Origins

In the spring of 2017, I traveled to Louisiana to do research in New Orleans and attend a conference in Lafayette. It was one of my first forays into a more interregional approach to study the U.S. South: the southern states as part of a broader hemispheric community based on authoritarian politics and plantation economies. I had just read Matthew Pratt Guterl’s American Mediterranean and was curious to what extent the legacies of a circum-Caribbean coalition of planters lived on after slavery had ended, especially during the Cold War era.

Later on that year I went to Bonaire, a Caribbean island that is still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. While I was there, a couple of things began to dawn on me; in many ways, New Orleans seemed to have more in common with Bonaire than New Orleans had with cities I had visited in other parts of the United States, for instance New York or Boston. The climate, the architecture, the people, the smells and sounds, the historical role of slavery – a strong connection appeared to exist between Bonaire and New Orleans, making the Crescent City more Caribbean than U.S. American.

Quarters for enslaved workers on Bonaire, built in 1850 — note the small size of the houses (photo by author)

Besides this realization, I also began to rethink the oft-portrayed image of slavery as an institution that was on the way out by the mid-nineteenth century. Of course, in the United States the debate about slavery reached its epitome during the 1850s, eventually leading to the secession of the South in 1860/1861 and the start of the U.S. Civil War. But other Western empires based on enslaved labor had already abolished slavery by that time; the United Kingdom ended it in 1833 and France followed in 1848. On Bonaire however, Dutch authorities actually decided to build new quarters for enslaved workers in 1850 to increase productivity of the salt pans in the remote southern parts of the island, where these laborers were put to work. Thirteen years later, in 1863, the Netherlands abolished slavery, the same year the U.S. did so, although the Civil War there would last for another two years.

The salt pans of Bonaire (photo by author)

It is significant that the Dutch decided to invest in the perpetuation of slavery during the 1850s, an investment that for instance got material form in the new-built quarters near the salt pans of Bonaire. To me, it was an indication that businesses based on enslaved labor were not stuck in the past, but actually had a forward-looking agenda to sustain slavery, even during a period when the institution had come under increased public scrutiny and debate. These considerations – the U.S. Gulf South as being both part of the United States and the Caribbean, the futurity of racialized regimes of labor exploitation, and the impact of these ruthless regimes on ecosystems around the world – form the basis of Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation. How did plantation blueprints continue to shape natural environments, societies, and (global) politics after institutionalized slavery had ended?

photo by author