ABSTRACT
Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by these people, this book offers new ways of seeing history from below, of linking localised experiences with global transformations and connecting deeply personal lived realities with larger epochal events that defined the history of slavery and its abolition in the British Caribbean.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 3|2 pages
SECTION I – PLANTERS, WORKERS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PLANTATION SPACE Plantations and Homes: The Material Culture of the Early Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Elite
part 4|12 pages
SECTION II – MATERIAL INEQUALITIES AND PRACTICES INSIDE ENSLAVED COMMUNITIES The ‘Better Sort’ and the ‘Poorer Sort’: Wealth Inequalities, Family Formation and the Economy of Energy on British Caribbean Sugar Plantations, 1750–1800
part 5|1 pages
SECTION II – MATERIAL INEQUALITIES AND PRACTICES INSIDE ENSLAVED COMMUNITIES Death and Burial at Marshall’s Pen, a Jamaican Coffee Plantation, 1814–1839: Examining the End of Life at the End of Slavery
part 6|12 pages
SECTION III – THE USES AND MEANINGS OF MATERIAL CULTURE BETWEEN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM Unsettled Houses: The Material Culture of the Missionary Project in Jamaica in the Era of Emancipation
part 7|3 pages
SECTION III – THE USES AND MEANINGS OF MATERIAL CULTURE BETWEEN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM Plantation Labourer Rebellions, Material Culture and Events: Historical Archaeology at Geneva Estate, Grand Bay, Commonwealth of Dominica
