seeing the physical world, but also as a way of controlling it, by means of a codified presentation, articulated from a hegemonic point of view. . . . [Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery] illustrates changes in the exploitation of enslaved peoples that are integral to an economic rationality that [in the nineteenth century] asserted itself worldwide.”—Revista Pesquisa

“Revealing the deep integration between the particularities of crop and environment on the one hand and capitalist modernity on the other, this book’s analytical clarity and significance will change how we think about nineteenth-century expansions of slavery in the New World.”—Edward E. Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

“The photographs, lithographs, and prints of plantation landscapes are immersed in histories elevating the past’s silences. The authors bring to light a sharp understanding of the industrial forces that powered such imaginations, reconfiguring territory and subjectivities of labor and planter alike. These images are compelling and show clearly the plantation works’ industrial character and the enslaved labor’s regimentation. Scholars working on the Global South should heed this volume’s tackling of broader questions of slavery within capitalist production.”— Michaeline A. Crichlow, author of Globalization and the Postcreole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation