Food Provisioning at Betty’s Hope Plantation, 1780s–1850s

Abstract

Throughout the colonial period, the occupants of the Betty’s Hope site relied a complex provisioning networks to obtain edible goods, tableware, and other necessities not only from the British Metropole and from local producers in Antigua but also from neighboring islands, including Guadeloupe, and from continental America. In this context, Betty’s Hope residents called upon food production and convivial hospitality were used to negotiate and stabilize their position within Antiguan society, both under slavery and after Emancipation (1834), under the particular constraints of absentee ownership and colonial trade regulations. The chapter combined the analysis of material cultural recovered at Betty’s Hope plantation with a close reading of correspondence relating to provisioning on the estate, to illustrate the enduring presence of informal trade, customary reciprocity, smuggling and illicit transactions on the estate throughout the nineteenth century.