Moving Landscapes to Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, and Ireland: Plantations, National Identity, and the Colonial Picturesque

abstract:The traditional opposition between French and British landscapes—one the product of absolute monarchy, represented by Versailles; the other a marker of the ideals of a free parliament, encapsulated in the landscape garden—is well known. But how did the polarization of two national landscape types percolate down to their colonial possessions, particularly their highly exploitative landscapes? Maps, images, and the landscapes themselves indicate that the French colonial landscapes were more honest and unveiled than their British counterparts, whereas the ambivalence of Irish-Caribbean plantations to French and British narratives of landscape history may reveal an acutely paradigmatic interpretation of colonial space.