Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Fornias, Carlos Venegas,Monzote, Reinaldo Funes,Marquese, Rafael De Bivar,Tomich, Dale W.

ISBN 10: 1469663120 / ISBN 13: 9781469663128

Published by Univ of North Carolina Pr, 2021

Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD PAPERBACK Standard-sized. Seller Inventory # M1469663120Z3

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author: Dale W. Tomich is professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University.

Reinaldo Funes Monzote is professor of history at the University of Havana.

Carlos Venegas Fornias is a researcher at Centro de Investigaciones Juan Marinello in Havana.

Rafael de Bivar Marquese is professor of history at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery: A ...
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr
Publication Date: 2021
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good