Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery - by Dale W Tomich & Rafael de Bivar Marquese & Carlos Venegas Fornias & Reinaldo Funes Monzote (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 Paraâiba 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"--

Book 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 Paraíba 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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

About the Author

Dale W. Tomich is professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University. Rafael de Bivar Marquese is professor of history at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. 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.