As monocultural complexes aimed at the intensive production of cash crops for the global market, plantations have played an indisputably central and persistent role in sha** the economic, socio-political, cultural and ecological setup of the modern world. Their foundational character is reflected in (if by no means exhausted by) the plethora of discourses that have invested plantations’ workings since the inception of European economic and sovereign expansion across continents. These have addressed a vast range of themes and processes—from land appropriation to production, processing and trade, through labor recruitment and management for profit extraction, taxation and regulation, political conflict and morality, sovereign rule and instruments of control and subversion, and many more—adopting multiple positions and perspectives, with disparate aims. Among such discourses, as far as scholarly engagements are concerned, over the course of the last century (and earlier), a significant number of important critical works have been produced, which it is impossible to summarize in this introduction. However, a few core bodies of literature can be identified, that have shaped our own approach in conceiving of this edited volume.

In broad strokes, we build upon conceptualizations of plantations as race-making institutions, from the publication of pioneering works such as Edgar Thompson’s (1932, 1939, 1975), W.E.B. DuBois’ (1899, 1911, 1935) and C.L.R. James’ (1980 [1966]) onwards, also and especially in relation to political-economic frameworks, that have contextualized the role of plantations in the development of capitalism (Braudel 1992; Williams 1944), the world-system (e.g. Mintz 1960, 1968, 1985; Rubin 1959; Tomich 2004; Wolf 1982; Wallerstein 1974), colonial and postcolonial dependency and underdevelopment (Beckford 1999 [1972]; Best 1968; Rodney 1981; Smith 1967). At the same time, we are attentive to the imbrication of racism in unequal class relations investing also the spheres of gender, sexuality and intimacy (e.g. Casid 2004; Chatterjee 2001; Fox-Genovese 1988; Morgan 2004; Stolcke 1988; Stoler 1985a) and to the role of migration and its governance, its differential exclusions and segregations (e.g. Bastos 2018, 2020; Behal 2012; Moulier-Boutang 2016; Northrup 1995), in relation to the organization of plantations as productive apparatuses. Overall, such approaches have contributed to outline the role of plantations as crucial foci for both the expansion of imperial and post-imperial projects and for opposition to them—from the first slave revolts and flights to contemporary peasant, worker and community struggles.

Drawing on such established fields of critical inquiry, in recent years scholars’ attention is increasingly turning to plantations’ ecological dimensions, on the one hand, and on the other, to the long-term material, affective, and symbolic imprints they have left on the environments that they contributed so heavily to mold—even after seemingly epochal transformations and in some cases plantations’ very demise. These stand out as particularly innovative axes of research, promising to shed light on current predicaments also by querying time-honored historical truths, their making and unmaking. In dialogue with recent scholarship on post-plantation politics and its affective archives (Thomas 2019; cf. her Afterword in this volume), on the afterlives of multiple plantation pasts (Adams 2007; Hartman 2007; McInnis 2016; McKittrick 2011, 2013; Sharpe 2016), and on eco-materialist perspectives (Allewaert 2013; Haraway 2015; Haraway et al. 2016; Haraway and Tsing 2019; Tsing 2015; Li and Semedi 2021), we seek to further articulate a nexus between plantations’ more-than-human dimensions and their all-too-human (modern, imperial) dynamics of control, extraction and subversion, all the while exploring their “durabilities” (Stoler 2016). In this sense, our approach builds on reflections recently put forth by other scholars on the need to “methodologically, conceptually, and politically placing political violence and non-human entities side by side” (Navaro et al. 2021: 2), and being attuned to what Navaro and her co-authors call “reverberations” —“the lingering effects (and affects) of violence […] including its echo, cyclical recurrence, and sporadic reoccurrence in different guises, shapes, and dimensions” (Ibid.: 10).

It is in this vein that we have identified this volume’s three main axes to analyze plantations and their workings as those of ecologies, afterlives and sovereignties. While, as mentioned, both eco-materialist approaches and analyses of plantations’ durabilities, hauntings and ruinations have been developed by recent scholarly works, the third theme—that of sovereignty—is perhaps the least explored in relation to plantations, despite some promising, early engagements with such nexus (cf. Thompson 1932). If currently the political philosophy underlying Westphalian, modern sovereignty is being questioned not only by reference to a present in which the nation-state appears to be giving way to new, complex and multilayered formations of power, but also by problematizing the very foundations of the modern state, no critical work has approached the theme specifically in relation to plantations. And this notwithstanding the acknowledgment, by such scholarship, of the role private (mercantilist, capitalist and industrial) enterprise played at the height of modernity in pre-figuring and effecting imperial and colonial forms of sovereignty across continents. What better context than that of plantations, among the first (together with mining) extractive projects associated with European expansion across the globe, to analyze the imbrications of political and economic power away from reified, monolithic and preempted conceptions of the modern state? Furthermore, while important work has been produced on the first two themes, very few scholars have addressed the intersections between one and the other, let alone of those two with the theme of sovereignty.

In the following sections, we engage with all authors’ contributions to explore such topics through a transdisciplinary and global approach. The broad range of case studies collected here analyzes the techniques that have allowed plantations to function on multiple levels, spanning across spatiotemporal frames from a number of disciplinary perspectives. On the one hand, the very proliferation of plantations across chronologies, geographies and specific political contexts precludes universal categorizations, calling into question any monolithic notion of “the” plantation. On the other hand, common features accrue to the different processes examined in the present book. All chapters speak to the emergence and transformation of modern sovereignties, productivist labor regimes, their attendant subjectivities and environmental dimensions, defining and nuancing the contours of plantations as institutions whose internal relations have pervaded whole societies, spilling over the bounds of individual estates. These case studies thus also broaden the scope beyond the sole instance of agricultural/agro-industrial production, by including the sites and types of labor that have developed in the evolution and restructuring of plantation economies, such as those pertaining to tourism, heritage, or domestic service. At the same time, the excesses, contradictions, resistances and ruinations of mechanisms of extraction and (and by means of) control are made apparent. Through the heterogeneity of plantations, we also consider mutations, failures and deviations, providing an insight into the afterlives, specters and remnants of these systems of production, extraction and authority, also in their subjective and affective dimensions.

The book is organized into four geographical sections—the Caribbean, the Americas, West Africa and its diasporas and finally South and South-East Asia—that highlight the planetary dimension of the plantation system and its expansion through differently paced and timed political-economic and ecological projects, across the modern and post-modern period. Such breadth allows to expand the focus beyond analyses of plantations that very often have dealt with individual empires through human-centered lenses, and with the singular geographies of the slave trade or of indentured labor. This also grants for an in-depth, granular exploration of plantation ecologies, subjectivities and afterlives on the ground. The choice of this broad chronology and planetary outlook on plantations provides for an accurate assessment of how local specificities are enmeshed in transnational and trans-imperial movements, resulting from “frictions” (Tsing 2004) with global processes.

Plantation Ecologies: Environmental Degradation, Segregated Human Relations and Racial Injustice

Plantations were shaped as much by political, economic and social dynamics as by specific ecological assemblages. While sustaining and promoting imperialist projects, capitalist ventures, racialized labor regimes and anti-colonial resistances, plantations were, on a very physical level, agro-ecological systems that altered and were altered by biological processes. As such, several contributors in this volume start from the acknowledgment that plantation environments cannot be seen as mere background scenarios to human action but must be reckoned with as acting forces in their own right (see Bulamah; Moore; Stubbs; Davis; and Chao). Building upon a robust and decades-old literature attentive to environmental transformations, the centrality of individual plant species for plantations’ very existence, as well as the importance of soil, air, water, fungi, insects and other animals in all their multiple interactions is considered for its role in configuring the contingent socio-ecological relations established inside and beyond plantations, past and present (Dean 1995; Fiege 2012, Ch. 3; Grove 1997; MacLennan 2014; McCook 2019; Soluri 2006; Uekötter 2014). Thus, plantations are perfect laboratories to bring together environmental and labor dimensions, as explored by inspiring early works in cultural ecology (Steward et al. 1956). Many chapters in this book make it clear that what happened “on the ground” was co-producing modern plantations’ social hierarchies and power relations (cf. Bray et al. 2019; Brown and Lubock 2014; Rogers 2010; Stewart 1996; White 1996). As the breadth of collected case studies testifies, the effects of the plantation mode of agricultural production run deep in our present and are global in scope. While many regions bear the imprint of historical plantation experiences, contemporary plantations, that span across the planet, keep reproducing and feeding on imperial matrices of ecological disruption and racial inequality.

Such processes, legacies and durabilities also put the volume’s case studies in dialogue with recent discussions on the notion of the Anthropocene. The term, which signals the emergence of a new geological era resulting from human activities, has gained currency in the social sciences, but the undifferentiated notion of the “Anthropos” on which it is founded also spurred criticisms for its erasure of racialized and gendered power dynamics, violence and exclusion (Yusoff 2019) and led to the emergence of a plethora of alternative concepts politicizing this new epochal shift (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016). In fact, political ecology scholars have long argued that human activity is embedded within larger ecosystems that have had an impact on global processes of wealth accumulation, concentration and inequality, and asymmetrically distributed environmental degradation (Escobar 1999; Hornborg 2007; Robbins 2012; Ross 2017), proposing the concept of Capitalocene to merge world-system theory with earth-system science (Moore 2015, 2016).

Intervening in such geo-historical debates, the identification of our era as Plantationocene (Carney 2021; Haraway 2015; Haraway and Tsing 2019; Haraway et al. 2016; Murphy and Schroering 2020) further shifts the focus, foregrounding the importance of monocultural agro-industrial systems (Besky 2020) for our understanding of ecological devastation and the perpetuation of colonial and imperialist relations, in particular through racialized and coerced labor. Rather than feeding into discussions about a definite periodization of geological epochs, we are interested in how the empirically grounded studies that compose this collection speak to the analytical potential of the Plantationocene. Our goal is to examine the multiple socio-ecological interactions within which plantations are enmeshed, and identify their effects. The fine-grained approaches from post-humanist and critical race perspectives developed in this book bring to the fore the violence against humans and non-humans, the unequal power relations intrinsic to the plantation system and the possibilities for its subversion, allowing us to imagine more elaborate ways of narrating plantation regimes, and to move beyond overly simplistic binaries between exploitation and resistance.

The recurrent uprooting, selection and transplanting of different life-forms from specific ecologies was foundational to modern plantation projects (Dusinberre and Iijima 2019; Haraway et al. 2016; Tsing 2015). In the process of putting cultivators and cultivars to work, the planters and managers who engineered the ordering and disciplining of these “naturecultural” worlds also sustained specific beliefs about the superiority of plantation-style production and, attached to that, about “nature’s” ideal keepers. Plantation-making was instrumental in the development of racialized discourses about local populations that did not conform to specific notions of productivity and profitability, with important political consequences: supposedly “lazy” agriculturalists, employing “backward” agricultural methods, should not be granted access to land (Li 2014), just as pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. Thus, plantation-making almost always involved the exclusion of local peoples, the destruction of their livelihoods, the denigration of their intimate and embodied knowledges, and ultimately the ruination of the very ecologies that nurtured those communities.

If making plantations demanded plans, ideal schemes, prototypes to be built based on technical expertise and hierarchical control, many case studies confirm that plantations seldom functioned according to these predefined designs. If laborers—whether enslaved, indentured or waged, in various combinations—never fully conformed to planters’ disciplinary prescriptions (and in fact it was insubordination or its threat that made the constant elaboration and refining of such prescriptions necessary in the first place), local environmental conditions also challenged scientific, “rational” projects. Furthermore, when the imagined plantation was physically realized, unforeseen consequences may ensue. Plantations have always been vulnerable to forces generated from within as much as from without, and disturbances happened far more often than acknowledged (Tsing 2004).

In fact, the standardization, simplification and scaling-up processes that characterize these agricultural systems, seeking to convert plants into marketable crops and humans into labor power, occlude the transformative capacities of the other life-forms that obstinately continue to exist within plantations. Not denying the ways in which plantations have caused biodiversity loss, Chao’s contribution in this volume points to the necessity of complicating our understanding of plantations’ metabolisms, acknowledging the role of non-humans in countering extractive aims that stretch across unprecedented scales. This case study eloquently illustrates how monocrop regimes, while contributing to eliminate some organisms, created possibilities for the proliferation of others. Bringing to the fore fungi feasting on palm trees, fungi that established symbiotic relations with those trees, and salvific plants turned into invasives, together with the perspectives of indigenous communities working for/fighting against the oil palm sector in West Papua, Chao casts light on the interdependent if unstable relations across species that are formed in those ecologies. Besides, discussing the parallel dimensions of conflict and collaboration constitutive of this plantation experience, this chapter highlights an aspect that the study of plantations has frequently ignored, namely the constant need for maintenance. Plantations’ disciplining (and policing the boundaries of) humans and “nature” has always been as much about repair and improvisation as about planning and control.

By calling attention to environmental disruptions, we can also better understand how non-human forms have impacted on the very structure and character of labor (e.g. affecting tasks and seasonal rhythms) and how the transformation of the relations between humans and other life-forms has shaped the tense social dynamics constitutive of plantation worlds. Modern agricultural regimes for the cultivation of rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton in eighteenth-century North American plantations, discussed by Stubbs, and the struggles for their implementation, provide a fertile terrain to study the open conflicts between working people (be they enslaved men and women, overseers or managers) and the planters. Planters’ demands to bring Europe’s “new agricultural” science to the colonies of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, together with their expectations regarding both the yield and quality of new crops, clashed with overseers’ real or presumed competences and skills. While adaptation to specific environmental conditions and the violent disciplining of bondspeople were routinely asked of overseers, absentee landowners were disappointed when events fell outside the script. Planters’ concerns over their reputation and financial returns resulted in the vilification of overseers. This chapter opens an important discussion on how scientific agricultural projects affect plantation-labor relations and hierarchies, that cut across class and racial lines.

Thus, plantation-making has always also been a matter of contention between alternative world views and agendas (cf. also Miller, this volume). But despite the violent and unequal power relations spun within and through plantations, projects for taming “the wild” and building strict social hierarchies always left “room to maneuver” for alternative livelihoods (Trouillot 2002b). Even if the plantation mode of production plays a central role in all chapters, it is important not to lose sight of how these specific socio-environmental regimes have had to negotiate their existence in relation to other communities and life-forms. Over the centuries, assemblages of humans and non-humans opened up possibilities for the subversion of plantation discipline. Bulamah’s contribution explores an array of geographies in the early modern and modern Caribbean that run counter or parallel to plantation apparatuses. These geographies—inhabited by enslaved men and women, pirates, smugglers, maroons and their “companion species”—functioned as spaces of subsistence, autonomy, healing or struggle. Bulamah explores in detail the human-pig entanglements made possible inside provision grounds and in the landscapes surrounding plantations. Such crafted and nurtured environments that subaltern peoples created along with their animals helped mitigate or evade subordination in plantation spaces. Moore’s chapter also highlights how the imperial and colonial imaginaries imposed onto the land and its inhabitants collide with those of local communities. It discusses precisely the (too often neglected) conflictual relation between peasant and plantation modes of production. Focused on Haïti’s Central plateau during US occupation, this case study examines the efforts of both scientists and the military to transform the landscape into cotton plantations, and the struggle of Afro-Caribbean communities to defend their livelihoods. The environmental characteristics of the Central Plateau and the biological properties of the cotton plant are essential to Moore’s story. The physiological features of cotton varieties and the physical qualities of this borderland, together with imperial authorities’ changing perception of them, make the various elements necessary to bring a plantation into existence visible. This chapter is also a good reminder that plantations recurrently failed. In Haïti, even under the oppression of US imperialism, other forms of cultivation prevailed over cotton monocrops. However, regardless of plantations’ actual workings, the racialized representations of the peasant guerrilla (“cacos”) as wild, wasteful and primitive still linger in public memory, making the enduring ideological power of plantation imaginaries evident.

Yet, the plantation stories addressed in this book show that inequalities were and are more than a matter of perception: they have been inscribed on the actual bodies of workers. Labor tasks have been learned and performed by men and women involved in sha** new habitats where crops could grow. As those workers have transformed the environment, conversely, the environment has acted upon them. In his contribution, Davies places the bodies of contemporary Sierra Leonean plantation workers at the center of his narrative. By stressing the relationship between them and the spaces they inhabit, he shows how the very process of generating sugar and profit has also produced contamination and death. Pesticides with noxious effects on land and water penetrated the porous boundaries of human flesh, revealing the embodied and environmental dimensions of subordination and toxicity produced by this plantation experiment. While attempting to recover the life stories of people whom narratives of global development and international aid have forgotten, this chapter also opens up new avenues to investigate the ways in which laborers frame their identities not only in relation to kin and other relations, to land or work, but also to toxic matter and other environmental components. The nexus established between chemicals and illness also encourages a reflection on the value attributed to specific subjects and the racial contours of such metrics. The cheapness of plantation labor has multiple meanings: besides being poorly paid, it is fungible and, according to differential perceptions of physical well-being, disposable. This case study feeds into an important discussion on the role of plantations as systems of labor-power commoditization, producing and reproducing specific bodies and human groups along racial lines, in relation to the too often overlooked subjectivities of working people (Holmes 2013; Nash 2017; cf. also Miller, this volume).

The Afterlives of the Plantation: Old and New Insights

While some studies address the present of plantations’ productive activities across different epochs, others focus on their afterlives. They investigate the future of the plantation system after the dismantling or transformation of its productive apparatus, that in many cases left economic and environmental ruination in its wake. The authors of this book’s chapters address the afterlives of plantations from different angles, following previous scholarship on plantation futures. If the present legacy of plantation societies was a classic theme in Caribbean dependency theories (Beckford 1999 [1972]), contemporary scholars have built and expanded on those insights to analyze the ways in which “the plantation” has spun multiple futures across a range of (black) geographies, seeking also to envisage decolonial horizons (McKittrick 2011).

The durability and extensibility of plantations, as the central locus of antiblack violence and death, have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas (Davis 2003; Wacquant 2002). But the notion of “afterlives”, famously adopted by Saidya Hartman in connection with (plantation) slavery to denote “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (2007: 6), has been productively stretched to encompass also psychic, affective and imaginary dimensions, often in connection with notions of spectrality and haunting (Adams 2007; Clukey and Wells 2016; Gilroy 1993; McPherson 2003)—that however remain mostly tethered to American (or at best Atlantic) geographies. References to the afterlives of various aspects of plantation management, relating for the most part to labor organization and discipline, have also been made across different contexts (e.g. Mintz 1985; Rosenthal 2018; Sherman 2021; Weiss 2011 - cf. the next section), but demand further exploration.

In original ways, the chapters collected in this volume examine the afterlives of plantations beyond the spatiotemporal and political-economic frames in which these durabilities are normally expected. Authors carefully analyze the restructuring of plantations in their labor-extractive and lethal aspects by means of policies whose driving ideology was in some cases anti-imperialist and alternative to capitalism: the establishment of citrus plantations in 1960s socialist Cuba (Aureille) and of Chinese-owned sugar plantations in 1970s Sierra Leone (Davies), Revolutionary Haïti’s reorganizing sugar plantations by 1805, after the war of independence (Ravano and Sacchi) or the shift from Chinese-owned plantations in the nineteenth-century’s native kingdom of Hawai’i to the twentieth-century white nativist rule with its attendant solidification of racial categories (Miller). The recursive use of past techniques for disciplining land and labor in order to exploit ever new territories for monocrop cultivation is evident in Moore’s chapter on the United States’ occupation of Haïti’s hinterland for cotton production in the 1910s to 1930s. A productivist rationale can be seen to cut across plantations that otherwise resulted from opposed ideologies, from the colonial to the “native” or the anti-colonial, in some cases with similar effects on workers’ conditions. The case studies gathered in this book thus highlight more complex global geographies and temporalities inherent to plantation systems than the one shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and its morphings into indenture alone.

Besides expanding the reach of such processes to planetary scales and longer histories, we seek to bring together plantations’ devastating social and ecological legacies within a single framework. From this perspective, plantations are analyzed as a shared symbolic-affective reference and a haunting past that permeate present eco-material and social relations, subjects’ and communities’ imaginaries of the future—be it in expectations about plantations’ rebirth after their material ruinations (Aureille, Davies), in nostalgias about plantations’ brutally hierarchical power structures, and in disavowals of some of their localized genealogies (Peano), or rather in the constant flight from plantation-derived violence (Bulamah, Moore). As noticed by Mintz and Wolf (1957), the durability of plantation systems does not merely rest on the coercion employed to set up such enterprises, but rather on the establishment of indirect constraints that bind people to plantation labor and order. The moral economy that developed between planters and laborers in order for the latter to secure a minimum of subsistence explains the long duration of relations of dependence into the present, still expressed in racial terms. Thomas (2019) also identified a political-affective continuity between the imperialist governance of Jamaican plantations and the formation of the nation-state as a post-plantation society in the mid-twentieth century. She highlighted how contemporary social relations based on absolute loyalty to a powerful local figure—what she calls “garrison politics”—are grounded in the system of political authority first developed in sugar estates. Relations of dependence between planters and their laborers, sustained by a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, are the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery, and even after the cessation of monocrop cultivation. The estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation subjectivities, being a major blueprint of socialization into work for generations and up to the present. Ravano and Sacchi’s chapter echoes these perspectives, demonstrating how after the insurrection of enslaved Africans, the Haïtian nation was built on the policing of former slaves’ activities, mobility and access to citizenship by conditioning this latter to bonded labor in sugar plantations.

At the same time, the afterlives of plantations index the perpetual strife to make life out of spaces of death and violence. Wynter (2003) identified a constitutive tension between the dominant logic of plantations as a sovereign-making project and the internal threat to such project caused by enslaved people who maintained a conception of themselves as human subjects rather than as objectified property. This conflict pervades the post-plantation present. Analyses of these mechanisms have focused on the reproduction of slave institutions built on the edges of the plantation (Trouillot 2002a) in order to ensure everyday survival, exploring collective memories of life-making away from plantations, through provision grounds and solidarity networks that are remembered and remade also through embodied and material dynamics, in the ways in which former plantation laborers and their descendants inhabit space (Chivallon 2012). Alternatives to plantation life have often lain in the creation of an agriculture-based socio-economic system that would ensure one’s own family and community subsistence. Plantations were thus also central in the emergence of oppositional and peculiar social groups, such as small black peasantries (Ibid.), which are still an important component of many contemporary societies—across the Caribbean, in the United States and in Brazil for example—playing a role in slowing down or undoing the further expansion of plantations.

Once again, the exploration of these processes reveals the extent to which plantations are precarious productive systems, far less stable than what many contemporary representations would make us believe. Furthermore, the sense of community inherited from plantation experiences and their culture-making dynamics directly unsettles the socio-political organization promoted by contemporary nation-states (Thomas 2019). These dimensions are evidence to the long-lasting legacies of the fundamentally strained relations between plantation infrastructures and communities, and of the unexpected institutions developed on their margins. It bears repeating that the unpredictability of making life out of plantations is an essential feature of social, cultural and economic systems that have developed everywhere in the margins of global plantation geographies. Plantations can be defined as hyper-exploitative systems because they ensure only the immediate, bare reproduction of their labor force, without providing for the social reproduction of laborers in the long term (Meillassoux 2018). In this context, the structuration of an Afro-American culture has been seen by Mintz and Price as “a miracle” (Mintz and Price 1992).

Everywhere in plantation systems, new social grou**s have been created  out of the interpersonal relations between laborers of different origins, in order to organize everyday survival and to create a modicum of space for human life. Bulamah demonstrates in his chapter how the Haïtian revolution was the direct result of enslaved people’s provision grounds. In organizing daily survival, the household economy created in the margins of plantations by the unexpected association between slaves, free black persons and animals (pigs) is the main institution that made the Revolution possible according to the author. He makes use of the concept of the counter-plantation, drawn from Haïtian sociologist Jean Casimir (2008), to highlight how much the invention of a creole culture through these encounters was the expression of the opposition to the dominant culture of occupiers and plantation entrepreneurs.

If creolization processes have challenged labor and productive organization in all plantation systems, according to Casimir (ibid.), Haïtian creolity is peculiar in its structural ungovernability. The full institutionalization of an autonomous life among slaves of different origins, who organized their own social reproduction during the eighteenth century (i.e. before the fixation of racial categories by the colonial state), undermined colonial and later national attempts to create and control a unified social formation. In this view, we can interpret the militarized labor regime imposed by the newborn Haïtian nation-state, described by Ravano and Sacchi, as a panic-driven response to what was perceived as an ungovernable country. The invention of a peasant economy and society, as an afterlife of provision grounds, appears foundational in Haïtian history if we connect these studies to Moore’s chapter. As we already mentioned, the author shows that the peasants of the hinterland opposed the US project to establish cotton plantations during the 1910s and up to the 1930s, and finally determined its failure and abandonment. The household economy and other strategies of survival, always readapted by plantation laborers according to the socio-economic conjunctures of plantation systems, are one of the main foci of those analyses that deal with plantation afterlives.

Reflections on “afterlives” thus question the kind of subject formation deriving from past experiences of plantation norms and values and the horizons of expectation they still entail in the present. Some chapters in this book highlight the ways in which laborers regard plantations as a “promise of development”, providing welfare and social mobility (Aureille, Davies, Chao), or on the contrary as a place from which to escape (Bulamah, Moore, Chao, Peano, Miller). Yet, despite apparently antagonistic ways of internalizing the plantation system, its pasts and futurities, it remains a common symbolic and affective reference for social action in the present: even when plantations are the space that everybody runs from, nobody stops talking about them, as Toni Morrison observed (quoted in McKittrick 2013: 10). Drawing on these insights, but also opening new horizons for thinking plantation futures, the chapters in this book address the continuities of plantation infrastructures and of subjects’ internalization of their set of norms through time (Ravano, Sacchi in Haïti, Aureille in Cuba, Davies in Sierra Leone, Behal in India); the “counter-plantation” events that keep threatening plantation projects and can cause their ruination (Bulamah and Moore in Haïti, Chao in West Papua); and the complex spatiotemporal overlaps of relations of domination with social encounters that challenge our contemporary imaginaries on the fixity of plantation systems (Abrampah in Ghana, Peano in Italy, Miller in Hawai’i).

In his study of the Chinese sugar plantation at Magbass, in Sierra Leone, Davies shows that despite its managers’ discourses promoting rural development, the plantation enterprise concretely created long-term precarity for its workers. The sugar plantation is chronically set for abandonment as a result of economic and political conjunctures (especially the civil war that raged between 1991 and 2002), leaving workers jobless in a wasted land. This intervention by a foreign economic actor, ostensibly in favor of the putative “rural poor” in Africa, had long-term consequences that are typical of plantation economies, what Beckford (1999) identified as persistent underdevelopment and poverty. In his perspective, the socio-economic future of plantation laborers is both blocked by the ongoing grip of export-oriented production in plantation zones and by recurring land dispossession. This last aspect is also present in Ravano and Sacchi’s chapter on independent Haïti. The transition from slavery to a free labor regime was artificially set “by both limiting access to subsistence farming and by subduing freedom to labor subordination”. In the same vein, the persistence—until the 1970s in most Caribbean and Indian-Ocean plantation societies, and even until today in Indian tea plantations (see the interview with Rana Behal)—of a system of remuneration based on subsistence wages, supplemented in kind, has both induced the reproduction of relations of dependence at work and the normalization of subsistence wages.

Thus, plantation afterlives display structural, economic and political as well as symbolic, material and affective dimensions. Ravano and Sacchi’s chapter particularly highlights the formation of Haïtian nationhood after the war of independence, in parallel with an emerging conception of citizenship that was conditional upon work on plantations or upon army service. Work and discipline, conceived according to the old norms of colonial plantations, are necessary also to access modern citizenship. Independence, freedom and waged labor in Haïti appear then less opposed to than in continuity with slavery, plantations and the colonial regime. This important point on the direct relation of modern citizenship to plantation infrastructure, echoing other works like Thomas’ (2019) on Jamaica or Williams’ (1991) on Guyana, speaks of the normalization of mechanisms first introduced by plantation systems (McKittrick 2013). This aspect is particularly developed in Aureille’s study. The author describes the ways in which peasants were groomed to a socialist way of life via the creation by the Cuban State of villages and agricultural communities within citrus plantations. Plantations, here as everywhere, represented an institution that governed not only production, but more broadly social life and the economy. Although citrus plantations were later dismissed and a transition to agroecology and re-peasantization was promoted in their place, former workers still framed their expectations of social mobility, recognition and protection according to the set of norms and values ordering social relations in plantations. This case study illustrates an important aspect of plantation histories: the transition from plantation systems to new political, economic and social structures is not the straightforward result of a plan. Conceptions of social justice and political legitimacy based on workers’ experience of the plantation can, and often do, conflict with the imposition of a new economic order and set of norms, but they might also foster such changes actively. As Garcia (1986) showed in relation to North Eastern Brazil’s historical district of sugar plantations, for example, the transition from planters’ traditional domination to the introduction of labor laws and a free labor market in the 1980s was not spontaneous nor fully ordered, but the product of social tensions in which workers’ conceptions of political legitimacy played an important part.

Finally, this book provides new reflections that go off the beaten track, problematizing the binary approach that pits plantation durabilities against counter-plantation dynamics. Abrampah’s archaeological study of Danish plantation ruins in Ghana and Peano’s analysis of the contemporary discourse on “modern slavery” applied to migrant farm labor in Italy both uncover more complex heritages of domination and social encounters on “plantation-looking landscapes” than what our contemporary imaginaries on plantations and slavery may typically foreground. In the archaeological excavation of the eighteenth-century Danish plantation house at Frederikssted, Abrampah and his collaborators found many more vestiges of local elites’ settlement of the main building after its abandonment by Danish colonizers than of the latter’s very short-lived occupation of the area for cotton and maize cultivation. Abrampah’s archaeological findings speak both of the colonial occupation and of its aftermaths, in the adoption by African elites of various types of European material implements in their everyday life. Peano’s chapter also unveils the “heterogeneous layers” of heritage (Foucault 1977: 82) behind the contemporary association between slavery and black migrant bodies in media, politicians’, NGOs’ and activists’ discourses in Italy, but also in legal and corporate dispositifs. The author shows for example how the justification of Ethiopia’s invasion with the moral necessity to abolish Abyssinian slavery by Mussolini’s fascist government, and the latter’s elaboration of racial theories via the rediscovery of Medieval slavery in Italy, are far more influential on contemporary conceptions of “modern slavery” and race than a “plantation elsewhere” might be. At the same time, canonical counter-plantation experiences and their legacies (most notably Rastafarian culture and its West African re-elaborations) may inform contemporary migrant farm workers’ languages of resistance and refusal.

These works remind us, through the genealogy of power and social encounters they carefully trace, of the “hazardous play of dominations” (Foucault 1977: 83) that emerge, overlap, conflict and disperse, in fluid rather than fixed spaces. In this respect, according to Peano, instead of really explaining contemporary mechanisms of labor exploitation, plantation narratives and discourses on modern slavery tethered solely to the “New World” as the primal scene of exploitation tend to reproduce race-making operations, by representing migrant farm laborers as the “others”, locked in black bodies without any acknowledged subjectivity. Following contributors’ insights, the “afterlives of plantations” therefore also define a contemporary imaginary of race and race fixity (such as that which prevails in Hawai’i and its histories, as Miller argues), that has been the product of a long-term process of ideological elaboration, far beyond slave times.

Plantations as Sovereign Machines: Subject Formation, Relations of Patronage and the Intimacies of Power

Plantations have been viewed as displaying sovereign-like features of control and violence monopoly over land and subjects, through force as much as ideology, across a wide range of contexts and epochs. Yet, if the sovereign-making powers of plantation systems have long been flagged in the literature, they have hardly been analyzed—witness the plethora of references to “plantocracies”, broadly if vaguely defined as polities reflecting “the will of the planter class” (Craton 1984: 190; cf. e.g. Breman 1989: 184–193, passim; Burnard and Garrigum 2018: Ch. 7; Mbembe 2013: 32, 36; Trouillot 1982; Williams 1970) and sometimes re-christened “saccharocracies” in the Cuban and wider Caribbean context (Fraginals 1964; Sandiford 2000; cf. MacLennan 2014 on “sovereign sugar” in Hawai’i). The indeterminacy and casualness with which such labels are employed in the literature is perhaps a reflection of the fact that “plantocracy” was an (often ironic and even scathing) emic category that seems to have taken hold starting from as early as the seventeenth century. It may have been employed by planters themselves, but above all it was a term wielded by their contemporary critics—among whom colonial officers and other imperial cadres figured prominently, predictably regarding the planter class’s ambitions to achieve political independence from the metropole with hostility. The concept of the plantocracy has thus been largely taken for granted, but widely employed—making plantations into the unexplored index of an institution (or indeed a set of institutions).

A noteworthy, if still cursory, definition of the plantocracy can be found in Cedric Robinson’s (1983) discussion of W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Reconstruction. There, Robinson picks up on the inadequacy of Marxian thought in postulating the necessity of a bourgeois revolution to shape working-class consciousness, when such principle is applied to analyze the drivers of the North American Civil War: in such context,  enslaved people had forged their own consciousness independently of the rise of the bourgeoisie and its liberal ideology (a process we referred to earlier in relation to plantation afterlives, that developed across the Americas).

The dominant ideology of the society was that of the plantocracy, a dictatorship of labor and land with no democratic pretensions. But of more significance, the ideology of the plantocracy had not been the ideology of the slaves. The slaves had produced their own culture and their own consciousness by adapting the forms of the non-Black society to the conceptualizations derived from their own historical roots and social conditions. (Ibid.: 238)

Here, plantations are seen to create both ideological and wider operational, material dimensions of political power in the form of boundless (at least in the intention of planters and certainly in the legal underpinnings of plantations) control over land and labor. Crucially, their sovereign effects (and failure thereof) are also employed to question overly deterministic, Euro-centric, liberal and teleological views of history and politics, something we wish to pick up on here.

The most notable exception to the lack of analytical scrutiny on the links between plantations and sovereign features of power, however, remains E.T. Thompson, who famously described the plantation as “a settlement institution” (1959: 44; cf. 1932, Ch 1), political in character.

[T]he central fact about the plantation is the acquisition and exercise of authority on the part of the planter in the interest of agricultural production. The plantation is a political institution; like the state it secures collective action on the basis of authority. The plantation system represents an extension of political control into the larger society whose institutions cooperate to maintain it. On the particular plantation authority is immediate and control is expressed in concrete acts of command and obedience. In the plantation system authority and control become diffuse and abstract. It becomes diffuse and abstract as the plantation extends its interests and influence beyond the concrete relations characterizing the local group into the institutions of the larger society, and the greater the span of extension the more abstract they become. […] what is far more important […] for the planter and his fellows is to gain control of the state. (ibid.: 55)

Further possible analytical connections between plantations and the sovereign sphere may be detected (still in wholly implicit form) in other classical works, such as Raymond Smith’s (1967) definition of plantations as “total social institutions”, following Goffmann and with specific reference to the Guyanese case. Similarly, a few years before Smith, Stanley Elkins (1959) had compared North American plantations to Nazi concentration camps. Yet, unlike the case of asylums analyzed by Goffmann, and unlike German lagers, American slave plantations were not, at least at first, the emanation of a sovereign power, or at any rate not in the same way as twentieth-century asylums or camps.

Indeed, rather than engaging in anachronistic analogies, it may be rather more productive and historically accurate to trace the genealogy of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation starting from early modern plantation systems—just as genealogies of labor management and the broader organization of production, among others, have been traced (or suggested) linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories (Mintz 1985; Rosenthal 2018) or diamond mines (Sherman 2021; Weiss 2011). Similarly, recent analyses have explored the long history of capital’s formation and expansion across the globe through chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships—understood as “quasi-sovereign” forms (Benton 2010; Easterling 2014; Mezzadra and Neilson 2019; Stern 2011; Stoler 2016). One could add plantations to such list.

As noted in the previous section, plantation-based genealogies of contemporary institutions have been developed with particular depth in relation to the North American context, and more specifically to the US carceral and criminalizing system (via Jim Crow, lynching, policing and ghettoization) as plantations’ poisonous heritage (Davis 2003; McKittrick 2013; Wacquant 2002). In relation to Jamaica, Thomas (2019) also explored the ways in which postcolonial sovereignty (and political life more generally) has been affectively inflected by the plantation system and its disavowed archives of violence. We have addressed the genealogical dimension in more detail in relation to the theme of plantation afterlives. Here, we wish to reflect on the multifarious and context-specific ways—including but not limited to genealogy—in which plantation systems may be related to sovereign operations.

In the cases discussed by the volume’s contributors, in fact, the relationships and arrangements obtaining in the space of the plantation may be analogous to, mirrors or pre-figurations of, or substitutes for the power and grip of the modern state as the locus of legitimate sovereignty. In Aureille’s study, the forgone socialist plantation in Cuba represents, in the imaginaries of those living in its ruins today, an affectively charged index of state sovereignty, a metonymy of its ascending and descending parables with respect to socialist rule’s perceived buoyancy, viability and effectiveness. In some ways, the chapter raises issues similar to those emerging from Stubbs’s and Muaze’s, centered on earlier epochs and different contexts on the American continent. In their analyses, the paternalistic and violent relations obtaining in the heyday of different plantations (in the United States and Brazil, pre- and post-independence respectively) appear as the building block and the mirror of national-imperial sovereignties. More specifically, in the eighteenth-century context examined by Stubbs, the founding fathers of the nascent liberal democracy were at the same time prominent planters, whose perceived ruling capacities were refracted across private and public domains. Planters’ preoccupations with their reputation, as a mirror of their overseers’ alleged skills and moral virtue, can thus be read as a metonymy or index of their alleged qualities as state leaders. Across public and private management, paternalism in this context appears as a core feature of statehood and of wider power dynamics (cf. Thomas 2019). Similarly, and in an even more univocal relation, in the nineteenth century plantations were the foundation of the newly independent Brazilian empire. As Muaze shows, the ruling planter class invested heavily in the cultivation of hierarchical and paternalistic distinction as a marker of its claim to power. All three cases push us to question the necessity of linkages between (and the content of) bourgeois institutions and ideologies, modern sovereignty and class consciousness in relation to plantation economies. Whether through socialism or in the upholding of slave-based production systems, modern sovereignty built through the plantation is seen to exceed the limits of liberal bourgeois citizenship and subjectivity, problematizing any uniform progressions and historical linearities.

Analyses of plantocratic regimes also question other grounding assumptions of theories of sovereignty. If the institution of private property is foundational not only to modern sovereignty but also to self-sovereignty, where the latter epitomizes the possessive individual of the liberal sort and is often the precondition to accessing citizenship and its constellation of entitlements, the extent to which plantocratic regimes made sovereignty distinct from property may be up for discussion. Should the distinction between sovereignty and property remain a necessary, definitional feature of modern political organization, as political philosophers argue (cf. Blaufarb 2016; Tomba 2019), where would this leave nineteenth-century plantocracies such as the antebellum United States or the Brazilian empire? Could they be simply relegated to pre- or early modern anachronisms? Or could the contiguities between one and the other be ascribed to something akin to, but more complex than, Marx and Engels’ classic definition of the modern state as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”?

At the same time, if in practice plantocratic sovereignty may be akin to a form of (colonial) property, ideas of the sovereign individual as the double (and the keystone) of the sovereign polity/plantation are closely associated with the emergence of a sharp distinction between a private and a public sphere, where the former was as tightly codified as the latter, as Muaze describes for nineteenth-century Brazil (cf. Lowe 2015; Stoler 1995). This was in turn mapped upon distinctions between lesser and higher legal personhood, along the lines of gender and class as well as of race, which constituted the ground for free or enslaved status. In early nineteenth-century Haïti, property represented the precondition for the birth of modern citizenship, together with labor (and hence the alienation of one’s powers, again the outcome of a possessive individualist conception of the subject), as both Bulamah and Ravano and Sacchi highlight in their respective chapters. Indeed, the very notion of freedom in post-revolutionary Haïti was founded on the twin discourses of labor and property. Similarly, in the case of Hawai’i discussed by Miller, the mid-nineteenth-century institution of fee-title property and contract labor, facilitated by the concomitant establishment of common-law courts (later administered by the planter elite), paved the way to the establishment of sugar plantations on the archipelago, and hence to its progressive loss of autonomous sovereignty, in a reverse process from those of the independent Caribbean islands. By contrast to Haïtian ideals of freedom, however, in the Cuban case analyzed by Aureille individual, property-based subjectivity applies to those who resisted the socialist project of expropriation in the 1960s, and thus to marginalized subjects. Yet, an act of property expropriation asserted socialist state sovereignty as much as founding the post-revolutionary Haïtian state-building process described by Ravano and Sacchi. Finally, in the late twentieth-century Sierra Leonean context discussed by Davies, while notions of hard work and self-making do appear, it is less self-property than one of its corollaries, namely self-exertion, that signals the mastery of individual and collective destinies, in line with the neoliberal ethos and the concomitant erosion of modern citizenship (an evanescent ideal to start with).

In Sierra Leone, furthermore, the presence of a Chinese-run sugar-making facility was violently questioned by civil-war rebels in a controversial bid to protect national and peasant interests. After the end of the conflict, a perceived failure of sovereignty led to the encouragement of foreign investments, and to new arrangements in which Chinese state capitalism gave way to a straightforwardly corporate model that took advantage of tax exemptions and gained sovereign control of the plantation and factory premises—signaling Sierra Leone’s nominally willful, though possibly obligated, sovereign retreat. Relations of dependency at inter-state level resonate across epochs and point to the imbrication of subjectivity and sovereignty, where one constitutes the ground for the other and vice versa. Just as subjects and other, non-human life-forms are hierarchically dependent on one another, so are putatively sovereign states. These recursive relations of dependency are grounded in plantations as either the original locus in which they were first experienced, refined and institutionalized, or as the site where they are re-elaborated, re-enacted, re-activated.

Finally, and in relation to hierarchies and subjugation, plantations can act as the discursive counterpoint for assertions of sovereignty cum racialized domination, as in the case described by Peano. In Italy, appeals against “slavery”, associated to the transatlantic trade, have served present as well as past sovereign (and sovereign-ist) manifestations with more or less explicit racist, colonial/anti-immigration purposes, while a supposedly “milder” system of enslavement has been used to differentiate a country seeking to style itself as more “civilized” than its trans-Atlantic and European imperial counterparts. Indeed, the control of movement, foundational to modern sovereign claims, has in the plantation one of its original experimental grounds: not only did the demand for plantation labor in the wake of slavery abolition in the British colonies (1834) occasion the birth of the indenture system as the origin of sovereign control on mobility, pointing to the colonial genealogy of the modern state (Mongia 2018; cf. Miller, this volume). The regulation of slaves’ mobility also represented a laboratory for the generalization of migration regulation in subsequent epochs (Browne 2015; O’Connell Davidson 2015; Parenti 2003), when it has invested freed slaves’ and so-called “new slaves’”—and more generally racialized and criminalized subjects’ (cf. Peano, Ravano and Sacchi).

In all cases, plantations appear as a sovereign-making machine, a workshop in (or against) which tools of both domination and resistance are forged, through the making of subjects and the sha** of their capacities, intimacies and relations. Of course, sovereign (and proprietory) claims in all these contexts were far from smooth, conflict-free affairs, not only on account of overt resistance by the oppressed, but also as a result of partly diverging interests within dominant groups (as the employment of the very notion of “plantocracy” to which we referred earlier testifies; cf. Stoler 1985b).

In the present moment, state sovereignty is often perceived to be undergoing a terminal process of ruination, which however leads to renewed—and in some cases even fortified—forms of control and governance (Brown 2010; cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2013 on the concept of a “sovereign machine of governmentality”, which of course draws and expands on Foucault’s seminal work on the subject). Sovereignties, inside and outside old and new plantation forms, are not fading so much as transforming within and beyond the nation-state framework, through their failures, as it were. The decline of modern state sovereignty has also been read as the potentially transformative withering away of hegemonic political forms, that had their foundations in plantation slavery, colonialism and racism (Thomas 2018). Yet, the nostalgia that accompanies the ruination of plantations and their sovereign frameworks, which some chapters clearly point to (Davies, Aureille), is an indication that life in the ruins of plantations and of nation-building may indeed feel harder and less hopeful.

The temporalities of this process are also problematic, for the nation-state has been depending all along on more-than-national sovereign entanglements, as many of the chapters clearly illustrate. In the Cuban as much as in the Sierra Leonean and Haïtian cases, export-oriented production has bound these polities to the world market and to several foreign interferences since the inception (cf. Ravano and Sacchi; Moore; Aureille; Davies)—if from the diametrically opposed ideological premises of socialist internationalism, that crucially supported the developmental project in Cuba, or of the discourse of fraternity and mutualism that accompanied Chinese investment in West African countries as in many others (and whose current retreat does not necessarily lead to a strengthening of national sovereignty), on the one hand, as opposed to the naked for-profit trade of capitalist markets (that may however at times be bound to discourses on “development”) on the other hand. Hence, a question arises about these emerging forms of sovereignty in the ruins of plantations: what directions are sovereign forms of power and control taking, and how do they speak to the past? How can we understand current transformations in the light of historical plantations as sovereign sites, which therefore both constituted the ground for and exceeded the nation-state framework? As mentioned, the graduated sovereignties and lateral citizenships of neoliberal exceptionalism (Ong 2006) may be seen to traverse the political history of the capitalist world-system from the inception, with plantations as one of their original sites of development. Indeed, plantations and other economic enterprises that displayed proto- or quasi-sovereign prerogatives were in many cases the building blocks of imperial projects (Cf. Behal, Miller, Moore, Muaze, Stubbs in this volume), where the latter intersected in complex ways with other, pre-existing kinds of assemblages of sovereignty, ownership and personhood (Bulamah; Miller; cf. Allewaert 2013; Chatterjee 2001; Hansen 2021). In this sense, a deepened understanding of plantations’ sovereign qualities can contribute in crucial ways to the problematization of liberal, modernist and Euro-centric conceptions of (Westphalian) sovereignty, its ideological grip and genealogies.

All chapters addressing the theme of sovereignty in relation to the plantation point on the one hand to the productive and subject-making aspect of such forms of power (tied for example to the notions of modernity and development, and in the Cuban case also to the construction of “the new man” and the skilled worker). On the other hand, of course, they refer to the multiple exclusions and erasures sovereignty is founded upon: in Aureille’s, Davis’, Bulamah’s, Miller’s, Peano’s and Chao’s chapters, we learn about forced displacements, the eradication of biodiversity, the debilitation and exposure of multiple life-forms to various kinds of hazards and the hyper-exploitative conditions of workers in old and new agrocapitalist ventures—all invariably accompanied by resistance, refusal, sabotage or flight. Indeed, in the Americas, “the notion of control of a whole territory and no longer a single plantation historically went hand in hand with the systematic formation of a national guard, very much directed against the possibility of a general slave uprising, rather than an exterior enemy of foreign powers” (Moulier-Boutang 2016: 41). Hence, the play of control and resistance, of production and subversion and their complex entanglements emerge as features of power relations in the space of the plantation, which put the production of subjectivities in connection with other life-forms and their diminution as much as with their thriving or flight.