"Vast Forests of Clove": Landscape Management, Labor, and Livelihoods in 19th c. French Guiana

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.

Clove was an unlikely success among the many 19th c. economic strategies undertaken by French administrators in Guyane, the only South American colony within the empire. The implementation of clove plantations resulted from a combination of historical and geographical factors along with broad notions of colonial expansion and botanical experimentation. This paper outlines how the physical needs of the crop impacted the landscapes of production and shaped the daily labor regimes of enslaved people. These include the creation of specialized infrastructure such as canals, raised fields, and drying houses. I further attempt a commodity history of clove, tracking networks of distribution that linked captive African cultivators with markets in the U.S. and Europe.

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