Mapping water in Dominica : enslavement and environment under colonialism PDF
Preview Mapping water in Dominica : enslavement and environment under colonialism
Mapping Water in Dominica Culture, Place, and Nature Studies in Anthropology and Environment K. Sivaramakrishnan, Series Editor Centered in anthropology, the Culture, Place, and Nature series encompasses new interdisciplinary social science research on environmental issues, focusing on the intersection of culture, ecology, and politics in global, national, and local contexts. Contributors to the series view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspectives of various cultural systems. Mapping Water in Dominica Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism • Mark W. Hauser University of Washington Press Seattle Mapping Water in Dominica was made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University Libraries. Copyright © 2021 by the University of Washington Press Design by Copperline Book Services Inc. Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by PageMajik 25 24 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in the United States of America The digital edition of this book may be downloaded and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No derivatives 4.0 international license (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0). For information about this license, see https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact University of Washington Press. This license applies only to content created by the author, not to separately copyrighted material. University of Washington Press uwapress.uw.edu Color versions of the maps are available at DOI 10.6069/9780295748733.s01. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file ISBN 978-0-295-74871-9 (hardcover) ISBN 978-0-295-74872-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-295-74873-3 (ebook) This book is published as part of the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot. With the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pilot uses cutting-edge publishing technology to produce open access digital editions of high-quality, peer-reviewed monographs from leading university presses. Free digital editions can be downloaded from: Books at JSTOR, EBSCO, Hathi Trust, Internet Archive, OAPEN, Project MUSE, and many other open repositories. While the digital edition is free to download, read, and share, the book is under copyright and covered by the following Creative Commons License: BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consult www.creativecommons.org if you have questions about your rights to reuse the material in this book. When you cite the book, please include the following URL for its Digital Object Identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.6069/9780295748733 We are eager to learn more about how you discovered this title and how you are using it. We hope you will spend a few minutes answering a couple of questions at this url: https://www.longleafservices.org/shmp-survey/ More information about the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot can be found at https://www.longleafservices.org. To Jean and Bill Hauser for the questions they taught me to ask • Contents Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan ix Acknowledgments xiii Timeline xvii Introduction Welcome to Nature’s Island 1 WATERSCAPES Chapter 1 Mapping Slavery’s Material Record 11 PROPERTIES Chapter 2 Mapping Caribbean Waterways 47 Chapter 3 Mapping the Sugar Revolution 79 CULTIVATION Chapter 4 Mapping Peripheral Flows 119 Chapter 5 Mapping Belongings 155 Epilogue Presenting Predicaments 189 Notes 195 Bibliography 219 Foreword Modern colonial empires were built in many places in the world by the simul- taneous capture of human labor (in the form of slaves, indentured servants, in- debted workers, and sharecroppers) and natural endowments (in the form of soil-water relations and varied nonhuman life) for the production of agricul- tural commodities exported to distant lands in service of global markets. In this book, we encounter one set of such capture processes in one Caribbean loca- tion, an island, that was the site of historical and archaeological research that informs the work. Centered on the sugar economy that emerged in eighteenth-century Domi- nica to serve a world demand for sweetness, and on the power relations it forged,1 Mark Hauser’s wonderful study covers the environmental conditions in which sugar plantations, slave systems, and struggles over water and soil formed in the modern Caribbean. As an archaeologist writing colonial history, he brings tal- ents and perspectives to this work that are often not found, even in some of the more careful historical studies. At the same time, he offers welcome analysis of the gradual, fitful, and often unpredictable ways in which local economies en- counter global pressures and flows, and traces more precisely the transformations that are swept into current, rather un-nuanced, discussions of the Anthropocene and its variants, such as the Plantationocene.2 As Hauser notes, precolonial empires were built, particularly in the Amer- icas, by directing local agriculture, and its command over water resources, to the production of crops and goods that served the purposes of large-scale polity building. In that sense, the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean and the harnessing of land, water, and labor to the production of sugar and other crops for the world commodities market was another wave of such disposses- sion, redirection, and capture. It included the loss of many freedoms among the local communities and the importation of others in servitude, this time from Africa. To document this process—the ecological relations with which the production and decline of plantations are enmeshed—Hauser focuses on three issues: scarcity, mobility, and ideas of belonging. After discussing the material record of slavery and providing a description of the water channels ix
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