ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that architecture reflected the increasingly prevalent British Atlantic turn-of-the-nineteenth-century phenomenon of absentee enslavement and proprietorship. At once, objects of worth, containers of wealth, and symbolic projections of status, buildings and their surroundings held value, varyingly economic, aesthetic, cultural, and, indeed, historical. A comparative analysis of two estates built by the ascending English Arcedeckne family, Golden Grove in Jamaica and Glevering in England, demonstrates how architecture, spaces, and materials contributed to transforming coerced labor into social advancement. Archival consideration of the Arcedecknes’ correspondence and labor camp management records prompt the questions: Where might delineations between these landscapes – one ostensibly productive, the other aestheticized – break down? How were economic factors, like quantifiable output or the workers who rendered each productive, translated into aesthetic terms? And conversely, how did aesthetic predilections affect, or even direct, each site’s economic and technical management? Despite unbridgeable divides between the two places, answers to these questions arise out of juxtapositions of the estates’ respective houses and the physical materials from which they were constituted, the land they occupied, their ancillary buildings, and the people who inhabited each property. Architecture emerges as an essential element in the transatlantic enslavement economy.
