Provisioning and Marketing
Provisioning and Marketing
Surplus and Access on Jamaican Sugar Estates
Examining the variability of enslaved life across the Atlantic World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries is increasingly possible with the availability of comparable data. This chapter explores the networks that slaves developed between the fields of the plantation and spaces beyond its borders. Analyzing data from two Jamaican sugar estates, a quantitative approach elucidates the conditions that facilitated enslaved people’s cultivation of surplus in provisioning areas and their access to markets that fostered the island’s internal market economy. GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analysis of cartographic data and modern soil quality data suggests the relative quality of conditions for cultivation. Assemblages recovered from slave villages on the two estates provide a sample of goods that enslaved people acquired in local markets. The results suggest that enslaved people with access to a larger amount of provision grounds with favorable conditions had greater access to the markets. More broadly, the evidence demonstrates the connections that enslaved people established to turn an exploitative system to their advantage.
Keywords: GIS, access to markets, sugar estate
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