Mapping Water in Dominica

Front matter

Mapping Water in Dominica

Enslavement and Environment under Colonialism

Mark W. Hauser

Foreword

Modern colonial empires were built in many places in the world by the simultaneous capture of human labor (in the form of slaves, indentured servants, indebted workers, and sharecroppers) and natural endowments (in the form of soil-water relations and varied nonhuman life) for the production of agricultural commodities exported to distant lands in service of global markets. In this book, we encounter one set of such capture processes in one Caribbean location, an island, that was the site of historical and archaeological research that informs the work.

Centered on the sugar economy that emerged in eighteenth-century Dominica to serve a world demand for sweetness, and on the power relations it forged, Mark Hauser’s wonderful study covers the environmental conditions in which sugar plantations, slave systems, and struggles over water and soil formed in the modern Caribbean. As an archaeologist writing colonial history, he brings talents and perspectives to this work that are often not found, even in some of the more careful historical studies. At the same time, he offers welcome analysis of the gradual, fitful, and often unpredictable ways in which local economies encounter global pressures and flows, and traces more precisely the transformations that are swept into current, rather un-nuanced, discussions of the Anthropocene and its variants, such as the Plantationocene.”

As Hauser notes, precolonial empires were built, particularly in the Americas, by directing local agriculture, and its command over water resources, to the production of crops and goods that served the purposes of large-scale polity building. In that sense, the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean and the harnessing of land, water, and labor to the production of sugar and other crops for the world commodities market was another wave of such dispossession, redirection, and capture. It included the loss of many freedoms among the local communities and the importation of others in servitude, this time from Africa. To document this process—the ecological relations with which the production and decline of plantations are enmeshed—Hauser focuses on three issues: scarcity, mobility, and ideas of belonging. After discussing the material record of slavery and providing a description of the water channels x Foreword and systems, he shows how security, flows, and belonging are both experienced and expressed.

The best work on colonialism and its forms of capitalist development in European empires across Asia, Africa, and the Americas has increasingly paid close attention to the actual processes imperfectly realizing the ambitions and imagined plans of colonial powers and elites. Ruling groups are compelled to deal with various unexpected events and frustrations (including rebellions, wars, market volatility, calamities, and epidemics). Meanwhile, subordinated working people and marginal farmers end up innovating livelihood strategies that occasionally loosen the iron grip of slavery as they look for ways out of the stark inequality and poverty that shapes their lives. Hauser provides a perceptive study in this vein, discovering actual social and ecological conditions in which modern slave economies were built around agrarian commodities. Drawing on a decade of archaeological and historical research, he provides a sustained examination of conflicts over water that forge the actual exploitative regimes designed and executed over a century.

To address the uncertainties at the heart of the immense enterprise of domination and control that slavery embodied, and the ways in which conditions of acute inequality and un-freedom still engendered ideas of belonging and emplacement, Hauser builds a theoretical framework deeply influenced by the idea of slavery as a predicament, in which he is inspired by historian Vincent Brown.? His approach is made creatively possible by examining the material and social life of objects in ordinary Dominican plantation lives, even as he reckons the place afforded these things in wider circuits of meaning and profit making, At the same time, Hauser is attuned to the spatial characteristics of island geographies in oceanic networks, as well as the patchwork of enclaves in which people and production get sequestered through both intensification and neglect over historical periods when these islands are more or less imbricated in world-scale development.‘ His painstaking, long-term research is placed felicitously and generatively in conversation with some of the most influential recent writing in environmental anthropology, historical archaeology, and the study of slavery in South America and the Caribbean.

The outcome is a fine study in social archaeology that makes archaeological work, in its concerns and methods, respond to contemporary questions of environmental stress and human distress, even as perspectives on landscape modification for economic development and nature conservation are brought to bear on the material record of human action on the environment in the long-past times more familiar to archaeological discovery. A well-attuned historical sensibility

Foreword xi is alive to speeding up and intensifying human impact on natural environments, but the story told here resists a decisive epochal account of these processes. In that way, the “great acceleration” that historians J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke describe’ becomes an analytical understanding of the modern exploitation of places like Dominica that is not teleological in a simple fashion. People on the island repeatedly set to work solving problems they did not create; these engagements meant that some repair accompanied a lot of loss and disruption. Sadly, the struggle to ward off the baneful effects of conquest, colonialism, plantations, and being swept into world commodity markets produced a series of setbacks for those who had the most to lose.

K. Sivaramakrishnan Yale University

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Funding for the research presented in this book was generously provided by the National Science Foundation, Archaeology Program (BCS 1419672, BCS 0948578), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Gr 8413), the Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) Guadeloupe, and Northwestern University’s Faculty Research Grant. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University for providing me a NEXUS 1492 fellowship, during which I had time to read and write about Caribbean ethnohistory and waterscapes in archaeology.

Tam thankful to the many individuals and institutions who made introductions, granted me access to their land, and generously gave of their time in facilitating this research, including the Ministry of Education and Island Heritage Foundation. The Lands and Survey Division of the Ministry of Housing provided geospatial data critical to this project. Lennox Honychurch provided intellectual, material, and social support throughout this project, opening his doors and his long list of contacts to enable my work. Landowners including Isidore Bellot, George Blue, Tony Burnet, Andre Charles, Michael Didier, Celma Dupigny, Christina Garner, John Henderson, Penny Honychurch, Daniel Langois, Jonathan Lehrer, and Joseph Xavier gave me access to their land. Wendy and Simon Walsh, in addition to allowing access to their land, were instrumental in organizing community events. I am also grateful to many other community members who supported this work by publishing magazine articles, hosting community events, and organizing school visits. Special thanks go to Paul Crask for years of conversation and his valorization of archaeological research in local publications.

Over the past ten years I have worked with many wonderful archaeologists from Dominica and elsewhere. Greg Alexander, Dean Bellot, Dora Bellot, Dorival Bellot, Carim Birmingham, Quincy “Q” Bruce, Walther Didie, Mitchell LaVille, Kirsha Reynolds, Michael “Togo” Sanford, Kiefa Stokes, Bradley Tavernier, Edward Thomas, and Dan Wade generously gave their time, and in so doing gave me a better sense of this world. I am also grateful to the many graduate and undergraduate student volunteers, some of whom have become xiii xiv Acknowledgments professors with their own projects. They include Pedro Alvarado, Lyndsey Bates, Kat Caitlin, Lacey Carpenter, Zev Cossin, Carmen Laguer Diaz, Demetrios Elias, Eric Johnston, Kalina Kassadjikova, Brooke Kenline, Addison Kimmel, Kristin Landau, Lauren Nadeau, Kushal Rao, Sophia Theodossious, and Ivan Yeh. Special thanks to those PhD students whom I have advised and have generously contributed their talents for this project in the field or in the lab, including Alan Armstrong, Khadene Harris, Bradley Phillippi, Jenn Porter, and Emily Schwalbe. Each of them has provided insight and nuance to this project. I would like to pay special thanks to Jenn, who read and edited an early draft of this manuscript, and Khadene, who was an on-the-ground collaborator in Dominica.

I am very grateful to those who have advised me as this project took shape. Douglas Armstrong, my advisor, continues to be an important interlocutor, supporter, and friend. Jerome Handler generously gave of his time and has pushed me from the very beginning to frame the project beyond its archaeological implications. This research began as part of a collaboration initiated by Kenneth G. Kelly, who continues to be an interlocutor and friend. Stephen Lenik and Zachary Beier did a lot of groundwork for historical archaeology during his fieldwork and generously provided his contacts to me. Jeff Ferguson and Michael Glasscock at the University of Missouri Research Reactor made the compositional analysis in the research possible. John Steinberg and Doug Bolendar at the Fiske Center at UMass Boston provided invaluable work on shallow geophysics of two sites showcased in this study. Jillian Galle and Frasier Neiman at the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) have been enormous supports in artifact cataloguing and analysis, also providing critical feedback on field methods and data structure. I am grateful to Tessa Murphy, Isaac Shearn, Sarah Oas, and Lindsay Bloch, who helped me generate the kind of evidence required to complete this research. Special thanks are necessary to Diane Wallman, who has been a close collaborator throughout this research.

My colleagues at Northwestern have been amazing supporters and advocates of this project from the beginning. My compatriots— Cynthia Robin, Matthew Johnson, Amanda Logan, Melisa Rosenzweig, and Jim Brown—have always been generous with their insights, expertise, and wisdom, much of which is dotted throughout this book. I would also like to thank those colleagues who have read drafts and provided critical feedback on portions of this manuscript. Shalini Shankar has been especially helpful in reminding me to highlight how archaeology is contributing something new to anthropological conversations about race and inequality. William Leonard was generous with information about energetics and metabolism. Tim Earle has read numerous drafts of proposals and

Acknowledgments xv articles, pushing me to focus on the necessary. Micaela DiLeonardo has helped me attend to the foundations of political economy implicit in slave society. Jessica Winegar and Mary Weismantel were enormously supportive throughout this process.

Beyond my department, numerous people have left major imprints on this project. Thinking about water, environment, and slavery began with and continued through numerous conversations with Sherwin Bryant. Placing those ideas in the broader context of Caribbean and Latin American thought was something Jorge Coronado was always willing to contribute to. Sam Spiers provided material and intellectual support for this project, and friendship at a critical point. Iam also grateful to many colleagues who have acted as sounding boards, including Gayatri Reddy, Chernoh Sessay, and John Karam. Corinne Hofman, William Keegan, Menno Hoogland, and Arie Boomert have generously guided me through the complicated and rich literature on pre-Columbian archaeology and Kalinago ethnohistory. Still others provided critical feedback on a published article that formed the nucleus of this book, including Charlie Cobb, Ian Lilley, Anna Agbe-Davies, Krysta Ryzewski, and Alice Samson. Special thanks go to those scholars who provide a model in contextually rich, nuanced accounts of the archaeological record, including Barb Voss and Laurie Wilkie. I would also like to remember Mary Beaudry, a mentor and friend who stood by me when I needed it most. Mary’s approach was to begin with the thing and use that object to unfold a world. Her work was always with purpose. In her writing and our conversations, she deeply influenced the shape of this research and the approach that I took in crafting this book.

I am deeply indebted to the two anonymous readers who read an earlier draft of this book and provided excellent commentary. I am very grateful to Lorri Hagman and others from the University of Washington Press who made this a better book. I am also indebted to those who made the online distribution of this possible, including the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP) and Northwestern University Libraries.

Finally, my family has been excited about this book from its early stages. My parents’ curiosity about the world, about my work, and about the past continue to be an inspiration for me. My brothers continue to be a source of pride and critical feedback. My sister-in-law, Gayatri Menon, has the most amazing way of simplifying complex ideas so that I can figure out how to see them in the soil. Most important is Kalyani Menon—my first and last reader, my toughest critic, and my most ardent supporter. She saw this book for what it was before I did.

TIMELINE

200 BCE

Farliest evidence of human occupation

Major settlement in Soufriere

Volcanic eruption in Soufriere

Kalinago begin to settle Dominica

Second eruption in Soufriere

Columbus arrives off coast of Wai’tu Kubuli (Dominica) Sir Francis Drake visits Dominica

Kalinago export arrowroot, cotton, and tobacco Dominica granted by patent to Earl of Carlisle

Massacre of Kalinago village by English

Jeannot Rolle, “a free person of color,” establishes first nonindigenous settlement at Grand Bay

French Commandant appointed

Coffee introduced

British General Lord Rollo invades and captures Dominica for Britain

Britain annexes Dominica as part of the Treaty of Paris Sugar intensified

French occupation

Legal abolition of British trade in captive Africans Brown Privilege Bill

Emancipation Act

End of apprenticeship

Coffee blight

Lime introduced

Made a Crown Colony

“Entire or partial abandonment of sugar”

Kalinago Territory established

Dominica becomes independent nation xvii

Introduction

Welcome to Natures Island

N 1817, A LEGAL DISPUTE arose over a comparatively small estate in

a much-overlooked corner of an island at the edge of the British Empire.

The party claiming ownership sued the property’s residents to recover rent and proceeds from the estate, which the complainants alleged was wickedly neglected. The probate that accompanied the suit included a detailed description of the property, documenting enslaved laborers, buildings, furniture, animals, equipment, and the disposition of the land. The estate in question was in the southwestern quarter of the island of Dominica (maps I.1 and I.2). For those acquainted with Caribbean estates, this is a familiar story. In their description, the document’s authors stated that the buildings were “slight and can only answer a temporary purpose.” Of the slaves, the authors agreed that all 120 were generally healthy and able-bodied in the minds of the attorneys. What struck me as I read the document was the state of the land. Aside from a few smallholders who were squatting on the property, most of the coffee fields had been left to nature. One parcel was “totally abandoned and [became] a common for cattle.” Perhaps the most interesting comment was the one made about the cane fields: “One remark that has forcibly struck us is that the cutting down of the Galba fences where the canes are now planted was highly injurious, in a situation so much exposed to the wind and must prove extremely injurious to the canes.” These fields were in the process of being abandoned. The probate ends with these damning words, “We deem it necessary to remark—under all the circumstances of this property, that on demanding of the present manager . . . what salary he was allowed . . . he stated it be roo joes [a large sum in 1817] per annum.”

The account describes a Dickensian situation: a ramshackle estate with a few settlers and over one hundred slaves of all ages and origins, who use former coffee lands to graze their cattle and livestock, run by an incompetent manager living in a rotting estate house. The account is interesting in that it describes abandonment of prime land. The probate’s authors’ disdain for the defendants is evident in their account of the owners’ misuse of the estate—converting prime coffee lands into cane fields and hiring a manager whose ignorance was richly rewarded. The account is important because it describes a property and the people who lived on it in the wake of Dominica’s sugar revolution, a short-lived agrarian transition that coincided with Britain’s annexation of the island in 1763. By all accounts, the revolution failed. The lives and livelihoods of the people are not clearly spelled out in the document. From the ways that parcels were named we can infer that free people squatted on the land. It also tells us that enslaved laborers remained attached to the land even when their labor was no longer needed. Finally, it suggests that these people, living on the margins of empire, had to resolve problems that were not of their own making. An absence in the account above is water and its role in the everyday life of those left to live on the estate. Water animated the landscape; it brought life to the soil. Its absence speaks to how much the people writing the account took it for granted as part of their everyday life. Its absence is also noteworthy for those who had to rely on available sources to drink, cook, wash, and water their animals.

This book uses the lens of water to examine an environment modified by slavery on an island largely overlooked by historians (maps 1.3 and 1.4). The predicaments faced by enslaved people described above were not unique.' The sugar revolution, the “event” of this study, put into direct competition ordinary people’s daily needs to access soil and water with the manufacturing demands of goods destined for distant markets. It was not the first political-economic transformation in the Americas that centered around local and elite tensions over soil and water. Hydrosocial manipulation and agricultural intensification, as well as their social control, are very much part of the story of states in the Andes, the Maya region, and central Mexico.* Nor was sugar the last commodity to transform the Americas, as recently noted in Mexico City, Bolivia, and the United States. While the unequal distribution of water and its scarcity are very much part of the contemporary public transcript, we can understand this present narrative through its deep roots in the past. Archaeology as a field focuses on absent presences, mapping them in space and mapping how they change over time.

The sugar revolution put into motion something the Americas had yet to see. Monoculture supplanted agricultural practices in which farmers had cultivated different species as climate and soil conditions demanded. Sugar was the first botanical commodity exploited in the Caribbean that came from another part of the world. Whereas cotton, tobacco, and cacao were indigenous crops in the Americas, sugar originated in Southeast Asia and migrated through a long passage, in which its value and the social relationships attached to it evolved.* The revolution introduced into agriculture a high level of organization, ve The Bahamas Atlantic Ocean

Leeward Islands Greater Antilles

J Dominica> Windward Caribbean Sea Islands

0 500 KM Loi

MAP 1.1. Location of Dominica in the Caribbean. Illustration by author.

Capuchin, Vielle Case

Atlantic Ocean

=. Marigot

AE i gs f i

Z », Kalinago

‘bf Territory LE, ss f "Ç

Wie

Massacre 54 Z

Roseau ` 2

N : £ Point Michelle Z 7 w E hh 2 pi Soufriere Grand Bay S 0 5 10KM L111 _t

MAP 1.2. Location of Dominica’s Enclaves described by M. R. Trouillot, 1988. Illustration by author.

Fort Shirley

— Paved Road = Cobble Road --- Footpath

—- Unpaved Road

Estate Name

Place Name i des, me Sugarloaf —

Caribbean Sea N

MAP 1.3. Dominica’s Portsmouth enclave and its locations described in this study. Illustration by author.

— Paved Road see Cobble Road

--- Footpath Soufriere —- Unpaved Road

Estate Name

Place Name Galleon š: Caribbean Sea Bois Cotlette N 4 Scott’s Head w S 0 500 1,000m L |

MAP 1.4. Dominica’s Soufriere enclave and its locations described in this study. Illustration by author.

interchangeability of labor units, extreme time-consciousness, and, most important, separation of both production from consumption and workers from their tools. At the same time, enslaved Caribbean people who had become experts on the land aspired to many forms of freedom: freedom from the legal status that defined them as property, freedom from the physical violence that accompanied slavery’s legal and labor regimes, and freedom from the slow violence that emerged through very simple but long-lasting competition between production of commodities and reproduction of lives and livelihoods.’

Enslavement is forced labor extracted under the threat of violence, where people are compelled to solve problems not of their own making. To be enslaved is to face those problems as everyday predicaments surrounding security, mobility, and belonging. Because labor was extracted under constant threats of violence, slow and fast, securing life and livelihoods was a principal concern for those living in slave society. To secure life and livelihood, people were forced to move about the land in ways contrary to their captivity. Since the possession of captives was critical to cultural politics in slave society, those deemed property struggled to forge networks of community through different idioms of belonging. In the eighteenth-century Caribbean—a context known for its industrialized relations of labor, racialized forms of difference making, and enslavement defined through chattel property—people struggled to secure their livelihoods in contexts where mobility was differently policed to pursue the politics of belonging.

These predicaments were not natural states; they were the consequence of plans authored in distant places of power and materialized locally. While the ancestors of the indigenous Kalinago took captives from neighboring islands and more distant shores, it was only in the 1700s that people in Dominica started facing the predicaments described above. It was then that colonists and slaves from neighboring Martinique and Guadeloupe began to establish agricultural concerns on the island. Amid entrenched slavery and its violence, anxieties over security, mobility, and belonging intensified in 1763, when English and French planters pursued economic progress promised in colonizing discourses and undersigned by the cultivation of sugar. Archaeological and textual evidence provides clues about how enslaved people of African descent resolved everyday concerns over lives and livelihoods through their capacity to move about the landscape in order to pursue the politics of belonging. Forced to realize the plans of English-speaking elites, enslaved workers shaped the landscape by modifying traditional ways of doing things. Enslaved Dominicans also engaged in the global economy in novel ways. Unexpected economies emerged that formed a social and political infrastructure, bringing maroons, slaves, and Kalinago in daily face-to-face interaction. People formed communities that frustrated imperial categories of difference based on skin color and dispossession, and households formed associations around both kin and non-kin.

Colonizing discourses described Dominica as an island of latent potential that could be realized only through the capacity of slavery and markets. Subscribers to these discourses invested their fortunes and the labor of others, only to find that cultivation of sugar was a failed project. In 1965, the Dominica Tourist Board branded the colony as “the Nature Island” to promote travel of “holidaymakers” from Europe. “Nature’s Island” also alludes to a historical process, as Dominica was the last quarry in Europe’s eighteenth-century land grab for growing sugar and implanting subjects in the Caribbean. The “nature” of the island changed in relationship to slavery and markets, and capital ambitions on the island failed when nature would not yield. “Nature’s Island” also signals the boundary work of eighteenth-century colonial accounts, in which slippages between “nature” and “culture” rendered Indigenous people invisible and enslaved Africans governable. All who stood in relation to slavery felt the consequences of these imperial ambitions, but those who were legally categorized as property bore the most significant cost of their reproduction and resolution.

These accounts recognized that some people would pay more dearly for cultivating new Caribbean colonies than others. Some provided financial outlays to accumulate land, build factories, and commission infrastructure. In the historical record, little acknowledgment is given to costs for those whose labor was pressed into service to improve the land, work the factories, and ply the roads. Landowners needed workers for the commercial crops that increasingly blanketed the Eastern Caribbean: cotton, tobacco, coffee, indigo, and sugar cane. People of African descent were pressed into service to work these plants into commodities. For them, the landscape in which they labored was one of limited options. The slave trade inserted them into provinces or countries in which mobility required language skills and connections they were not expected to possess. Nor were they intended to move off the land where they labored to find a home somewhere else, because the laws had prohibited such movement as a capital offense. Some did run away and join communities of maroons living in the island’s highlands, but such moves did not guarantee that their lives became free of servitude. Importantly, their labor bore much of the costs unaccounted for in colonizing discourses. As land was made available for the cultivation of commodities such as sugar, coffee, and cotton, people living in slave settlements were often challenged to locate and improve water and soil to meet basic needs.

This book puts into conversation the work of scholars who question the premises of capitalism and its workings in the environment, historians concerned with the role of slavery and governance in colonial settings, and archaeologists engaged with spatial relationships inscribed into plantation economies. While contributing to a long-term conversation in which Caribbean scholars have centered these ecological relations in the making of social lives, it also considers a new way for archaeologists to conceptualize matter in conditions of intense social inequality and shows how archaeological data can contribute to broader conversations about nature, culture, and place.’ It thus examines “what manages to live” despite slavery.š

With few exceptions, archaeologists write for one another, limiting their contributions to broader scholarly discourse. This is a shame. The material record they engage can contribute insights that move past apolitical commentary of the environment and situate political ecology in the violent histories of slavery.’ More than three decades ago, Jamaican cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter described Caribbean history as a competition between two priorities.!° One priority, that of the cane field, was framed in the idiom of property and improvement. Colonization of Dominica was a process of alienation where humans were transformed into labor “and nature to land.” Here the slave was dually alienated." The process of colonization was a physical alienation by which people racialized as black were held captive in the Americas. It was also a political alienation of the relationship between those people and the earth, which reshaped the social fields in which they operated. A second priority, that of the provision ground, was framed by idioms of reunion and cultivation. In provision ground spaces, Africans reunited with the earth through growing food. In so doing, they cultivated relationships on “the plot of folk culture,” which became another basis of social order.”

I hope to work against the insularity of archaeology by putting into conversation Caribbean scholarship in my examination of the changing nature of Dominica in relation to an often-overlooked matter—water. The book is divided into two sections, Properties and Cultivation, to mirror Wynter’s framing. Farms as an assemblage of plants, people, technologies, and animals became increasingly valued for their global relations, rather than more intimate ones. Sugar cane, chief among the crops valued for their ability to accumulate wealth, created particular predicaments for those forced to work the land. Gardens cultivated by the enslaved became a local articulation of alternative geographies. Here enslaved laborers sought “biotic,” political, and social refuge in which noncommercial, threatened species could survive.” I hope to challenge the myth that on an island barely larger than Chicago, with 365 rivers, nature was abundant, and its elements, such as earth, air, water, and fuel, were virtually free. Bringing these relationships into sharp focus, this book advances one account of how engagements with these elements emerged for residents of Dominica as a set of predicaments, reconstituting how people who did not set these processes in motion were able to socially and materially reproduce themselves.

Waterscapes

Pe.

Chapter I

In Evening got opposite Roseau when several Boats came on board of us having the principal Gentlemen in the Island. . . In landing we went on board the Africa, a Negro [slave] ship. We saw Boys & Girls dance & sing keeping time with their open hands striking each other —while a male got a sword in his hand & he made a number of curious movements with it looking frequently to his own limbs & wriggling with his back side. One female began [a] song [and] all joined the chorus — much in a way in highlands in their own native dialect. The children have necklaces of beads on wrists & necks.

—Journal of Jonathan Troup, May 11, 1789

ONATHAN TROUP ARRIVED OFF the coast of Roseau, onboard The Duch-

ess of Portland. Troup was recruited to practice medicine among sixteen

“Mullato, French and English” physicians in Dominica after he received his medical training at Marischal College in Aberdeen in 1788. New to the Caribbean, and in search of his fortune, Troup spent the next year documenting his practice, taking histories of various patients, describing maladies, and detailing ingredients of the remedies he prescribed. His prose is inconsistent, containing incomplete sentences, half-written words, unfinished thoughts, and descriptive tangents. Topics include people, weather, diseases, terrain, and livestock, and how they played an active role on the island. Quickly drawn sketches of town scenes and the material culture that Dominica’s residents used accompany some of these descriptions (figure 1.1). Historians have discussed how his manuscript is inflected with tones of sexual violence that pervaded colonial society, including accounts of Troup’s own interactions.” Also important were the social lives of people on the island. The list of actors who play pivotal roles in his descriptions of everyday life includes estate managers, plantation proprietors, doctors, people classified as “free colored,” Africans classified as slaves, and both free and enslaved skilled tradesmen. This last group is described most prominently in

B

FIGURE 1.1. Watercolor paintings found in Jonathan Troup’s journal, highlighting some of the lives and livelihoods he encountered during his one-year stay in Dominica (UA, MS 2070, Journal of Jonathan Troup). Counterclockwise, from top left: “Water and Negroe Woman” (126), “Barber” (127), “Field Slaves and Town Slaves” (12.4), “Iron Bilboes and Wood Stockade” (123), “Hair Rings” (122v), “Ibbo Dancing” (121), “Negroes pulling a cart of goods” (133). Courtesy of University of Aberdeen.