Land, Labor, and Memory: Plantation Landscapes in Martinique

Author(s): Elizabeth C. Clay

Year: 2016

Summary

Landscapes are shaped by the experiences of people over time, serve to establish and reinforce social relations, and are spaces within which individuals actively construct their experiences with each other and with their environment. This paper focuses on plantation landscapes on the island of Martinique, where the significant role of the French sugar industry - made possible by slave labor - in the globalizing Atlantic world is still clearly visible. Plantation sites that have not been lost to development remain on the landscape as crumbling buildings, small-scale fishing or agricultural villages established post-emancipation, or are still in use for large-scale agricultural export production. Using historic maps, satellite imagery and archival sources, this paper will analyze the physical legacy of the plantation economy in two distinct regions of Martinique to explore how colonial settlement patterns and landscape transformations have persisted through time. 

Cite this Record

Land, Labor, and Memory: Plantation Landscapes in Martinique. Elizabeth C. Clay. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434374)

Keywords

Temporal Keywords
Colonial

Spatial Coverage

min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 243