Plantation Roads and the Impositions of Infrastructure: An Archaeology of Movement at Good Hope Estate, Jamaica

Abstract

ABSTRACT Studies of plantation surveillance have provided important understandings of the material dimensions of elite power and control over enslaved people. These studies have emphasized inter-visibility of managerial housing and the living/working spaces of enslaved people, as a panoptic strategy to enforce self-discipline. This emphasis on inter-visibility of living and working spaces, however, assumes a static population, rather than a complex, industrial society in motion. Using Space Syntax analysis, cartographic records, historic travelers’ accounts, and landscape documentation, this study addresses surveillance and planter control through a mobilities approach, elevating the status of road networks, while identifying the plantation as a carefully orchestrated landscape of movement. I demonstrate how understanding the manner in which movement is limited or itinerated, and for whom, represents a productive avenue of research at the intersection of inequality, control, and mobility. This approach is developed through a distinct archaeology of infrastructure.