Plantation Knowledge

<p><b>The first book to examine plantations in their global variations through the history of knowledge.</b></p><p>Few institutions feature as prominently in contemporary notions of colonialism racism and environmental degradation as the modern plantation. The racialized plantations of the Atlantic World loom large in the public imagination namely those of the British Caribbean and the US South. Yet the plantation has proliferated into the Information Age and has continued to expand across the tropical zone of our planet surviving the abolition of slavery the collapse of European empires and the challenge of generations of anti-colonial thinkers. To grasp how the plantation has spread and evolved in our modern world this volume studies what it terms <i>plantation knowledge</i> or the types of expertise experience and information processing that have made and continue to make plantations possible. Drawing on case studies including Ireland Mexico Mississippi Hawaiʻi India Malaysia the Philippines Cuba Brazil and Central Africa it examines the global spread of the plantation; the diverse people beings and forms of knowledge intertwined with this process; and the elasticity and durability of the plantation as a mode of commercial agriculture.</p><p>This book is made freely available in an open access edition with the support of the European Union through a project funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme grant agreement No. 889078.</p>