"Plantation," the Public Good, and the Rise of Capitalist Agriculture in the Early Seventeenth-Century Caribbean

abstract:In sixteenth-century English colonialism the term "plantation" had carried entirely public connotations, but through the 1630s and 1640s English Caribbean settlers consciously muddied this definition and applied the term to private, profit-driven landholdings while seeking to retain its public connotations. This article traces the transformation of the term "plantation" in the region and highlights its implications for the ways that English colonists were able to organize and rationalize their exploitation of people and the environment. The article first charts the ways that the public definition of the plantation shaped early settlement. The next two sections consider the circumstances that drove definitional innovation. English settlers in the Antilles chain responded to the imposition of a proprietary property regime by claiming the public status of the plantation for individual estates. Conversely the Providence Island Company's rejection of private landownership led settlers to use the idea of the plantation to define their private stake in the venture. Ultimately the article's final section demonstrates that elite settlers embraced a new hybrid public private definition of the plantation because it offered them a way to legitimize their pursuit of private profit, and it helped to structure and justify their control over bound and enslaved people.