In this chapter, religion’s role in conflict and violence is examined, covering the decades from c. 1603 until shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641. The chapter traces how it was increasingly religious flashpoints – sacred objects, churches and churchyards, and rituals such as the Mass among others – that generated tension, unrest and even violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. As Protestant settlers sought to implement the work of ‘converting and civilising’, Irish Catholics pushed back against what they viewed as heretical incursions. They reveal battles over ideas of possession, heritage, power and the nature of the sacred itself, and how religious symbols and language were growing ever more important in how Irish and British, Catholic and Protestant viewed and lived alongside one another. Intra-confessional conflict is also addressed, through examining the eruption of violence by Scottish settlers against the Church of Ireland in the wake of the National Covenant and ensuing unrest in Scotland. It indicates religion’s potent ability to motivate and mobilise resistance, even unto violence, as crisis Unfolded across the Three Kingdoms.

This chapter considers the evolution of English policy towards Ireland from the sixteenth century onwards. It argues how, at the beginning of the seventeenth century and the important reign of James VI and I, there was a renewed emphasis on religion, specifically Protestant evangelisation, as a key part of colonial projects, with Ireland part of wider trends in developing English imperialism. This resulted in policies of ‘converting and civilising’, with concepts of civility becoming inextricable with the Protestant religion. This was made visible in the planning and requirements of plantation schemes such as Ulster, which is contrasted with earlier schemes’ more lax religious requirements. The stress on religion, in turn, generated Irish Catholic resistance, which also drew on religious arguments, justifications and imagery in resisting the dispossession, displacement and loss of power that plantations represented. The Catholic clergy were crucial actors in articulating this religiously inflected opposition. The effect of both plantation and challenges to it was the increasing voicing of grievances, across a range of issues, in religious terms and through religious categories.

This chapter considers sacred space and the battles surrounding its possession, uses and understandings of the sacred more generally, including the wider significance of the landscape itself as a sacred space. Irish Catholic approaches were nuanced, such as the distinctions drawn between newly-built Protestant churches and older buildings that could be ‘re-catholicised’. The numerous rites and practices that this entailed are explored, showing that while notions of the holy and control of space were important to Irish Catholics, there was, nonetheless, great variety in how that was expressed. Spaces such as churches and churchyards are also examined as locations where both sacrality and ethnic tensions overlapped, with disputes surrounding burial showcasing Irish Catholic hostility to Protestants and Protestantism as heresy but also as foreign bodies contaminating Irish soil. The politics of church possession is another theme, which is shown to have explosive potential for intra-confessional conflict, as Irish Catholics debated and fought over the control of churches as a central demand of their cause, leading to conflict among themselves.

Haiti was a remarkably constant presence in Carpentier’s life and its imprint on his narrative fiction and essays has been profound, far-reaching, and indelible. Carpentier’s fascination with Haiti begins with his first novel, ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933), culminates in The Kingdom of This World (1949) and resurfaces within the transatlantic context of the French Revolution in yet another major work, Explosion in the Cathedral (1962). While traces of Haiti appear in myriad formal and conceptual manifestations throughout Carpentier’s oeuvre, in this essay I suggest that the notion of the Plantationocene, forged by Donna Haraway and Donna Tsing, carries significant critical potential for refocusing Carpentier’s links with Haiti in a manner that is both transdisciplinary and cross-historical.

The Sandtoft settlement in Hatfield Level is the best-documented of several refugee communities established on improved wetlands. Described via the resonant language of ‘plantation’, the settlement connects agricultural improvement in England to imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, acting in the service of empire and state while forging transnational Protestant networks. As improvers, the Sandtoft settlers were fastened to the crown’s agenda to produce profit, subdue commoners, and integrate marginal localities into the nation. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, they met with hostility in England: at odds with Archbishop Laud’s repressive efforts to demarcate a distinctively English Protestantism, while facing a violent campaign of expulsion by fen commoners opposing improvement. Interpreting these experiences through the transnational lens of Protestant adversity, the settler community entangled their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia in early modern England, this chapter traces how engineered environmental change forged lines of solidarity and separation.

The author embraces Uniformitarianism to re-examine whether creoles and pidgins emerged in an exceptional way and why there are so few pidgins lexified by European languages in coastal Africa where the earliest trade contacts between European mercantile companies and Indigenous rulers took place. Equally significant is the fact that no historian of the trade mentions usage of a Portuguese pidgin-cum-broken language, though it appears that Portuguese functioned as the default lingua franca from the coast of West Africa to coastal East Asia. Note also that no English pidgin emerged in India, the territory from which the British East India Company spread its activities to Southeast and East Asia. There are more English pidgins than those based on other European languages; and most English pidgins are in the South Pacific. An extensive review of how the trade between Europeans and non-Europeans operated, through brokers-cum-interpreters, reveals that pidgins emerged like creoles by basilectalization away from the lexifier and not sooner than the early nineteenth century. Comparisons with the emergence of more specifically the Romance languages also suggests that the latter evolved similarly to creoles and pidgins, by gradual divergence away from the lexifier, under substrate influence.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

Sugar as an industrial commodity has featured in colonial as well as postcolonial literary texts. On the one hand, it stimulates desire and, on the other, it induces terror and abjection. Its status as an object of desire hinges on colonial modes of surplus accumulation as celebrated by its literary apologists. It serves as the muse of plantation capital precisely because its global demand generates revenue for those invested in the expropriating instruments of Empire. The imagination of the postcolonial writer, in contrast, represents sugar as an exceptionally bitter commodity. For it speaks to a harrowing history of abduction, deceit, transportation, drudgery, degradation, murder, insanity, rape and penury. It denatures nature, ecologically, and dehumanizes humans, physically as well as psychically. It gives birth to a grotesque and unnerving disorder. This chapters discusses literary texts from Oceania and the Caribbean that revolve around sugar—a commodity implicated in slavery and indentured servitude.

At the end of this story, I propose to compare the experience of segregated training at Huachuca during World War II to a ghetto: it presents the excluding and ostracizing face, as well as the protective and integrating face. Furthermore, the Huachuca experience had a double effect on the racial policy of the post-war army: the black hospital showed that interracial care could be accepted by doctors and patients, and set a precedent for integrated care at field hospitals based overseas during the war; the catastrophic fighting experience of the 92nd Division on the Gothic Line, as a result of its inadequate training, proved that segregated training was also negative from a strictly military point of view. Thus, the experiment carried out at Huachuca during the war laid the groundwork for the presidential decision to put an end to discrimination in the armed forces taken by Executive Order 9981 in July 1948.

In the summer of 1942, the governor of Arizona and the Secretary of War planned to enroll black soldiers from Huachuca to harvest cotton, which had become an essential raw material for the war. Faced with what was experienced as a humiliation, the infantrymen began to speak of the fort as “a plantation” on which Southern ante bellum slavery would be perpetuated. It is true that training conditions there were harsher than on other camps, repression more severe, and military justice racially biased.

This chapter takes plantation as a rubric under which theorizations of race and space in Marxism and Black and Indigenous critical theory might be usefully coordinated for the sake not only of intersectional practicality but intellectual purchase for literary scholars in particular. Historically associated with the racializing regimes of both settler colonialism and enslavement that made what historian James Belich has called “the Anglo-world,” plantation comes into view as a key means through which capitalist social relations originating in late medieval southeastern England have been planted across the planet to the massive detriment of human and nonhuman life. Understood as sites at which the compulsion to expand set in motion by capital in the metropole confronts noncapital in its most resistant difference, white settler colonies in North America and Oceania are treated as experimental spaces for the satisfaction of that compulsion – that is, as not only spatial but phenomenological frontiers of real subsumption. This chapter focuses on one such experiment: the settler/master’s assumption of the role of the God of Genesis, specifically the power to bring worlds out of and into being through acts of signification, the whole-cloth fiction of race foremost among them.

The South has never been a real space in the imaginations of authors from colonization-forward. From early works from the colonial era to the wave of Afrofuturist texts of the past several decades, the South has been a space of alternative realities, a site of speculation upon which authors projected imagined presents and futures. The “otherness” of the South has always lent the region a speculative bent in the United States and global imagination. This essay examines literature from the antebellum South itself, the supposedly geographically fixed monolith of plantation culture. Written by a majority white, proslavery authorship, southern imaginative writing before the Civil War always speculated on the “South” and shaped it as a cultural identity. To understand the endurance and widespread influence of the dominant versions of “South,” it is necessary to examine their literary origin point and not just the aftershocks and reverberations. Like writing about the South, writing from the South during the nineteenth century was always a speculative exercise, made especially evident when focusing on works by those invested in continuing an idea of “South” that lay the foundation for ideologies circulating long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

The Epilogue traces the influence and afterlife of Villa Pisani in domestic architecture of the southern colonies of British North America, as transmitted by eighteenth-century English translations of Palladio’s treatise.

Particularly from 1638 to 1653, John Milton was deeply engaged in Ireland, although his relationship with Ireland is less well known than Edmund Spenser’s. The 1641 Ulster Rising in Ireland informs Milton’s political development, culminating in his service to Cromwell’s republican government. As the Introduction details, the 1641 Rising follows decades of strife in Ireland, following on the 1541 acceptance of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, Counter-Reformation changes in the Roman Catholic Church, and successive English plantation attempts at reforming Ireland, including the Ulster Plantation (which started the year after Milton was born).

We explore and document the joint evolution of domesticated cereal production and highly hierarchical social structures in deep history and then trace the similar structures thorough to the plantation system. All of this history points to the gradual evolution of the monocultural system, today very prevalent but highly criticized on both social and ecological grounds. This is followed by a detailed examination of what it means to convert from the monocultural ideology to a polycultural system and all the details that emerge from such a move. We note that agriculture did not start with the idea of monoculture, the latter situated in particular historical moments, but that early agriculture and today’s more advanced agroecological systems are more accurately characterized as diversified farming systems.

Long arrived in Jamaica in 1758 hoping to make money and to be able to return to England soon. The plantation would be the source of his wealth, and a settlement with his older brother Robert secured him in the ownership of Lucky Valley. Having speedily made a propitious marriage into the white elite, he devoted himself for the next eleven years to every aspect of the management of a sugar plantation, all of which he subsequently described in his History. He represents the planter’s life as one of constant work and anxiety, yet ‘smoothed by the allurements of profit’. He saw himself as the head of the enterprise, responsible at every level, and disavowed the skills of the enslaved. He acquired new enslaved labour, organized the plantation on the basis of gendered and racialized practices, bought new land and built new works, greatly increasing the production of sugar and rum. Foreseeing the likelihood of an end to the slave trade, he worried about the failure of enslaved women to reproduce themselves, which he blamed on them, thus threatening future prosperity. He proposed new practices to improve what was conceptualized as ‘breeding’.