It is often thought that establishing and operating plantations is actually a very simple matter: the future planter must acquire land, cultivate it, grow a cash crop, and sell the product after harvest. But that is a serious underestimation of the complexity of the process. It is not without reason that countless would-be entrepreneurs have gone under. Future planters had to take into account a wide variety of aspects, including plant diseases, predators (such as insects), energy sources, water supply, labour recruitment, labour discipline, transport facilities, relationships with financiers and local authorities, and market opportunities. A plantation was therefore usually a difficult and risky enterprise. Its history is often presented as a continuous success story, but in reality failures have probably far outnumbered successes. P.F. Knowles was justified in saying: “Often in early stages of a crop’s development the best area of production is not known, mistakes may occur through ignorance, or unanticipated pests may appear. Usually the average yield is very low”.Footnote ¹ Typical, perhaps, is the following observation on the introduction of sugar cane in Hawaii: “Managers taught themselves how to organize a plantation and manufacture sugar (a delicate chemical process) by trial and error. Sugar mills broke down, burned down, and generally proved inadequate. […] Often error led to business failure”.Footnote ²

But even if the harvest was successful and the crop could be shipped to overseas buyers, the risks always remained clearly present. Whether long-distance transfers were commercially viable depended on which means of transport were available. If such means of transport had limited carrying capacity, if transport took a long time, and if it entailed serious risks, then only crops that could be well-preserved and had a high value-to-weight ratio, such as spices, were eligible for transfer. As transport became faster, cheaper, and less risky, bulkier vegetable products entered the picture as well. And when, at the end of the nineteenth century, good refrigeration techniques became available, perishable goods such as bananas and other fruit could also be transported across long distances.

The historian of technology Nathan Rosenberg stated the obvious when he wrote that “there are many things that cannot be known in advance or deduced from some set of first principles”. This fundamental uncertainty

This is also the reason why pioneers are often “punished”. Karl Marx had already pointed out in the third volume of Capital that “the pioneering entrepreneurs generally go bankrupt, and it is only their successors who flourish, thanks to their possession of cheaper buildings, machinery, etc.” And he added, in his usual sour manner: “Thus it is generally the most worthless and wretched kind of money-capitalists that draw the greatest profit from all new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social application by combined labour”.Footnote ⁴

As the knowledge of planters in the tropics and subtropics increased over time, their mutual competition became more sophisticated. Whereas, during the eighteenth century, former soldiers and other “meritorious” Europeans were rewarded with a piece of land so that they could have a farm or plantation there, this became almost impossible at a later stage because of the enormous know-how that had been accumulated in the meantime. In his manual on Modern Coffee Production, published in 1956, A.E. Haarer cautioned for instance:

Broadly varied knowledge is therefore an essential ingredient in any attempt to practise agriculture through plantations. The collection Plantation Knowledge, edited by Nicholas Miller and Ulrike Lindner, is an extremely important historical exploration of this issue. The collection comprises ten chapters, each of which is clear and well written, together with an excellent introduction by the editors. The book focuses on knowledge, but places it in a broad socio-historical context, based on the many and at times unfamiliar forms of plantations.

Each chapter deals with a case study, ranging from sixteenth-century Central Mexico and seventeenth-century Ireland to twentieth-century Indian tea plantations. Various crops are discussed, including sugar, rubber, cotton, cocoa, coconuts, and tea. It becomes clear that all kinds of labour relations existed: mostly in the form of coerced labour, such as slavery, convict labour, and unfree forms of sharecropping, but sometimes also as wage labour – not infrequently informal, precarious labour arrangements that endure into the present.

Jennifer Saracino demonstrates how Spanish colonists attempted to utilize the Badianus Herbal – an illustrated and descriptive scientific document of Nahua medicine and botany, translated into Latin in 1552 – for their encomienda system, acknowledging that these differed significantly from the later plantations. The Irish chapter by Ted McCormick focuses on William Petty’s prospecting efforts of 1655–1656, and therefore mainly concerns the production of information enabling the precise reallocation of land confiscated from the Irish.

Co-editor Nicholas Miller presents a microhistory of the Waimānalo sugar plantation in Hawaii, and shows that predominantly Chinese and Hawaiian day labourers were used while it was under Hawaiian management. Claudia Roesch reconstructs how planter Joseph Emory Davis attempted to implement the Owenite system of labour organization on his plantations along a bend in the Mississippi River. This involved transferring paternalistic management methods that had first been tried in Scotland to a slave-based system. Moritz von Brescius shows that the Charduar plantation in Assam not only developed new plants, but also new agronomic practices that “would inform the expansion of rubber commodity frontiers […] in all tropical regions the world over”, drawing attention to the collaboration between commercial estates on the one hand and “botanical gardens as knowledge hubs” on the other.

Christina Skott focuses on sugar growing in Wellesley Province on the Malay Peninsula, where “varieties of cane were tried and changed”. The abolition of slavery in 1833 in the British Empire led to an exodus of planters and investors in the West Indies who sought refuge in the East Indies, “taking their experience and expertise with them”. Marta Macedo explores “the deep entanglements between São Tomé and the Congo through projects of cocoa plantations” from the 1890s to the early 1910s. She reveals that “constant travel and transit between the Congo and São Tomé” took place. Theresa Ventura discusses the two largest “penal farms” in the Philippines, where copra was produced as a result of a “coproduction of agricultural and scientific fieldwork”. The farms made use of the rapidly growing prison population in Manila. She emphasizes that these penal farms “were the American nodes in a transnational network of Dutch and British botanical gardens and research stations”. Gillian McGillivray compares sugar production in post-emancipation Cuba and Brazil and attempts to answer the question of why Cuban cane farmers were more successful in defending their interests against sugar-factory owners than their Brazilian counterparts. She finds the answer partly in the extent to which export production involved a class and national dichotomy. Finally, Rebekah McCallum studies “how managing agencies and companies used their knowledge of the [Indian] tea industry […] to shape plantation labor policy […] prior to 1931”.

It is clear that the contributors address very different aspects of the growing body of “plantation knowledge”. Topics covered include plant parasites and diseases, nurseries, the use of fertilizers, soil exhaustion, labour management, precipitation, and technological innovations, such as the vacuum pan for sugar production. The editors rightly point out that “the range of knowledge inputs […] was truly global […] and came from across the spectrum of colonizer and colonized”.

The collected essays indeed show that plantation knowledge was the result of continuous exchanges across borders. This concerns not only the planters who learned from each other, but also the workers. McGillivray points out, for example, that “Cuban sugar workers formed the first national association of sugar workers during a visit to Mexico City”.

The collection invites further research, which is always a good thing, because our work as historians is never finished. In doing so, it would be important to pay more attention to gender aspects than is done in this collection.

Another question I have been wrestling with for years, and which this wonderful book has brought even more to the fore, is this: what about the relationship between colonial empires? Marta Macedo rightly speaks of the “interimperial logics of cooperation and competition” and Theresa Ventura of “transimperial scientific networks”. For example, I myself have repeatedly observed in the past that Kew Gardens, Buitenzorg, Pamplemousses, and other colonial botanical gardens generously provided each other with seeds and shared other important information. The present collection contains many references to such interimperial cooperation. Experts from one empire were welcomed into another and given a wealth of information. Von Brescius reports, for example, that “Dutch officials and planters closely followed developments in [British] Assam, translating planting treatises, comparing outcomes, and eventually offering potent critiques of Charduar’s calculations”. I might add that British experts, in turn, visited the Netherlands Indies to learn the finer points of coffee and tobacco cultivation. This naturally gave rise to discussions that sometimes spanned several continents.

The differing perspectives make the collection lively and a pleasure to read. But at the same time, I wonder: how can we construct a coherent picture of this? In their introductory essay, the editors claim that they provide “a general history of plantation knowledge”, but we do not seem to be there yet. It will be quite a task to unite the various elements into an overarching historical theory. But that does not detract from the fact that this collection represents an important step in that direction.