"This Coffee Only Succeeds when the Wood is Cleared and Burned off": Slavery, Agricultural Practice, and Deforestation in 19th Century Jamaica

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In the opening decades of the 19th century, Jamaica experienced its first coffee boom. As planters raced to create productive plantations in the eastern and central highlands of the island, they employed gangs of enslaved laborers to clear cut an untold number of acres of old growth tropical forests. This paper reviews the labor and land management strategies employed in the clearing and cultivation of coffee, and the long term and devastating effects coffee production had on the highland landscapes of Jamaica. Archival, cartogrpahic, and archaeological materials from the plantation of Marshall's Pen will be central to this analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Co-Producing Space: Relational Approaches to Agrarian Landscapes, Labor, Commodities, and Communities

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow