CHAPTER 5

Depicting and Defining the Plantation in the Early English Caribbean, 1625–1675

PAUL MUSSELWHITE

Despite being an intensely contested space, maps of the early English Caribbean depict few borders. They are, though, pockmarked with settler claims in the form of “plantations.” Richard Ligon’s famous 1657 map of Barbados was an early example of the form; Ligon depicted the island as an unbordered space interspersed with hills, mounted horsemen, escaping enslaved people, and draft animals, but along the leeward coast he marked a string of small rectangular symbols and names (see Figure 5.1).1 Modern viewers instinctively recognize these symbols as plantations and understand them immediately through the lens of a rich scholarship that has identified the plantation as a private space of commercial agriculture and brutal racialized labor exploitation. Nobody stops to notice the absence of lines delimiting these places, even though surveying and enclosure are recognized as a critical precursor of this Atlantic form of capitalist agriculture. The omission, though, is significant. The absence of lines on a map, as much as their presence, can be revealing about the way a space was claimed. In this case it provides an important insight into what was actually a messy process of defining the plantation as a form of settler possession in the first half-century of English settlement in the region.

England’s earliest Caribbean cartographers, such as Ligon, marked plantations as nodes, more akin to the towns and villages on contemporary European maps, rather than as the two-dimensional bounded spaces that were beginning to be charted by contemporary property surveyors in England and even in other colonial zones such as Ireland and Bermuda. English surveyors certainly had the necessary skills and experience to quickly master the surface area of comparatively small Caribbean islands; in fact, they began drawing plats for individual deeds by the late 1640s. Yet, mapmakers chose not to even gesture at such lines when they drafted maps of the English islands. They sought to portray plantations as unbounded nodes of settler power rather than bounded acreages granted by the state. Even as “plantations” became spaces of naked capitalist exploitation and surveyed boundaries began to appear in land transactions, planters cultivated and adapted the plantation’s associations with the public good and public authority in the service of retaining far more commercial and legal independence than they would have enjoyed as mere freeholders. Making plantations appear like towns, with power over elusive hinterlands, in the cartographic evidence that reached England was part of an effort to define exactly what kind of place a plantation was.

The absence of boundaries on early maps, and this larger effort to define the plantation, has been overlooked because historians have long considered the plantation as a precociously private space. One of the foundations for the standard account of the rise of the plantation complex is the drive for private property. Scholars have long argued that, among European invaders in the Americas, English colonists were uniquely fixated on private landownership, property boundaries, and profit, and that this mindset made the emergence of slavery and plantation agriculture seem rational and inevitable in Anglo-America.2 Recent historiography has challenged this picture of inevitability by recovering other English Caribbean models built around local production, inter-imperial trade, and privateering.3 However, even much of this analysis assumes a clear dichotomy between plantation and nonplantation models. Accepting the definition of the private, capitalist plantation, it assumes that every place described as a “plantation” in the Caribbean, and every node marked on Ligon’s map, reflected at least the aspiration to establish nakedly acquisitive commerce, overlooking the many “plantations” elsewhere in the English Atlantic that were organized around purposes as diverse as gathering congregations of the elect or drying cod.4 The assumption that the plantation represented one simple path of development flattens the picture of the emergence of capital-intensive, slave-powered agriculture. In fact, the plantation was a completely new form of colonial place that was still being defined and redefined in ways that mediated the struggles that historians have identified over the growth of capitalism and state power.

This essay argues that cartography itself served as a medium for that debate about the nature and purpose of the plantation. Ligon’s map of Barbados reflected the aspirations of an emerging commercial and slave-owning class on the island in the 1650s, but the contours of the debate became clear in the wealth of maps depicting the newly acquired island of Jamaica in the 1660s and 1670s. In the aftermath of Oliver Cromwell’s ill-fated Western Design to conquer the Spanish Indies in 1655, when the English sought to salvage their pride by “planting” Jamaica, they confronted head-on the ambivalent meanings inherent in that objective.5 Under the governorship of Thomas Modyford there was an unprecedented outpouring of maps of Jamaica, representing an effort to define the nature of its plantations, in the space between nodes of public settler authority and bounded spaces of private commerce within the Restoration Empire. Parishes became bounded spaces while plantations remained nodes, albeit with new output-oriented details. While Jamaica would take decades to eclipse the sugar profits flowing from Barbados, its prodigious crop of cartography helped to refine the definition of plantation much earlier. They attest to the intellectual effort that went into constructing the plantation as a potent new conceptual and spatial technology of settler colonial appropriation and racial capitalism—a technology so powerful that generations of scholars have employed the English-derived term “plantation” to describe a whole system of slave-powered commercial agriculture that came to shape the modern world.

Conceiving the Plantation

Since the sixteenth century British thinkers had described colonizing efforts, particularly in Ireland, as a process of “planting civility” in barbarous frontier zones. Drawing from deep classical and Christian traditions they defined civility as manifest in towns and cities, and they were convinced that only arable agriculture, or “planting,” would allow a sufficiently large and sedentary population to support these institutions. Early English ideas about “planting” and colonialism were, therefore, not about appropriating land for private individuals to plant particular crops, but rather about completely dismantling Indigenous pastoral societies that they viewed as too atomized and privatized; “planting” involved reconstituting colonial space with new social and political units structured around English settlers who would practice the right form of agriculture to underpin “civility.” These new communities were initially described as colonies, seigneuries, or towns, but around the turn of the seventeenth century the novel term “plantation” began to be applied to places being constructed and claimed by the logic of “planting.”6

Plantations, then, involved the appropriation of land, but the plantation was not a private landholding, but rather an exercise in commonwealth-building that Francis Bacon described as among the most “ancient, primitive, and heroical works.”7 The Crown claimed and then leased land to companies and individuals to engage in plantation—to allocate and manage a collection of land rights and jurisdictions with the aim of establishing a stable new settler community. Plantations therefore offered an opportunity for practical experimentation in different forms of public and private landholding that colonial projectors believed best suited to cultivating the civic virtue that supposedly underpinned the colonial endeavor.8 Planners were certainly not naïve; they recognized that private gain was essential to incentivize individuals; as one English planter in Ireland noted, “this word Myne is a strong warrior, every man for his owne will adventure farre.”9 The key, though, for those schooled in Renaissance humanist thought, was how to balance the allocation of private land with other types of public property that would give colonists a shared stake in the venture and support public infrastructure.

Early English plantations differed considerably from one another in the structure of land distribution. Plans for plantations in Ireland ranged from neo-Roman colonies in which a community of small-scale landholders were centered on a city that would collectively manage public works, to hierarchical seigneuries in which manorial lords received land from the Crown and collected rents but were expected to provide public services to their tenants.10 When the Virginia Company began granting private land in the 1610s they also established plantations as corporate communities charged with dividing the land in service of the public good and establishing commons. The rival faction of colonial investors who took control of the Bermuda Company in these same years favored a manorial model in which wealthy individuals established “families” of tenants on their “shares.”11 In all of these cases, though, the “plantation” was the spatial container for working out these questions of political theory.

Despite its reputation as a place for grasping opportunists, the geography of the early English Caribbean was also defined by plantations envisioned within the terms of this debate over public and private interests. When Sir Thomas Warner established the first successful English colony in the Caribbean on St. Christopher in 1623, he erected a fortified compound not unlike early English colonies elsewhere and termed this settlement “a Plantacon.” Commissioning him as governor of the island a few years later, the Earl of Carlisle noted that, by establishing the plantation, Warner had been “directing his Studies and endevours wholy unto Piety and ye publique.”12 Notably, though, other groups of investors and colonists settling on St. Christopher settled their own beachheads on other parts of the island as separate plantations with distinct jurisdictions and landholding patterns.13 Elsewhere in the Caribbean, English colonial planners experimented with other forms of landholding and land use. On Barbados the initial settlement by Sir William Courteen eschewed private landholding and operated the plantation as a shared commercial enterprise. The Providence Island Company, established in 1630, settled the whole of Providence Island as a single plantation divided into tenancies with colonists laboring in families. In all of these cases the plantation remained a community organizing land distribution.14

Gradually, over the next two decades, the idea of plantations under the primary direction of one resident planter emerged. In the mid-1630s the Earl of Carlisle, who secured the proprietorship of most of the English Caribbean islands, began granting land as tenancies to those who would acknowledge his ultimate authority over the archipelago. Many colonists gratefully took the grants in an effort to secure their title to land amid a welter of conflicting authorities. It quickly became evident, though, that they rejected Carlisle’s claim to collect rents and regulate commerce in the islands. In that context many colonists chose to begin describing their private lands, which were now ostensibly tenancies from the proprietor, as “plantations”; by the late 1640s new arrivals to Barbados, including Richard Ligon and a group of French refugees, were being advised to purchase a “plantation.” English Caribbean settlers retained the term because it still carried public connotations that implied that their effort had vested their property with a legitimacy and authority that rivaled Carlisle’s proprietary claim rather than being derived from it. The result was a confusing array of people and authorities across the English Caribbean claiming vastly different sized territories as plantations built upon a hybrid public-private identity, all participating in a broader debate about how land should be used to balance private interests with the public good.15

The increasingly precise art of private estate surveying, which was taking root in England during the seventeenth century, was quickly introduced to try to settle questions of property and authority, but surviving evidence suggests that it only served to inscribe some of the contradictions. A uniquely surviving Barbadian land survey from the 1640s, undertaken by John Hapcott for property purchased by Thomas Middleton, depicts a nuanced mixture of public and private spaces on the landscape. Dating from the very start of the consolidation of large-scale sugar production, Hapcott’s survey delineates an abstract acreage of land for private conveyance, and it originated at a moment of unprecedented land transactions on the island, as smaller properties were traded and consolidated into larger acreages ideal for sugar cultivation. However, the description states that it represented “the fforme of three hundred acres of Land” within “the Ffort Plantation.” The name “Ffort Plantation,” which dated to the original settlement of the island in 1627, referred to the prior existence of the “Plantacion forte” nearby. St. James Church also stood within the bounds of the land being patented, as did three smaller parcels of land that are designated as belonging to tenant farmers. The spatial designation of “plantation” was therefore clearly tied to these public buildings and institutions, and it implied a community with a complex set of relationships that were underpinned by various forms of private landholding. The plantation remained something more than a mere enclosed private farm.16

Despite the huge profits being made from the nascent sugar industry on Barbados and the consequent incentives for wealthy investors to amass land for cane cultivation, the political and ideological forces at play in the English Atlantic during the 1640s and 1650s kept the idea of the plantation as a civic community central to imperial discourse. Radical republican ideas during the era of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms encouraged some leading Parliamentarians to pursue plans to strengthen local civic institutions across England and its possessions. In the colonial sphere this meant doubling down on the idea of the plantation as a self-governing community. In Ireland, following the brutal suppression of Catholic resistance, some English leaders were particularly anxious that new plantations of soldiers and settlers on seized land should be self-governing communities. They encouraged those receiving land to settle in towns, and they sought to attract new colonists to take over leadership of ruined Irish towns. One vocal army veteran, the Baptist Richard Lawrence, envisioned each “English Plantation” as a community of former soldiers who would receive grants of land as a means of incentivizing them to establish a militia to defend the area against Irish counterattacks.17

Similar connotations of plantation as a public and communal venture informed aspirations for the English Commonwealth’s expansion in the Western Hemisphere. When Barbadian colonist and future Jamaica governor Thomas Modyford proposed establishing new English plantations in Guiana in 1652 he described it as a civic community structured around shared resources and common defense. He suggested transporting former Barbadian servants and settling them “in Townships of at least 50 men in a towne [with] small parcels of land at first assigned them.” Modyford described these places as “towneships and plantacons” that would be defensible communities with “liberties” for the white male property-holding citizens who would emerge as patriarchal household heads with responsibility for militia service.18 As late as the 1650s, then, plantations were still understood across the English Atlantic in ways that reflected the civic roots of the term. Although land was being carved up at pace in the Caribbean, and private investors were discussing buying and selling plantations, they were also envisioning new plantations as colonial beachhead communities and miniature commonwealths that defined American space through the communal construction of social and political authority rather than merely through abstract grants of private property doled out by an imperial bureaucracy.

This definition explains why plantations that appeared on early English Caribbean maps did so in ways that portrayed them as nodes of communal authority rather than as areas of private property. Depictions of Caribbean plantations were most reminiscent of towns, villages, or churches in other contemporary cartography. Richard Ligon’s 1657 map of Barbados is an early example of this trend. This cartographic framework was reminiscent of well-known projects to map contemporary England, such as Christopher Saxton and John Norden’s county maps in William Camden’s Britannia. As Richard Helgerson demonstrated, this style of cartography depicting Britain served to bind discrete local communities across the kingdom into a larger political project.19 When viewed side by side, therefore, the affinity of these maps clearly serves to equate Barbadian plantations not with agricultural acreage but with English communities. The similarity is even more striking in a manuscript map of English plantations in Surinam, dated from 1667; in this map the short-lived English colony is depicted as a series of “plantations” along the Suriname River, but each plantation is denoted by images ranging from one building to a small cluster around a church spire. The implication was clearly that these discrete plantations were substantial nodes of ordered English society rather than merely pieces of property.20 These depictions represent a stark and revealing contrast to the contemporary trend in the mapping of the plantation landscape in Ulster that began with Josias Bodley’s 1609 barony maps. Ulster plantation cartography featured increasingly careful delineation of property boundaries, geographic features, and architectural details, even on the large-scale official maps being sent to Dublin and London.21 This Irish cartographic trend was in keeping with the Jacobean shift, identified by Kenneth Olwig, toward a new state-centric vision of landscape as a patchwork of resources and property lines intended to inform and also symbolize the state. The maps of Barbados and Surinam reflected a much more bottom-up sense of possession in which the plantation remained an inscrutable locus of power that allowed planters to shape their own landscapes, according to landscape’s older definition as communal relations rooted in a particular place.22

Private ownership was certainly not entirely absent from early mapping of plantations. Both Ligon’s Barbados map and those of Surinam did predominantly label the plantations using personal names such as “Butler” or “Knott.” Yet a closer reading of Ligon’s map complicates even this element of a privatized reading of the plantation. Ligon’s title for his map noted that it contained “the M[aste]rs Names of the Severall plantacons,” rather than the names of the plantations themselves. The implication was that the plantation itself had a distinct identity, such as the Ffort Plantation that had appeared on Hapcott’s survey, and that Ligon was merely offering a shorthand by naming the “master” of the community. Furthermore, the named individuals were “masters” with broader authority over the community on the plantation rather than ownership of the land. Early maps, then, depict an ambiguous world of land tenure and authority in the English Caribbean, in which plantations could be controlled by private individuals but retained communal connotations.23

At the same time, though, competing conceptions about the plantation and its relation to the state were emerging in the English Atlantic in the mid-seventeenth century. Developing in London among the circle of thinkers around German émigré publisher Samuel Hartlib, ideas about “improvement” emphasized that application of natural philosophy could manipulate the natural world to generate new commodities, stimulate trade, and bring humanity closer to divine perfection. Improvement embraced projects to develop new manufacturing processes and even efforts at alchemical transmutation, but many focused on agricultural innovations on “plantations.” One of Hartlib’s correspondents, the horticulturalist Ralph Austen, was particularly invested in perfecting “plantations” of fruit trees in England, which he believed would combine spiritual perfection with pecuniary reward. The innovations in sugar production on Barbados were of deep interest to the Hartlib Circle because they seemed to perfectly fit their model of an innovative plantation.24 In many ways the goal of establishing plantations within this worldview was no less public than the vision of plantations as civic communities; the Hartlibians argued that their plans were designed to make England (and more broadly the Protestant world) into a new Canaan, overflowing with abundance.25 The critical difference, however, was that this form of plantation promised public benefit through individual “improvers” perfecting the relationship between humanity and the natural world rather than focusing on interpersonal relationships. It lent itself to the dehumanization of laboring people and the commodification of land. According to this definition the plantation fulfilled its imperial, and even eschatological, purpose by organizing crops and people with an eye to efficient extraction of resources and perpetual economic growth, rather than an orderly and virtuous civic community.

This alternative definition of plantation had two implications. First, planting employed a particular set of technical skills that people could acquire through study and experimentation, rather than civic virtue. In reality much of the knowledge that underpinned the intensification of sugar and tobacco production came from Indigenous and African sources or from rival empires, but by the 1650s colonists from Barbados, where sugar cultivation had boomed, were being distinguished as uniquely skilled “planters” particularly suited to the establishment of plantations elsewhere.26 Second, planting strove for material gain that could accrue to the individuals and the state; Austen suggested that “By diligent planting . . . men would be stored with money, & all necessary & vsefull Commodities, & be much more able to beare all burthens, & Taxes.”27 English policymakers increasingly saw colonies as primarily sources of tax revenue, so they recognized the appeal of limiting plantations to innovative commercial units that promised infinite growth.28 These ideas introduced a new overlapping definition of plantation that still connoted public benefit, but which did so through discrete private plantations that could be bought, together with material objects, draft animals, and the bondspeople who possessed knowledge of crop production. Ligon described a late 1640s plantation for sale in Barbados as “ready furnished, and stocked with Servants, Slaves, Horses, Cattle, Assinigoes, Camels, &c. with Sugar work, and an Ingenio.”29

Cartography in the English Atlantic was beginning to be reshaped by these ideas. Most significantly, the Down Survey, which was overseen by Samuel Hartlib associate William Petty, represented a new comprehensive effort to map the conquered and sequestered land of Ireland in the 1650s. Petty’s survey built upon the already more advanced surveying of Josias Bodley, but it was undertaken on an unprecedented scale and with minute attention to land quantity and quality. The maps that the Down Survey produced differed markedly from those of the mid-seventeenth-century English Caribbean. Carried out on a parish-by-parish basis and at a scale of 1:50,000, they carefully delineated the boundaries of every subdivision of the parish (known as a “townland”), noting its precise acreage and accounting for any land deemed unproductive due to bogs or rocks. They also sometimes included roads and depictions of the key buildings. The objective was to render the land legible as a quantifiable patchwork of resources and to allow for projections about its potential output and optimal level of human occupation—or the ratio of “hands to lands” as Petty called it—that would enable the English state to distribute it to conquering soldiers and investors in ways that would maximize productivity and revenue.30

Although not reflected in the maps of the English Caribbean, similar instincts were taking hold there; the increasingly detailed Barbadian land records from the 1650s attest to the fact that colonists were seeking precisely to delineate their property. Surveying skills were in demand in the region and archaeological evidence also points to linear boundaries on the landscape of some islands that may date to the mid-seventeenth century. Furthermore, although Richard Ligon’s map of Barbados did not reflect this increasing interest in surveying and property boundaries, his description of the island was crowded with calculations and observations about the natural environment and the sugar production process that reflected new scientific methods and the pursuit of profit through investment in bound and enslaved labor. It was clear that plantation spaces were increasingly being charted and conceptualized in ways that emphasized property, commodity, and profit.31

Clearly there was a considerable distance between this invocation of private investment in land and enslaved laborers and the vision of compact settler communities depicted in planters’ petitions and cartographic depictions of Barbados and Surinam. But in the mid-seventeenth-century English Atlantic, the language of plantation still bridged that gap, offering all colonial settlements the appearance of potential profit but also giving private agriculture a veneer of public service. Expansion and centralization of the English empire, though, would bring these contradictory definitions into conflict.

The Plantation in Jamaica

The ambiguity behind plantation had critical implications in the late 1650s when, as a result of Cromwell’s ill-fated Western Design, English forces landed on Jamaica. Despite the disastrous outcome of the original mission to Hispaniola, the plantation remained at the heart of English plans. Cromwell had originally envisioned establishing plantations in the conquered Spanish Indies and had ordered his men not to pillage in hopes of preserving crucial public infrastructure. The English troops who straggled into Jamaica died at staggering rates from disease and malnutrition, and they faced persistent resistance and counterattacks from the displaced Spanish colonists and their Afro-Spanish allies, all the while hemorrhaging money and resources from the empire and engaging in bitter internal feuds. Because of their malleability, plantations promised to address all of these problems. “Nothing is of more important Considercon,” Cromwell’s advisors concluded after news of the arrival on Jamaica, “than that the business of planting bee ymediately and effectually applied unto.” The voluminous papers about the island’s future attest that almost everyone concurred that “planting” was critical to Jamaica’s future. Col. William Brayne, one of the army commanders on the island, apparently “talked of nothing but planting.”32 Planting Jamaica seemed obvious because it simultaneously implied the establishment of orderly communities where former soldiers would develop virtue and willingly pursue self-defense, and also the development of profitable industry and financial returns.

The actual process of establishing plantations on Jamaica, though, forced the nascent English empire to confront the contradictions inherent in the idea of the plantation. Cromwell’s initial proclamation in the autumn of 1655 ordered the “settling of a civil government” for Jamaica and encouraged individuals to “proceed upon plantations and settlements,” suggesting that the plantations he had in mind were communities that would look like the nodes that dotted Ligon’s map.33 A little over a month after arriving in Jamaica, a group of army officers penned an appeal to Cromwell requesting the “allotment and distribution of land to the respective regiments” of the army who were to settle in communities. A few months later, seeking to “animate the soldiers,” commanders ordered that every man receive “his particular land,” but they issued strict instructions to plant “every regiment in the manner of a township,” which was clearly reminiscent of Modyford’s earlier plans for English settlement in Guiana.34 The newly established places were frequently described as “Quarters,” implying their continued connection to military encampments, but also either contiguous with a single “plantation” or consisting of multiple “plantations”; these were interspersed with savannas, which had previously been cleared by Spanish colonists for cattle grazing, and which were maintained as commons.35 Col. Brayne was convinced that this distribution of land had had an effect by 1657, suggesting that most had “industriously imployed themselves to plant” and that the “Spirits of our people are much raised.”36

The Protectorate state also focused upon attracting coherent communities of planters who would “transplant themselves” in groups. Daniel Gookin was dispatched to Boston to appeal to the “Townes and Plantations” of New England to migrate to Jamaica as “whole Churches,” with promises of land, protection, public stocks, and other “Privileges and Immunities” for their discrete communities.37 Although he did not succeed, another community of planters from Nevis was encouraged to migrate as a group and set up a self-governing plantation on the eastern tip of the island, far removed from the occupying army. After four years of brutal guerrilla conflict, army commanders also negotiated with some of the communities of formerly enslaved Africans on the island, noting that they were “endeavouring to make some plantations” and using that fact to support the idea of granting them a “charter” for self-government. It was clear that plantations were intended to be the building blocks of civil society on Jamaica.38

However, given the desperate state of the army that had limped into Jamaica, the practical business of growing food also took on a public valence. Dispatches from Jamaica noted which officers were making the most progress in “planting,” as a barometer of their success in raising food crops. Officers also framed their efforts to apply agricultural skills as part of a public commitment to address the depleted food stocks. One explained that he was using his “best interest to make those under [his] charge to plant, to the end they may be taken off from his highness[’s] allowance.” Admiral Goodson explicitly combined the expertise and civic models of planting when he appealed to the Protector to particularly send “ingenious publique speritted men of eminent virtue.”39

Equally, though, some of the leading voices among the English occupiers and in London already had in mind the establishment of plantations predicated upon the commercial cultivation of nonsubsistence agricultural commodities. Some officers—particularly those who had experience of the sugar boom on Barbados over the previous decade—sent reports detailing “plantations of sugar, Cotton, Tobaccoe, Cocao.” Col. Francis Barrington, who wrote detailed letters about the commodity output of the plantation under his management, was described as having a “genius much inclined to the way of plantation.”40 The form of plantation that Barrington exemplified required careful attention to the capacity of the land, knowledge of manufacturing techniques, an understanding of marketing exotic staples, and significant investment capital.

On Jamaica, the plantation as a space for perfecting nature also came to take over some of the legitimizing functions that the older discourse of plantation had served for early English expansion. When appropriating land that was owned by Irish or Indigenous inhabitants, or unsettled islands such as Bermuda or Barbados, colonists readily applied the established logic that plantations were justified because they introduced “civility.” On Jamaica, though, the English were seeking to displace an established Spanish colony that boasted an urban center and a recognizable European civil society. In justifying this effort anti-Catholicism was obviously critical, but the conceit of introducing a new and more efficient agricultural regime to exploit the true potential of the island also played a role.41 It would take many years for Jamaica’s system of commercial agriculture and African slavery to reach maturity and become the centerpiece of the English Caribbean, but that did not stop colonists and officials from comparing their plantations favorably with the agricultural practices of previous Spanish colonists. John Ogilby’s account of the island summarized this position by derisively describing the Spaniards’ former estancias as “less considerable” plantations.42

Critically, though, this definition of the agriculturally efficient plantation also allowed officers to argue that they needed complete control over their men’s labor to realize these objectives. Some officers fiercely resisted efforts to allocate ordinary soldiers private plots of land, arguing that “if they must plant, they shal plant only as . . . servants.” The officers’ efforts to organize the island into private commercial plantations under their control, with the ordinary soldiers laboring for them as opposed to being granted their land within communal plantations, attracted resentment, resistance, and even outright rebellion. Admiral Goodson recounted the story of Col. Richard Holdipp, who was ousted by his men when he attempted to manage them like servants; he noted that Holdipp “cannot be suffered to enjoy his plantation, which with some little encouragement . . . he might have brought to good perfection.” Goodson’s comments convey the resentment of Holdipp’s men, but they also elucidate the attitude that provoked this anger—the assumption that the plantation was a result of Holdipp’s single-handed effort to pursue “perfection” and that it was this effort that made the land into his property to “enjoy.”43

Enslaved laborers quickly became the alternative to reluctant conscript labor. Cromwell’s merchant advisors in England advocated incentivizing the shipment of servants and enslaved people that would encourage “planters” from elsewhere in the region to “enter upon Plantations” on the island. On the ground in Jamaica, acting Governor Edward D’Oyley heartily concurred with these conclusions, arguing that their greatest need was “Negroes, which are the life of Plantations.” This choice of words spoke powerfully to the way that the distinct definitions of plantation were being melded together. It implicitly acknowledged that plantations were more than just bounded acreages of the newly conquered island. They were bodies that needed to be brought to “life” in order to fulfill their true purpose—a purpose that even former maroons were being credited with engaging with elsewhere on the island. Yet D’Oyley also clearly reflected the view that forced labor was essential to do the punishing and exploitative work of clearing land and mass-producing commercial commodities at low cost. The contradictions and tensions were palpable. The “life” of the plantation as a civic institution in the service of empire would now be generated by consuming Black lives.44

None of these plans made much progress in the chaotic final years of the interregnum, and so when Charles II returned to England in 1660, the question of Jamaica remained unresolved, leaving room for the king to articulate his own vision of planting. Desperately in need of sources of revenue, the king eagerly embraced the idea of encouraging commerce by cultivating new commodities. At the same time, though, Charles and his advisors were inherently skeptical of the state of the island. It was, after all, largely populated by the remains of an army that had been recruited by Cromwell. The Crown’s response was to reframe planting once again by emphasizing patronage and hierarchical manorialism. Royal advisors, including army officer Thomas Lynch, encouraged Charles to appoint a member of the nobility, Lord Windsor, as governor, granting him 50,000 acres to begin a “plantation” and also giving him permission to endow manors of at least 500 acres on any worthy individual who invested in the island. Lynch also persuaded Charles to reserve for himself a 400,000-acre royal “pryvate plantacon” on Jamaica in order to help make planting “a Mode” at court. The royal “plantation” was to be rented out to communities of tenant farmers, allowing the king to paternalistically fulfill the civic goal of transforming poor English servants into productive tenants. Equally, though, building upon Charles’s interest in new scientific innovations and his patronage of the Royal Society, the plantation would allow him to take on the persona of an “improver,” sponsoring experiments with new commodities. Practical considerations led the Crown to abandon this plan, but this additional vision of the plantation as a royal estate illuminates yet another approach to reconciling the competing ideas of plantation in the mid-seventeenth century. Jamaica appeared to English colonists and planners to provide a blank slate on which these various visions of plantation could be imposed.45

Sorting and Mapping Jamaica

All of the conflict over the nature of plantation is critical to understanding the flurry of Jamaican map-making that followed over the next two decades; colonial leaders and their English allies sought to secure Jamaica’s future in the empire by mapping it as a patchwork of plantations that were now defined in ways tailored to the ambitions of the Restoration empire. It is striking that, save for Ligon’s map of Barbados, the English Caribbean had scarcely been mapped in any detail before 1660, yet the newly claimed island of Jamaica was depicted in at least four main maps (and numerous reprints) within less than twenty years of conquest. This cartographic explosion represented the efforts of some English colonists, and particularly Governor Thomas Modyford, to fit the plantation within a coherent vision of imperial jurisdictional space. It served to clarify the definition of the plantation as an independent but predominantly agricultural enterprise within a new, larger public geography of empire.

Interest in understanding Jamaica’s spatial order developed quickly. Immediately upon his Restoration in 1660, Charles II prioritized Jamaica and specially requested that Gov. Edward D’Oyley provide a detailed survey of “what Quarters and Divisions the sevrall Souldiers, Planters and Inhabitants are now dispersed and settled [in]” as well as “a Register of the several Plantations which are or shall be settled.”46 The reports he received, though, were confused. In many places former garrisons were disbanded and the commanders were simply converted into justices and militia captains. When the colony’s first assembly was called in late 1663, the delegates were elected from “precincts” that matched the previous garrison “quarters.”47 The remnants of the distinct plantation established by transplanted colonists from Nevis and the rapidly growing urban hub of Port Royal were each also given separate courts. One of the African communities was recognized by an order of the island’s council that was to serve “as a Charter to them.” Many of the savannas were still being treated as commons and there were also (probably notionally) four tracts, of 100,000 acres each, that were to form the royal plantation.48 The initial result of the royal survey, therefore, was to reveal a patchwork of legal and institutional spaces in Restoration Jamaica, including some plantations, with no clear boundaries.

This complex political geography, though, did not endure. Thomas Modyford, who succeeded the short-lived governorship of Lord Windsor, was a Barbadian who had previously described himself as a “Planter Governor.” He was charged with establishing “the more orderly and convenient settlement” of the island and with “persuading and encouraging the inhabitants . . . to turne their Labour and Industry to the . . . benefit of ye Plantacon.” Before he left Barbados to take up his post he recruited landless men on that island with the promise of fifty-acre tracts on Jamaica, envisioning the establishment of land grants within counties, hundreds, and tithings. But when he arrived in Jamaica he quickly became reconciled to the virtues of large individual plantations. Modyford carefully calculated Jamaica’s acreage and how much it might produce were it “well filled with People,” demonstrating that he was thinking about land and productivity in the precise quantitative terms that were reminiscent of William Petty’s Down Survey and its framing of “hands to lands.” In addition, as factor for the newly established Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa, Modyford advocated for a steady supply of enslaved people to be shipped to the island.49

Modyford and his allies also looked for a way for the plantation’s claims to civic authority to be wedded more firmly to the state. The solution they settled upon was the institution of the parish. The parish was already becoming an important unit of local government in Barbados and a few parishes had been laid out on Jamaica just before Modyford’s arrival, but the new structure established under his watch nearly doubled their number so that they carved up almost the entire surface area of the island, rather than emerging organically as the zones around churches.50 At first glance this decision seems curious, especially given that Modyford also advocated religious toleration.51 However, the full range of the legislation Modyford and his allies developed clarifies the picture. The act establishing parishes was thin on details about spiritual matters, but it was accompanied by other acts restricting the movement of servants and slaves to within their “master’s plantation” and developing infrastructure linking “plantations” to seaports; all of those acts leaned heavily upon the leadership of the parish vestry, which would be composed of leading Anglican conformist planters in the community. Parishes, therefore, provided units of local governance that could secure authority across the island in the hands of select individuals. In contrast to counties, towns, or quarters, though, parishes carried limited connotations of secular power and also deep symbolic ties to the reestablished English ecclesiastical structure that was becoming the marrow of loyalty to the restored Stuart monarch in the 1660s. The result was an effort to project a radically simplified geography of white power on Jamaica, consisting of two sets of spatial units—the “master’s plantations,” outside which enslaved individuals were not permitted to stray, and the parish whose vestry would enforce those rules.52

Modyford was anxious to portray this neat and comprehensive spatial relationship between parishes and plantations in a new map of Jamaica that he had surveyor John Man draw in the mid-1660s (see Figure 5.2). In his letter to the Duke of Albermarle, in which he reported the completion of the map, Modyford emphasized that it laid out “the division of the parishes & the several plantations.” This delineation was achieved by the novel imposition of lines demarcating the parish boundaries, most of which lay across seemingly empty space, suggesting that they were state-structured containers just waiting to be filled with preordained plantation units. Modyford did retain hints of the previous definition of plantation, noting that the map conveyed “how all the knowen plantations relate to & are able to succour each other” as if they were interdependent communities capable of altruistic civic action. At the same time, though, the map itself began the work of narrowing the definition of plantation and bounding it within lines drawn by the imperial state. It included a key of what it described as the “settlements” in each parish with notes on what commodities each location produced. In an important marker of toponymic distinction the list included some places with the descriptor “farme,” and these locations were the only sites (save for towns and churches) that were not listed as producing one of the four commercial commodities (cocoa, indigo, sugar, and cotton). The implication was that “plantations,” now defined by their market-oriented output, were the critical private subdivisions of each parish.53

Man’s map of Jamaica did not represent a definitive watershed in the conception of plantation. John Ogilby’s description of Jamaica that accompanied the first publication of the map notably did not follow its spatial structure, describing the island as consisting of three towns and seven “plantations” that corresponded to larger communities. Other maps produced in these years also hinted at alternative forms of space. The Vassal and Rogers map, completed in the early 1670s with the explicit intention of depicting the “settlements” of the island, reinscribed a wealth of Spanish toponyms, the locations of “villas,” references to communities such as “Seaven Plantations,” and to the African maroon communities.54 Other Caribbean maps also continued to portray plantations in alternative ways.55 Even Richard Forde’s well-known 1675 map of Barbados offered a more complicated picture. It lacked the parish boundaries of the Man map, and it also contained a wealth of other neighborhood names such as “Four Square,” “Scotland,” and “Thickets” that were suggestive of alternative geographies beyond the plantation.56

Over the next half century, though, the neat spatial symmetry initially articulated in Man’s map would take hold across large areas of the English empire, as the plantation was boiled down into a profit-maximizing machine reliant upon private property in land and enslaved labor. Numerous scholars have charted the surveying, agricultural, and labor exploitation techniques that facilitated the consolidation of smaller tracts into precisely surveyed 200–300-acre private estates on which dozens of enslaved Africans were confined and forced to produce and process sugar.57 This consolidation was more than merely a set of technical innovations, though. It involved rationalizing diverse colonial spaces and systems of property ownership, such as proprietary tenancies and commons, into discrete units in which the authority of the planter and of the state were carefully demarcated.58 The surviving letters of Christopher Jeaffreson, who inherited land on St. Christopher, reveal the rationalization of space that this involved. In one epistle soon after his arrival on the island he noted that he had “never had nor seen any deed” for most of his estate, and he had been forced to use hearsay and local knowledge to reconstruct the complex network of overlapping land claims, exchanges, and tenancies between friends and kin that had constituted his plantation. Jeaffreson, though, was intent on “settling” the plantation. For him, though, unlike his predecessors, this did not mean establishing civic communities of European agriculturalists on his lands, but rather securing official and unencumbered title to the land from the island’s imperial officials, purchasing more enslaved laborers, and erecting a sugar works.59 When English soldiers surveyed the spoils of their recent conquests from the Dutch in Surinam in 1667 they tallied up the “plantations & Sugar works,” reflecting the fact that, in the Caribbean, the two had become synonymous. Colonists and imperial officials were adopting the logic of Man’s map that reduced plantations to their output.60

Conclusion

Plantations retained a public identity that led to their continued appearance on new island-level maps that circulated in the metropolis, but their position was now clearly as a subordinate unit of governance within the empire whose public role was the supply of increasingly important raw materials. The description alongside Richard Forde’s map of Barbados encapsulated this fact when it noted that the island was “divided into 11 Parishes . . . [and] subdivided into divers Plantations.”61 Forde captured the fact that plantations had retained their position as jurisdictions, but where they had previously been understood as miniature commonwealths they were now private jurisdictions that functioned as subdivisions of the state. Because they were now populated primarily by enslaved men and women they were no longer seen as potentially self-governing, but rather their “masters” were empowered by colonial law to police their inhabitants. Their bounds were now defined by property lines delineated and protected by the imperial state rather than by the community of the plantation itself acting out of civic virtue. This was a formula calculated to facilitate the exploitation of enslaved laborers for private profit and defer questions about the common good to the larger imperial sphere.

Lord Willoughby, proprietor of the English colony of Surinam in the 1660s, reflected this newly circumscribed assessment of the plantation. When he was confronted by imperial efforts to restrict his authority in Surinam to only the land he had physically settled (rather than the extensive boundaries of his patent), he argued that the move was unjust because his grant was for a “settlement” and it was “of another nature to a Plantation.” The implication was that “plantation” now meant only a discrete private acreage.62 For early English colonists, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, a plantation had been precisely as expansive and public as Willoughby’s “settlement.” But the debate over plantations in Jamaica had helped to clarify the potential of a simplified new geography of empire encapsulated in Man’s map. It was a geography in which the plantation, once the fundamental civic unit of English colonialism, had become a subdivision of a parish—a privatized commercial space that retained jurisdictional authority (particularly over the enslaved women and men who labored there), but for the purpose of profit and within the superstructure of the state.

This bounded and privatized image of the plantation has come to dominate our modern imagination, but the descriptions, maps, and surveys of the early English Caribbean depict plantations as nodes rather than abstract spaces. In doing so, they preserve vestiges and markers of a fundamental debate about the nature of the plantation as a form of colonial place and a technology of colonization. They reveal a story not about how a “plantation model” came to become the dominant economic system of the English Caribbean, but how a particular economic model came to monopolize the definition and the accompanying civic and settler legitimacy of the “plantation.” In a scramble for legitimacy, various English settlers staked claims to define and control “plantations” as a way to legitimize their appropriation of resources, position themselves in relation to the English state, and claim particular forms of authority over the bound and enslaved people in their midst.

Notes

1. 1.  Richard Ligon, A topographicall [Description and] Admeasurement [of the yland of] Barbados in t[he West Indyaes] with the Mrs. [Names of the Seuerall plantacons], D657 L726t / 1-SIZE, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI (hereafter JCB), https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1486~101320001:A-topographicall--Description-and--. See also Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed. Karen Kupperman (Hackett, 2011), 38–39.
2. 2.  Most scholarship on land and settler colonialism in English America still relies upon the picture of enclosure laid out by Joan Thirsk; see Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1978). For the English predisposition toward private property, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 1. For the standard picture of plantation development referenced here, see Richard S. Dunn, Sugar & Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775 (University of the West Indies Press, 1974); Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York University Press, 1984), chapters 2–3; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 5. A more complex picture of English agriculture in this era has emerged; see Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Paul Slack, The Invention of Improvement: Information & Material Progress in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2015). Allan Greer has recently and compellingly reversed the polarity of this argument by suggesting that regions of early America marked by slavery were precocious in developing ideas about private property in land, and this essay seeks to build upon and complicate the origins of that dynamic. See Allan Greer, “Owning Bodies, Owning Lands: Property Formation in the Early Plantation Colonies,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 50, no. 1 (2024): 22–42. See also Henry Jones, “Property, Territory, and Colonialism: An International Legal History of Enclosure,” Legal Studies 39, no. 2 (2019): 187–203.
3. 3.  Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621–1713 (New York University Press, 2011); Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (University of Georgia Press, 2012); Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013); Christian J. Koot, “Imagining the West Indies: A Seventeenth-Century English Map of Montserrat,” Winterthur Portfolio 53, no. 1 (2019): 3–39.
4. 4.  For the relationship of public and private landholding elsewhere in the Americas, see Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
5. 5.  Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (Harvard University Press, 2017). Some recent scholarship has recognized the role of Jamaica in framing political economic debates, but it has largely portrayed planting as one undifferentiated option within this debate; see Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (Yale University Press, 2015); Leslie Theibert, “Making an English Caribbean, 1650–1688” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2013).
6. 6.  James VI, Basilikon Doron Devided into three books (Edinburgh, 1599), 43. For civic humanism and civility in England, see Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Polity Press, 2010). For the impact on Ireland, see Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001), 121–34, 187–205; John Patrick Montaño, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Hiram Morgan, “The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–1575,” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 261–78.
7. 7.  John M. Robertson, ed., The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (New York: Routledge, 2013 [1905]), 776.
8. 8.  Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford University Press, 1992); McRae, God Speed the Plough.
9. 9.  Thomas Blenerhasset, A Direction for the Plantation in Ulster (London: 1610), C1v.
10. 10.  Canny, Making Ireland British, 121–34, 187–205; Morgan, “The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith,” 261–78 (esp. 274–78); Michael MacCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford University Press, 1986), chapter 4; Withington, Society in Early Modern England, chapter 8.
11. 11.  Paul Musselwhite, “Private Plantation: The Political Economy of Land in Early Virginia,” in Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America, ed. Paul Musselwhite, Peter C. Mancall, and James Horn (University of North Carolina Press, 2019); J. H. Lefroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1515–1685, 2 vols. (Longmans, 1877–79), 1:104, 140.
12. 12.  “Warners Commission as Governor of St. Christopher, 29 Sept. 1629,” f. 15, MSS Egerton 2395, the British Library (hereafter BL); see also discussions of discrete plantations in Anglo-French negotiations over St. Christopher, in ff. 3–17, MSS Egerton 2395, BL. For published sources on the settlement of St. Christopher, see V. T. Harlow, Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667 (Hakluyt Society, 1925), 1–24.
13. 13.  Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 4–10, 14–17. For Virginia’s corporation structure, see Paul Musselwhite, Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth: The Rise of Plantation Society in the Chesapeake (University of Chicago Press, 2018), chapter 1.
14. 14.  Paul Musselwhite, “‘Plantation,’ the Public Good, and the Rise of Capitalist Agriculture in the Early Seventeenth-Century Caribbean,” Early American Studies 20, no. 4 (Fall 2022): 597–618; Kupperman, Providence Island, chapter 5.
15. 15.  Musselwhite, “‘Plantation,’ the Public Good, and the Rise of Capitalist Agriculture.” For the early settlement of Barbados, see James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands Under the Proprietary Patents (Oxford University Press, 1926). On the Courteen period, see Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 36–42. For details of Carlisle’s land grants, see [William Duke], Some Memoirs of the First Settlement of Barbados (Barbados, 1741), 51–62.
16. 16.  John Hapcott, “Estate Plan of 300 acres of land near Holetown, Barbados” (1646), Shelf Et647 1 Ms, JCB, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1159~106490001:This-plott-representeth-the-forme-o; Douglas V. Armstrong, Karl Watson, and Matthew Reilly, “The 1646 Hapcott Map, Fort (Trent) Plantation, St. James, Barbados: A Significant Resource for Research on Early Colonial Settlement in Barbados,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 58 (2012): 137–54. For reference to the establishment of “The forte Plantacon” in 1627, see Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 30; N. Darnell Davis, ed., “Papers Relating to the Early History of Barbados,” Timehri: The Journal of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society of British Guiana, New Ser., 5 (1891): 55–58.
17. 17.  Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England in the Irish Transplantation Stated (London, 1655), 16. For Lawrence’s civic vision, see Toby Barnard, Improving Ireland? Projectors, Prophets and Profiteers, 1641–1786 (Four Courts Press, 2008), chapter 3. For the effort to encourage compact settlement, see “Commissioners to the Council of State, 8 Jan. 1652,” in The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey (H. M. Stationery Office, 1891), 1:624. For focus on reviving town governance, see T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2000), 62–71. For attracting New England migrants to Ireland, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 8. For corporate structures in the interregnum empire, see Paul Musselwhite, Urban Dreams, chapter 3.
18. 18.  “Considerations Concerning the Settlement of the maine called Guiana to be presented to the committee of trade, 16 Feb. 1652,” ff. 118–19, CO 1/11, the National Archives, London (hereafter TNA).
19. 19.  For England, see maps in William Camden, Britannia (London, 1607); Richard Blome, Britannia, Or, a Geographical Description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1673). For Spanish America, see maps in John Ogilby, America: Being the Latest and Most Accurate Description of the New World (London, 1671); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
20. 20.  For Surinam, see Unknown, “Surinam and Commewijne Rivers,” Cabinet Blathwayt 38, JCB, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/JCBMAPS~1~1~1614~102110002:-Surinam-and-Commewijne-rivers.
21. 21.  Annaleigh Margey, “Representing Plantation Landscapes: The Mapping of Ulster c. 1560–1640,” in Plantation Ireland: Settlement and Material Culture, c. 1550–c. 1700, ed. James Lyttleton and Colin Rynne (Four Courts Press, 2009), 140–64.
22. 22.  Kenneth Robert Olwig, Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), chapter 2.
23. 23.  Ligon, A topographicall [Description. The mixture of new private property with a communal project was also present in the contemporary development of “plantations,” in England. See Elly Robson, “Fen Plantation: Commons, Calvinism, and the Boundaries of Belonging in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 63, no. 1 (2024): 30–62.
24. 24.  R. A. Austen, A Treatise of Fruit Trees (London, 1653). On Austen, see James Grantham Turner, “Ralph Austen, 1612–1676,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online. On improvement, see Slack, Invention of Improvement, chapter 4; Paul Warde, “The Idea of Improvement, c. 1520–1700,” in Custom, Improvement and the Landscape of Early Modern Britain, ed. Richard W. Hoyle (Ashgate, 2011). On the Hartlib Circle, see Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge University Press, 1995). For connections to empire, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (Yale University Press, 2000); Sarah Irving, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (Pickering & Chatto, 2008). For Hartlibian interest in the Barbadian sugar industry, see Eric Otremba, “Enlightened Institutions: Science, Plantations, and Slavery in the English Atlantic, 1626–1700” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2012), 39–51; John E. Crowley, “Sugar Machines: Picturing Industrialized Slavery,” American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (2016): 403–36; David Chan Smith, “Useful Knowledge, Improvement, and the Logic of Capital in Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of Barbados,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78, no. 4 (2017): 549–70.
25. 25.  Koji Yamamoto, Taming Capitalism Before Its Triumph: Public Service, Distrust, and “Projecting” in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 3.
26. 26.  “William Goodson and Robert Sedgewick to the officers in Jamaica, Jan 4 1655/56,” A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 7 vols. (London, 1742) (hereafter Thurloe), 4:389–90. On Indigenous and African knowledge in agricultural innovation, see Eric Otremba, “Inventing Ingenios: Experimental Philosophy and the Secret Sugar-Makers of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic,” History and Technology 28, no. 2 (2012): 119–47; Michael J. Jarvis, “Bermuda and the Beginnings of Black Anglo-America” in Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). On efforts to translate “plantation” knowledge, see Michael D. Bennett, “Caribbean Plantation Economies as Colonial Models: The Case of the English East India Company and St. Helena in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Atlantic Studies 20, no. 4 (2023): 508–39.
27. 27.  “Ralph Austen to Samuel Hartlib, 10 Feb. 1654,” 41/1/66B, in The Hartlib Papers (The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2013), http://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib (hereafter HP); “Ephemerides 1653 Part 4, Hartlib, 1653,” HP 28/2/72B; “Ralph Austen to Samuel Hartlib, undated,” HP 41/1/145A.
28. 28.  For commercial empire, see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton University Press, 1993), chapter 12; L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613–1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). For ideas about state unity and empire, see David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 531–55; Alexander B. Haskell, For God, King, and People: Forging Commonwealth Bonds in Renaissance Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), chapters 4–5; Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Commercial Ideology of Colonization in Jacobean England: Robert Johnson, Giovanni Botero, and the Pursuit of Greatness,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 4 (2007): 791–820; Thomas Leng, “Commercial Conflict and Regulation in the Discourse of Trade in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005): 933–54.
29. 29.  Ligon, True and Exact History, 66.
30. 30.  Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University Press, 2009), 183 (quote); William Petty, History of the Survey of Ireland, ed. Thomas Aiskew Larcom (Dublin, 1851); Vincent Gookin, The Great Case of Transplantation in Ireland Discussed (London, 1655); Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, chapter 8; William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), chapter 5 (esp. 181–82). For a digital collection of the Down Survey maps correlated, see Trinity College Dublin’s Down Survey of Ireland project: http://downsurvey.tcd.ie/index.html.
31. 31.  For disputes over landownership, see Puckrein, Little England, chapter 2. For surveying and property lines, see B. W. Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1988); R. H. Leech, “‘In what manner did they devide the land’: The Early Colonial Estate Landscape of Nevis and St Kitts,” in Estate Landscapes: Design, Improvement and Power in the Post-Medieval Landscape, ed. J. Finch & K. Giles (Boydell Press, 2008), 191–204.
32. 32.  “Report Concerning Affairs in America,” f. 123, MSS Egerton 2395, BL; “Edward D’Oyley to Thomas Povey, July 12 1658,” f. 169, MSS Egerton 2395, BL.
33. 33.  Interesting Tracts Relating to the Island of Jamaica (St. Jago de la Vega, Jam., 1800), 1–2.
34. 34.  Interesting Tracts, 61; “William Goodson and Robert Sedgewick to the officers in Jamaica, Jan 4 1655/56,” Thurloe 4:389–90. Modyford’s plan for Guiana had actually played a role in encouraging Cromwell to pursue the Western Design.
35. 35.  Various descriptions of the geographic organization include: “A brief description of Jamaica,” ff. 608–12, MSS Egerton 2395, BL; “The Scittuacon of the Island,” ff. 3–5, CO1/14/57, TNA; “Thomas Modyford’s Description of Jamaica,” ff. 1–9, Add. MS 11410, BL; “Jamaica census 1661,” CO1/15/98, TNA. For savannas as commons at this stage, see “Sedgwicke to Thurloe— 5 Nov 1655,” Thurloe 4:151–53. On the relationship of spatial distribution to previous Spanish settlement, see Pestana, English Conquest, 130–31; James A. Delle, The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in the Plantation System (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
36. 36.  “William Brayne to Thomas Povey and Martin Noell, July 1657,” ff. 129–30, MSS Egerton 2395, BL.
37. 37.  “Instructions to the Commissioners, 1656,” Thurloe 4:634; William Noël Sainsbury et al., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series (London, 1860–1926), 9:100–101; Daniel Gookin, To all persons whom these may concern, in the several townes, and plantations of the United Colonies in New-England (Boston, 1656); “Brayne to Cromwell, Jan 9 1656/7,” Thurloe 5:770–71; “Gookin to Thurloe, 21 Jan 1655/6,” Thurloe 4:440; “Gookin to Thurloe, May 10 1656,” Thurloe 5:6–7. On the parallels between this effort and the encouragement of puritan migration to Ireland, see Games, Web of Empire, 268–69.
38. 38.  “Stokes to Sedgewick, May 22 1656,” Thurloe 5:48; “Luke Stokes to Cromwell, May 29 1656,” in Thurloe 5:66–67; “Instructions for those going to Jamaica,” Thurloe 4:635–6; “Instructions to Commanders in Jamaica, 1656,” Thurloe 4:634–35. For the African settlements as “plantations,” see “The Scittuacon of the Island,” 5.
39. 39.  “Col. Barrington to Thurloe, 1 July 1657,” Thurloe 6:376–77; “Goodson to Thurloe, 25 June 1656,” Thurloe 5:151–53.
40. 40.  “The Scittuacon of the Island,” 28; “D’Oyley to Cromwell, Sept 12 1657,” Thurloe 6:512. For an example of Barrington’s letters, see “Francis Barrington to Thurloe, July 1 1657,” Thurloe 6: 376–77.
41. 41.  On religion and the Western Design, see Pestana, English Conquest, chapter 1; Block, Ordinary Lives.
42. 42.  “Col. Barrington to Thurloe, 1 July 1657,” Thurloe 6:376–77. For previous Spanish settlements as “less considerable” plantations see Ogilby, America, 343. For the halting maturation of plantation capitalism on Jamaica, see Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 49–52, 66–71. For conflicted attitudes toward prior Spanish settlement, see James Robertson, “‘Stories’ and ‘Histories’ in Late-Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” in Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage, and Culture, ed. Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (University of the West Indies Press, 2002), 25–51.
43. 43.  “Goodson to Thurloe, June 25 1656,” Thurloe 5:151–53.
44. 44.  “Col. Edward D’Oyley’s Description of Jamaica,” ff. 16–25 (quote, 19), Add. MS 11410, BL. For the slave trade, see Donohue, Fire Under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2013), chapter 6; Swingen, Competing Visions, chapter 2.
45. 45.  “Considerations about the Government of Jamaica,” ff. 283–86, MSS Egerton 2395, BL; “Instructions to Thomas, Lord Windsor, Governor of Our Island of Jamaica, 21 March 1661/2,” ff. 15–16, CO138/1, TNA. See also “Considerations about the Peopling and Settling of Jamaica,” CO1/14/54, TNA; “Considerations” (quote, f. 120v), CO1/14/54, TNA. For a more public focused version of the plan see “Proposal Concerning Jamaica,” CO1/14/56, TNA. For the way in which the royal plantation fit with Restoration ideas about gardening and political order, see Kate Mulry, An Empire Transformed: Remolding Bodies and Landscapes in the Restoration Atlantic (NYU Press, 2021).
46. 46.  “The King’s proclamation for the encouraging of planters in Jamaica. Whitehall, 14 Dec. 1661,” #94, CO 1/15, TNA; “Instructions to Governor D’Oyley,” ff. 6–8, CO138/1, TNA; “Instructions to Lord Windsor,” ff. 13–20, CO138/1, TNA.
47. 47.  Alexander Aikman, Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica (Kingston: 1811–1829), 1: 1; Agnes Mary Whitson, The Constitutional Development of Jamaica, 1660–1729 (University of Manchester Press, 1929), 20–23; Pestana, English Conquest, 210–12.
48. 48.  Council Minutes, 11 Dec. 1662, f. 21r, CO139/1, TNA. For orders, see ff. 6–8, CO138/1, TNA. For separate jurisdiction at Port Morant, see Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 5:#215. For savannas, see Edmund Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed . . . (London, 1661), 16.
49. 49.  Jamaica Entry Book, ff. 23, 29, CO138/1, TNA; “Thomas Modyford to the Committee for Foreign Plantations, 10 May 1664,” ff. 135–38 (quote, 136v), CO1/18, TNA; “Considerations Touching Jamaica, 21 July 1664,” #94, CO1/8, TNA. It is possible that Modyford initially proposed a plan for Jamaica in January 1664 that more directly reproduced (almost verbatim) his earlier township proposal for Guiana (#2, CO1/18, TNA). For “Planter Governor” see A. P. Thornton, West-India Policy Under the Restoration (Oxford University Press, 1956), 25. On the role of the new Africa Company, see Swingen, Competing Visions, chapter 3.
50. 50.  Lord Windsor had taken clergymen with him when he traveled to the island, and orders had been given for their support; see Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series 5: #264; Council Minutes, 20 Apr. 1663, f. 22r, CO139/1, TNA. The General Assembly that met after Windsor’s departure established a small number of parishes; see ff. 39v–40r, CO139/1, TNA. Parishes had been established in Barbados in the midst of disputes around landownership in the 1640s; see Puckrein, Little England, chapter 2; Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados 1627–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 4.
51. 51.  “Thomas Modyford to the Committee for Foreign Plantations, 10 May 1664,” ff. 135–38, CO1/18, TNA.
52. 52.  For laws passed by Modyford’s assembly, see ff. 55r–81v, CO139/1, TNA. For the 1664 Jamaica slave code and its relationship to the evolution of slave law in the English Atlantic, see Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the Seventeenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429–58. For a comparative view of local government and slavery in Carolina, see Ryan A. Quintana, Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (University of North Carolina Press, 2018). On the Restoration episcopate see Grant Tapsell, “A British Patriarchy? Ecclesiastical Imperialism Under the Later Stuarts,” in The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill, ed. Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (Boydell, 2013), 261–84. For their political thought, see Mark Goldie, “John Locke and Anglican Royalism,” Political Studies 31, no. 1 (1983): 61–85.
53. 53.  John Man, Novissima et Accuratissima Jamaicae Descriptio (1671), Cabinet Blathwayt, 35, JCB; “Thomas Modyford to the Duke of Albemarle, 28 December 1667,” #100, CO1/21, TNA.
54. 54.  Ogilby, America, 342–43; Tabula Iamaicae Insulae (1678), Cabinet Blathwayt, 35, JCB. On the memory of Spanish locations, see Robertson, “‘Stories’ and ‘Histories.’”
55. 55.  See, in particular, Koot, “Imagining the West Indies”; “Map of the River Oyapok, from the Journal of Jesse de Forrest” reproduced in Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 150.
56. 56.  Richard Ford, A New Map of the Island of Barbadoes (1675), Cabinet Blathwayt, 35, JCB. The lack of parish boundaries may be a reflection of Ford’s Quakerism and consequent aversion to formal parochial jurisdiction.
57. 57.  Higman, Jamaica Surveyed; Dunn, Sugar and Slaves; Burnard, Merchants, Planters, and Slaves, chapter 2.
58. 58.  Allan Greer has recently emphasized the way in which sugar producers in both the English and French empires were at the forefront of the shift to absolute forms of private landownership; see Greer, “Owning Bodies, Owning Lands.”
59. 59.  John Cordy Jeaffreson, A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Hurst & Blackett, 1878), 1:198, 199.
60. 60.  Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 252.
61. 61.  Ford, A New Map of the Island of Barbadoes.
62. 62.  Harlow, Colonising Expeditions, 179.