#plantation system

[haitianhistory]

Cheney, Paul Burton. Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017, 264pp.

Liberté ou la mort: Placing the Haitian Revolution in the Age of Revolution and Atlantic History

In the words of the publisher: “In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, a family of Breton nobles, draws on remarkable archival finds to show that despite the wealth such plantations produced, they operated in a context of social, political, and environmental fragility that left them weak and crisis prone.”

“Focusing on correspondence between the Ferronnayses and their plantation managers, Cul de Sac proposes that the Caribbean plantation system, with its reliance on factory-like production processes and highly integrated markets, was a particularly modern expression of eighteenth-century capitalism. But it rested on a foundation of economic and political traditionalism that stymied growth and adaptation. The result was a system heading toward collapse as planters, facing a series of larger crises in the French empire, vainly attempted to rein in the inherent violence and instability of the slave society they had built. In recovering the lost world of the French Antillean plantation, Cul de Sac ultimately reveals how the capitalism of the plantation complex persisted not as a dynamic source of progress, but from the inertia of a degenerate system headed down an economic and ideological dead end.”

According to the Department of History of the University of Chicago where the author teaches, “Paul Cheney is an historian of Europe with a specialization in old regime France and its colonial empire. Before beginning his PhD training in history at Columbia University, he studied political economy at the New School for Social Research. He has taught at Columbia University, the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin), and the Queen's University of Belfast.”

*You can read a review of the book written by David P Geggus, an authority on colonial Saint-Domingue, here.

[afishtrap]

In this paper I shall use the list of 1805, together with related sources, to determine whether current conceptions of Javanese society around I8oo can still be accepted. The opus classicum in this respect is Burger's well-known dissertation from 1939. He states that Javanese society around 1800 had hardly been touched by Western influence, that it was characterized by subsistence agriculture, self-sufficient villages, an undifferentiated mass of peasants, no wage-labour, hardly any tenancy, no trade or market to speak of, and hardly any money.3 Although this book was written 45 years ago, recent publications on the nineteenth century still use it as a starting point. Publications on earlier periods do, however, challenge this notion: Jan Wisseman and Leonard Blusse, for instance, demonstrate quite clearly that Central and East Java in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries and West Java in the seventeenth century had a rather monetized economy. But they are exceptions.

Peter Boomgaard, Buitenzorg in 1805: The Role of Money and Credit in a Colonial Frontier Society, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1986), pp. 33-58

I’m including this just as an example of how academia’s dry tone can make even the most brutal and desperate of situations sound not just matter-of-fact, but downright civilized.

The Regency (Regentschap; Kabupaten) of Buitenzorg can be regarded in several aspects as a typical frontier area. Geographically it is wedged in between the city ofBatavia and its hinterland (the so-called Ommelanden) in the north, and the Priangan Regencies in the south. The Ommelanden can be regarded as a colony of settlement, consisting of the so-called Private Estates (Particuliere Landerijen). Owners are mostly Europeans and Chinese, with a sprinkling ofJavanese. A Private Estate may be called aplantation, but it has to be kept in mind that the term plantation covers a wide range of varying phenomena. If we want to be more specific it might help to place the Private Estates in the Ommelanden around 800o in the same class as the Latin American hacienda and the mediaeval European manor. They varied in size from small to very large, the mass of the inhabitants consisted of sedentary peasants with various forms of tenancy, and they had a demesne or owner-operated area with cash crops. The demesne could be worked with corvee labour or wagelabour; the peasantry paid rent (or, if you like, tax) either instead of corvee labour or on top of it. In the case of the Private Estates the commercial crop was often sugar, grown by wage-workers (bujangs), hired for a year. The bujangs also operated the sugar-mill. The peasantry paid a 'tax' of one-tenth of their staple crop, rice, the so-called cuke. They had to perform corvee labour once a week, but it seems that corvee labour was probably confined to the upkeep of roads and bridges and perhaps some transportation services. Whatever the official regulations were, however, there were many instances of landowners squeezing their peasantry dry. It is reported in 1795 that 11/16th of the average rice crop is paid as tax to the landowners. The administrative structure of the Ommelandenw as entirely European, with hardly any traces of indigenous elements left. The growth of the number of Private Estates and of their population had been so fast over the last decades of the eighteenth century that the development of the administrative apparatus had lagged behind, due to bureaucratic sluggishness and the restricted means of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The drawbacks of that situation became more and more apparent from I790 onward, when robbery, murder and the use of opium assumed alarming proportions. To make up for a lack of police personnel, the landowners were permitted to keep private jails, where suspects could be held before being sent to the Commissioner in Batavia. Focal points of much mischief were the warungs or shops, for which every landowner could get a licence from the Commissioner (Gecommitteerde). Usually the landowner leased his licence to a Chinese for about a oo times as much as the original fee. Although 'shop' is the correct translation for warung, the idea conveyed by this term to a modern Westerner is quite misleading. A warung in the Ommelanden around 1800 was a brothel-cum-opium-den, doubling as gambling-house and cockpit. It was there that the unmarried bujangs spent their money and got into debt, which often marked the beginning of a criminal career, but sometimes the end of the Chinese warung-holder as well, because many a warung-keeper was murdered by his customers.5 The landowners and their mandadors or potias (European or Chinese administrators of an estate) stood also a fair chance of getting murdered, often as a result of severe treatment ('strenge behandeling') of their peasants and bujangs. But it was certainly not economic exploitation alone that shortened the average life expectation of the highhanded landowners in the Ommelanden Reverend Hooijman, landowner of Pondokgede was killed in 1800 sitting on his veranda on a Saturday night while preparing his sermon. The official report on his murder surmises that his extraordinary inclination towards the fair sex ('bijzondere neiging voor de schone kunne') must have caused his violent end.6 The death of mandador Bote in 1807 at the hands of a robber band three hundred strong, was occasioned by a personal grudge of Kyai Gede, leader of the bandits and formerly in cahoots with Bote. It seems that they made a deliberate detour to Ciampea, Bote's Estate, just to murder the mandador. Kyai Gede watched this spectacle protected against the tropical sun by a large payung (a ceremonial parasol, traditional attribute of high Javanese dignitaries), and surrounded by gamelan playing children and adolescents.7 This was no doubt an exceptional case: most robber bands were much smaller, usually any number between five and twenty-five, their leaders local bullies without aspirations as august as those of Kyai Gede, their aim plain robbery of anything movable, especially buffaloes. Bands like these could be handled by the mandador and his henchmen. In the case of Kyai Gede it would be more proper to speak of peasant unrest, and it was only with a large force of armed retainers of the combined landowners under the leadership of Johannes van den Bosch, landowner and professional soldier (the later Governor-General) that Kyai Gede could be killed and his band dispersed.

I mean, paid with food and lodging, not cash. No mention of whether anyone could leave: an important point, there.

I have found hardly any mention of wage-labour, and we must assume that the bujang who formed part of the cacah was not paid in cash, as was the case in the Ommelanden, but in food and lodging.

[iandeleonarts]

Katrina's Roots: Slavery, Race and the Politics of Caribbean Hurricanes 1780- 1840

Brilliant lecture by Stuart B. Schwartz on the practical and metaphorical implications of colonial-era Caribbean storms as they relate to slavery, empire, and modern-day governmental failures.

some points of interest from the talk: 

1780, before his execution, runaway slave Plato curses Jamaica with a devastating storm, which would actually arrive later that year in the form of a terrible Hurricane.

1831, slave rebellion in Virginia organized by Nat Turner, said to have drawn favorable auguries from two solar eclipses that year

generally, Hurricanes are seen throughout the colonies as incredibly dangerous for planters, as they not only resulted in agricultural devastation, but also famine/rebellion amongst the slaves

Schwartz talks about journalistic language: after a hurricane, when whites loot, it is seen as a creative survival technique--when blacks loot...you can imagine

post-Hurricane destruction used to justify the deplorable conditions in which slaves always lived, regardless of storms--"let not calamities be construed as cruelty"

while Hurricanes were doubtless used as evidence of God's displeasure with the colonies, there was a very clear understanding early on that these winds were a yearly, regular event

white woman in the audience asks a weird question and seems amazed to learn that the indigenous Caribbeans were intimately acquainted with Hurricane knowledge and could predict them accurately

Schwartz recounts Columbus' eventually being able to predict Hurricanes as well--proof of which apparently got him labeled a "witch"

"If nature is against us, we will conquer nature."- attributed to Simon Bolivar

Hurricanes as "terremotos" in the sky

Hurricane Mitch in Central America proves the neoliberal failure which is the privatization of relief systems

Rosa Luxemburg on the 1902 volcanic eruption in Martinique and its Imperial equivalents

1844 Hurricane in Cuba devastates coffee plantation and creates an incentive for increased sugarcane cultivation

Racist post-Hurricane colonial rhetoric propagated the myth that black slaves, when expecting aid or relief would become unmoveably lazy--a discourse that continues to permeate our culture, as can be seen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the gulf--

"The emergence of a non-interventionist state, with a reduced concept of the public sector, in which victims, because of their punitive failings are viewed as undeserving of aid, continues a long tradition of opposition to the concept of relief as a human right. And in a city like New Orleans, where half the population was African-American, and a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line, it is very easy to trace a lineage of neglect and prejudice back to much earlier concepts of what the state's responsibility was supposed to be and what their attitudes towards the disenfranchised was supposed to be in the wake of a natural disaster."

 - basically the Reagan argument, government is the problem and needs to be limited...we all know how that turned out

(note)--Reagan was NOT an anarchist