Work and Models of Efficiency in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sugar Factories: A Caribbean Case Study.

Summary

Industrial design can increase labor management and mobility, increase efficiency, and structure worker behavior. As the industrial period evolved during the eighteenth century experiments in factory layouts produced efficient modes of production. But when the labor is enslaved, efficiency may not always be defined in terms of time or cost. This paper presents the industrial foot-print and spatial design of factories at several sugar plantations spanning over two centuries of operation on a former British colony of the West Indies. Archaeological investigation of nine factories offers insights into work regulated by confinement, patterned by punishment, and managerial surveillance. These were non-negotiable spaces, consciously designed to maintain product quality, a uniform flow of sugar, and to maximize labor with a whip. Although workers were property, and labor being perceived as part of the machinery, there was, nonetheless, covert space for individual pride among the skilled who held more power over the final product than plantation owners might have cared to admit.

It is hypothesized that changes observable in factory layouts are representative of reconceptualization of the individual, and of space itself, as much as efforts to increase labor efficiency, during a period in which significant societal changes were occurring.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage