ABSTRACT
From the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, before any British New World colonies, English administrations pursued a process of development by dispossession, which they called “plantations,” in Ireland. Britain first developed an architecture of extraction in Ireland, with dispossession, ethnic differentiation, and privileging of the settler colonials. This early plantation system in Ireland initiated for British Atlantic New World colonies what Martinique-born Édouard Glissant calls the plantation “modes of Relation.” The plantation relation survives transatlantic transplantation and is ramified by it. In Barbados, one of Britain’s earliest and most profitable New World colonies, plantations were built upon planning and architectural techniques of extraction developed initially in colonial Ireland plantations. With particular attention to some of the remaining seventeenth-century buildings in Ulster and Barbados and Richard Ligon’s 1657 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, I trace in this chapter the development and transatlantic transplanting and transformation of early British colonial plantations from Ulster, Ireland to Barbados (and back) and I explore how Ligon aestheticized the plantation, changing its meaning going forward.
