British Peasant Ideologies and Technological Approaches to Marginal Caribbean Landscapes

Summary

British colonial ideology originated, in part, from a view of the proper relationship between people, land, and government that was rooted in the ecology of Britain itself. This view was informed in the Caribbean by Barbadian and other large-scale sugar planting colonies, but the British Virgin Islands are ecologically and politically distinct. This paper employs high-resolution satellite imagery and GIS modeling to explore what happens when a British "peasant" ideology is laid onto a very different Caribbean landscape in an end-of-slavery experiment intended to place free Africans in their "proper" role. These data are combined with historic maps to analyze the different productive potentials of different parts of the site of Kingstown, British Virgin Islands, home to a group of free Africans settled there by the British Government in the 1830s. While the Kingstown people’s response was probably complex, this paper explores the limits under which they would have worked, had they employed the British model.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• The Interaction between Political and Ecological Frontiers

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16277