This edited volume centers on Antigua, an island in the eastern Caribbean, and one of its most profitable and well-known sugar estates, Betty’s Hope. Documentary records show that between 1715 and 1834, Betty’s Hope was home to as many as 392 enslaved individuals, all laboring to produce sugar for a global market. From the time of the estate’s founding in the 1650s until it was sold in 1944, the plantation remained under the ownership of one family—the Codringtons. The little I have sketched thus far is a familiar story of plantation slavery in the Caribbean: one of absentee owners divorced from the everyday conditions of plantations and their management and of enslaved people working and making life possible under the most difficult circumstances. With this volume, editor Georgia L. Fox and her collaborators clarify and enrich such familiar stories by providing data-rich chapters that chronicle the history of a community for which the legacies of slavery extend well into the present.

The volume has 16 chapters from 16 contributors, with Fox serving as both editor and author of three of those chapters. It is neatly organized into six parts that detail the history, archaeology, and heritage practices of the famous plantation. In the first chapter, Fox offers some background to the nearly decade-long research program at Betty’s Hope. Chapter 2 by Fox details the history of the estate owner’s house and the aristocratic family that financed its construction. In Chapter 3, Cory Look applies GIS techniques to reconstruct the Betty’s Hope landscape at various points in time, showing how space at the plantation was appropriated, maintained, and transformed.

Part II examines subsistence practices across the plantation. In this section, Jennifer L. Anderson explores the role of neighboring Barbuda in provisioning Betty’s Hope. Anderson argues that the plantation’s remarkable prosperity depended on the reliable supply of food and other goods produced in Barbuda. Geneviève Godbout follows with more detail on the provisioning system at Betty’s Hope by analyzing both archival and archaeological data from the estate owner’s house. Alexis Ohman closes out this part with a zooarchaeological analysis of mollusks and what they reveal about food access and preference at Betty’s Hope.

Part III focuses on cane agriculture and the ecological costs of transforming a small island like Antigua into a sugar colony. Here, Fox considers the extent to which the decline of the plantation system in certain parts of the Caribbean was due to a lack of innovation or to an inability to compete with sugar produced by enslaved laborers in Brazil, Cuba, and North America. Suzanna M. Pratt, E. Christian Wells, and Anthony R. Tricarico use the erosion-productivity impact calculator (EPIC) mathematical model alongside archival records to determine the extent of changes in soil quality at Betty’s Hope. They propose that even though plantation agriculture had a deleterious impact on soil health, it was the more recent and ongoing abandonment of the landscape that precipitated large-scale erosional events in the area.

Part IV transitions to a closer look at the processes that shaped social life for the enslaved laborers at Betty’s Hope. James F. Dator draws on a variety of archival sources to trace the Codrington family’s involvement in the wider trade in enslaved Africans. In Chapter 10, Fox discusses the implications of archaeological data recovered from domestic contexts of enslaved people and their households. Benjamin C. Kirby follows with a discussion of the results from a chemical sourcing analysis on Afro-Antiguan pottery. He shows how enslaved potters were deliberate in their choices of base clay, which suggests that they had a higher degree of autonomy than previously suspected. In Chapter 12, Charlotte Goudge applies a commodity-based approach to rum, one of sugar’s byproducts. Christopher K. Waters closes out this part with a closer look at Antiguan military defense infrastructure and places those developments in conversation with the historical trajectory of Betty’s Hope.

Antiguan archaeologist Reginald Murphy begins the sixth and final section of the book with an account of the restoration of the north windmill of Betty’s Hope. Amanda Kramp follows with an account of the collaborative process of creating and installing an interpretive exhibit for the visitor center at Betty’s Hope. In the final chapter Erin Friedman, Cory Look, and Matthew Brown discuss the application of drone technology to the Betty’s Hope project and its potential in heritage management. The volume concludes with an afterword in which Fox considers the legacy of enslavement in Antigua.

Overall, the book is a welcome addition to site-based studies of plantation slavery in the Caribbean. Undergraduate and graduate students will find the edited volume cohesive and accessible. Archaeologists and historians will find fruitful lines of inquiry that invite new and pressing questions about micro- and macro-scale processes at work in the region from the period of plantation slavery through emancipation and freedom.