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Symposium Program

9:00-9:20 – Opening Remarks
 
9:00-9:10 – J. Cameron Monroe (UCSC)
 
9:10-9:20 – Justin Dunnavant (UCSC)
 
9:20-10:40 – Panel 1: Regimes, Networks, and Landscapes
 
The entrenchment of African Slavery in the New World required, on both sides of the Atlantic, the emergence of new political/legal regimes, the coordination of novel economic networks, and the transformation of local landscapes. Cities, plantations, ports, and factories around the Atlantic littoral became articulated with one another and their local landscapes in dynamic new ways. This panel examines the local and long-distance landscape reconfigurations fostered by the rise of slavery in the New World, exploring a diverse set of spatial manifestations of the slave economy on both sides of the Atlantic.
 
9:20-9:40 – Lisa Randle (University of South Carolina): “When your Neighbor is your Kin: Panopticism along the East Branch of the Cooper River, South Carolina”
 
9:40-10:00 – Fraser Neiman (Monticello Archaeology): “Historical Ecology of Jefferson’s Monticello Plantation”
 
10:00-10:20 – Georgia Fox (SCU Chico): “Depleted and Defeated: Resource Scarcity at Betty’s Hope Plantation, Antigua”
 
10:20-10:40 – Paul Lane (Uppsala University): “An Outline Historical Ecology of Nineteenth Century Plantation Slavery in East Africa”
 
10:40-11:00 – Discussion Moderated by Justin Dunnavant                  
 
11:00-11:10 – Break
 
11:10-12:00 – Panel 2: Coping with Insecurity
 
The slave trade and the plantation complex brought people, plants and animals into new locales and interspecies relationships. Labor regimes, environmental devastation, and abject inequality forced the enslaved to adapt creatively to the limited resource bases available. The new dietary practices that resulted, in turn, shaped and transformed landscapes dramatically, resulting in unique colonial ecologies the legacies of which continue to shape the world today. In this panel, speakers explore these pivotal processes in the historical relationship between human diet, health, environment, and resource insecurity.
 
11:10-11:30 – Amanda Logan (Northwestern University): “Turbulence and Loss: How Chronic Food Insecurity Emerged in Banda, Ghana, during the 18th-early 20th centuries”
 
11:30-11:50 – Meredith Reifschneider (San Francisco State University): “Enslavement and Institutionalized Care: The Politics of Health in 19th Century St Croix, Danish West Indies”
 
11:50-12:10 – Mark Hauser (Northwestern University): “Objects without History: Substance and Portability in New West Indian Plantations”
 
12:10-12:30 – Discussion Moderated by Andrew Matthews
 
12:30-2:00 – Lunch
 
2:00-3:40 – Panel 3: Emerging Ecologies
 
The development of capitalism and slavery throughout the Atlantic world fostered an economic model of plantation agriculture that favored the rapid expansion of cash crop cultivation, often at the expense of local ecologies. As a result of ecological issues associated with deforestation and soil degradation, plantation landscapes required constant reconfigurations. Panelists explore, not just the ecological shifts that occurred in relation to cash crop cultivation and pastoralism, but the larger socio-economic factors that undergirded Atlantic consumerism.
 
2:00-2:20 – Elizabeth Reitz (Georgia Museum of Natural History): “Cattle and the Ecological Consequences of Slavery in the Carolina Low country”
 
2:20-2:40 – Marco Meniketti (Sans José State University): “Living in the Margins: The Legacy of Laborer’s Housing in the Landscape of Vernacular Architecture on Nevis”
 
2:40-3:00 – Diane Wallman (University of South Florida): “Socio-Environmental Histories and Legacies of Colonial Subsistence in the Insular Caribbean”
 
3:00-3:20 – Krish Seetah (Stanford University): “Landscapes of disease: An Indian Ocean case study”
 
3:20-3:40 – Discussion Moderated by Diane Gifford-Gonzalez
 
3:40-4:00 – Break
 
4:00-5:00 – Keynote Lecture - Judith Carney (UCLA), “Out of Africa: Botanical Legacies of Atlantic Slavery in the Americas.”