Plantations

Plantations, estates established for large-scale agricultural production. The plantation developed in the Americas as part of the region's incorporation into the European world economy beginning in the sixteenth century. A distinctive form of agricultural enterprise, it combined specialized production of tropical and subtropical crops intended for large-scale external markets with the use of various forms of dependent or coerced labor. Over the course of its historical evolution, plantation production transformed tobacco, coffee, bananas, cacao, indigo, cotton, and above all, sugarcane from luxury items into articles of mass consumption. While the development of plantation agriculture was linked to the emergence of world markets for tropical staples, its viability derived from an abundant, cheap, and disciplined labor force secured by direct or indirect compulsion. Slavery, indentured servitude, contract labor, sharecropping, and tenancy concentrated laborers for commercial crop production, reduced their bargaining power, subjected them to lowered standards of living, and imposed upon them a strict labor discipline enforced by a hierarchical staff of supervisors and overseers. A clear distinction obtained between powerful owners, who generally claimed European descent, and a subordinate, and racially and culturally distinct, labor force. The planters' coercive control over the recruitment, allocation, and conditions of labor, guaranteed by the colonial state, established the conditions for profitable, large-scale commodity production in the American plantation zone.

Wherever it took hold, the plantation system disrupted or destroyed preexisting cultural norms and eliminated competing forms of economic and social organization. What anthropologist Charles Wagley termed "plantation America" formed in an area extending from the coastal lowlands of Brazil, through the Guyanas and the coast and islands of the Caribbean, to Chesapeake Bay in the United States, where soil, climate, and ease of transport facilitated the large-scale production of tropical and semitropical crops. The sparse indigenous populations in this region, unaccustomed to settled agriculture and European diseases, provided insufficient labor and were eventually replaced by imported workers. Later, with changes in transportation, in production technologies, and in market patterns, plantation production spread along the coastal lowlands of Peru, Ecuador, and Central America and to inland regions of Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina.

The plantation in the Americas formed as part of a broader political and economic complex within the European world economy. Specialized production of plantation staples depended upon overseas markets for the sale of the crop, while capital, technology, consumer goods, and even labor were imported from abroad. The evolution of the plantation in the Americas was shaped by colonial rivalries between European powers, the expansion and diversification of markets, growing productive capacities, changing sources of labor supply, and shifts in forms of labor organization throughout this international complex and their political and economic consolidation into a world division of labor.

Historically, sugar was the most important plantation crop and the one that developed this productive form to the fullest. Beginning in the eleventh century, growing European demand stimulated the spread of sugar production westward across the Mediterranean to the European Atlantic coast. By 1470 refineries in Venice, Bologna, and Antwerp had established a colonial relationship between producing regions and dominant importers. The adoption of Arab production techniques, especially irrigation, transformed cultivation and enabled intensification of land use. Nonetheless, the sugar industry in the European Mediterranean was characterized by small-scale production and diverse ways of organizing land and labor. This pattern of sugar cultivation was extended to Madeira and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic. Thus sugar remained a costly luxury product until well into the age of colonization.

During the sixteenth century the emergence in Spanish Hispaniola and, above all, in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé, of large plantations using African slaves to produce cheap, low-quality sugar for metropolitan refiners signaled the transition from Mediterranean polyculture to American sugar monoculture. However, the decisive break with the Mediterranean pattern came in Brazil. There, ideal climate combined with unlimited supplies of fuel, land, and the use at first of indigenous and then of imported African servile labor to create larger-scale operations that established the characteristic pattern of American plantation agriculture. In Pernambuco and the Bahian Recôncavo powerful senhores de engenho (mill masters) monopolized access to river courses in order to grind their own cane and that of dependent lavradores de cana (cane farmers), who themselves often employed large numbers of slaves. African slavery, the fertile massapé soil (a heavy clay soil preferred for sugarcane), and technical innovations in milling and boiling promoted large-scale production. The plantation linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas to form an Atlantic economy. Brazil dominated world production as sugar reached growing numbers of European consumers and became a significant source of wealth in the colonies.

The development of the plantation system in the Americas was tied to intercolonial rivalries between European powers. With the expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil in 1654, the center of the plantation economy shifted to the Caribbean. Rather than directly organizing production, the Dutch now offered slaves, technology, credit, and access to Dutch markets to planters in the British and French Caribbean. Between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1720s, the consolidation of large estates and massive importation of slaves to grow sugar eliminated the preexisting European yeomanry and indentured servants as sources of labor. The West Indies were transformed into "sugar islands," with majority populations of slave workers of African descent.

The eighteenth century was the classic period of sugar and slavery in the Caribbean. The West Indian colonies were the cornerstone of imperial politics and the development of an Atlantic economy. The mercantile policies of France and Britain finally eliminated the Dutch influence and enabled them to assert control over their respective colonies. Rising demand stimulated by falling prices created a profitable but highly competitive sugar market. In the Caribbean, these conditions resulted in concentrated landownership, intensive cultivation, heavy dependence upon slave labor, and the introduction of various innovations designed to reduce labor costs, improve yields, ameliorate manufacture, and mitigate the effects of deforestation and soil exhaustion. The West Indian sugar plantation was at the heart of the transatlantic commercial complex linking the African slave trade, European manufactures, and North American exports of livestock, lumber, fish, and grain. Perhaps 29 percent of the slaves transported during the course of the entire African slave trade were imported to the British and French Caribbean between 1701 and 1810. In Saint Domingue, the richest colony in the world, nearly half a million slaves produced more wealth than all the British West Indies and enabled France to compete with Britain in international politics and trade.

Between 1790 and 1914 industrialization and urbanization in Europe and North America, slave emancipation, and the end of formal colonialism throughout the hemisphere, together with the expansion and reintegration of markets, led to the decline of the old sugar colonies and the emergence of modern plantation agriculture. Increasing world consumer and industrial demand for sugar, coffee, cotton, cacao, and bananas resulted in the extension and diversification of plantation production. Railroads and steamships opened new areas to cultivation and linked them more firmly to international trade.

By the mid-nineteenth century Cuba was the world's largest sugar producer. Its sugar industry, along with those of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, was totally transformed by massive United States investment during the twentieth century. Peru too emerged as a significant sugar producer, and production for local markets developed in Morelos, Mexico, and Tucumán, Argentina. In new sugar zones, the usina central (central refinery), incorporating modern milling and refining technologies, increased the scale of production and transformed the relation between land, labor, and capital in diverse ways. Plantations in the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo made Brazil the world's foremost coffee producer. Coffee was also cultivated as a plantation crop in Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Later, after the introduction of the refrigerator ship, bananas became an important plantation crop in Central America, Colombia, and Ecuador.

The abolition of slavery throughout the hemisphere during the nineteenth century, combined with growing demand for plantation products, initiated a search for new sources of labor and new forms of labor control. In the old slave zones, planters and the colonial state struggled, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, to reimpose estate labor on freed populations. In many places state-sponsored immigration, particularly from Asia, provided an alternative source of labor. Contract laborers from India, China, Indochina, Japan, Africa, Madeira, and the Canary Islands were variously distributed to British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Peru, and Brazil. In the Brazilian coffee zone Italian Colonos replaced African slaves. In the tropical lowlands and piedmont areas of the Andes and Central America, labor was recruited from highland peasant communities. The demand for labor sharpened conflicts between plantation owners and smallholders and shaped racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity throughout the American plantation zones.

By the 1920s large-scale international migration had come to an end. A variety of forms of sharecropping, tenancy, contract labor, and wage labor prevailed. Even where workers were juridically free, however, the plantation owners controlled labor by monopolizing resources and eliminating alternative economic activities. Workers were exposed to seasonal employment, and, where local labor was insufficient, especially during planting and harvest times, regional inequalities provided sources of migrant labor. Conversely, by the twentieth century, technical innovation, the growing scale of production and capital investment, and the expansion and integration of markets resulted in a shift to corporate ownership and financing of plantations. Local planter classes were increasingly subordinated to or eliminated by corporate capital as plantation economies were integrated into production, marketing, and financial networks dominated by transnational corporations, particularly those from the United States. Thus the plantation began to lose its distinctive identity and came to resemble other forms of large-scale capitalist agriculture. Yet pockets of debt peonage still remain in the twenty-first century. In 2007, the Brazilian government freed 1,108 forced workers trapped on a sugar plantation in the state of Para.

See alsoEstancia; Hacienda; Slavery: Spanish America; Sugar Industry.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (1974).

Manuel Moreno Fragináls, El ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (1978).

Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (1984).

Manuel Moreno Fragináls, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (1985).

Michael J. Gonzales, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933 (1985).

Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985).

Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985).

Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (1985).

Verena Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Plantations, 1850–1980 (1988).

J. H. Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (1989).

Laird W. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (1990).

Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Barickman, B. J. A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780–1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Wolford, Wendy. "Of Land and Labor: Agrarian Reform on the Sugarcane Plantations of Northeast Brazil." Latin American Perspectives 31:2 (March 2004), 147-170.

                                      Dale W. Tomich