Mission plantations, space, and social control: Jesuits as planters in French Caribbean colonies and frontiers

Abstract

The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, owned plantations in the Americas to fund missionaries who proselytized among native peoples and enslaved Africans while ensuring that colonists remained Catholic. Fusing the roles of planters and missionaries, Jesuits manipulated the spatial layout of plantations as a method to exercise social control over the laborers who were enslaved at these properties, as well as to influence the European and indigenous populations inhabiting the colonies and frontiers where mission work took place. Spatial layouts of French Jesuit plantations (habitations) dating from the mid seventeenth century to the 1760s in Martinique, Dominica, and Guyane reveal some of the ways in which missionaries organized space. These Jesuit mission plantations were situated in prominent locations in order to attract gaze, and features such as crosses, churches, and gardens displayed the Society’s prestige and mission work. At the same time, maximizing efficiency and conducting direct surveillance of laborers were reduced in importance.

An anthropological genetic perspective on creolization in the anglophone caribbean

“…The majority of the islands included in this study ultimately became British possessions, or in the case of St. Thomas, associated with Denmark then the United States, and share general historic commonalities. One of the islands experienced lasting socio-cultural influences from another colonial power; in Dominica, there was considerable French influence (Graham, 1970;Atwood, 1971;Honychurch, 1995a;Lenik, 2012). The goal of the current study was to examine how colonial socio-cultural influences may have worked to shape the genetic landscape of contemporary Caribbean populations.…”

Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism

“…Plantation spaces were typically zones designed to optimize production and profit while controlling and monitoring laborers Hauser 2011a;Lenik 2012), however, the activities undertaken in marginal spaces, such as the tenantry discussed below, demonstrate that different forms and permutations of economic work and labor were underway, simultaneously. This suggests that capitalism functions at different levels and to various degrees of success (which include failures) synchronically and diachronically.…”

“…In general, the Below Cliff landscape would have appeared disorganized and erratic to planters and others committed to plantation efficiency. As illustrated by James Delle (1998) in his analyses of Jamaican coffee plantations, the plantation was a space in which the state of nature was to be harnessed, controlled, systematically organized, and rigidly managed to maximize labor efficiency and profit (see also Lenik 2012). Although the natural landscape, natural disasters, and acts of resistance on the part of the enslaved were all contributing factors in the successes and failures of elite attempts at organization and control (for a systematic analysis of plantation efficiency see Bates N.D.), it is undeniable that there was a particular logic to plantation organization that hinged on power relations and imposed order.…”

In Search of Ubuntu: An Examination of Enslaved African Domestic and Labor Environments on St. Eustatius

“…Traditional African design elements would have included scattered patterns of dwellings around a centralized yard space for communal activities (Armstrong , 2009(Armstrong , 2001Delle 1999Delle , 1998Ferguson 1992;Vlach 1995Vlach , 1993. Lenik (2012) examined the spatial patterning on mission plantations that used slave labor in seventeenth-century French Martinique, Dominica, and Guyana and determined that the importance placed on surveillance varied in the Caribbean. While measures were taken to guide the construction of slave villages by missionaries they did not focus on maximizing productivity or overly controlling their enslaved labor force (Lenik 2012).…”

“…Lenik (2012) examined the spatial patterning on mission plantations that used slave labor in seventeenth-century French Martinique, Dominica, and Guyana and determined that the importance placed on surveillance varied in the Caribbean. While measures were taken to guide the construction of slave villages by missionaries they did not focus on maximizing productivity or overly controlling their enslaved labor force (Lenik 2012). This suggests that varying levels of ideological freedom would impact slave settlement patterns, both from within the slave communities and from the planter class.…”