The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Subsistence in the Plantationocene: dooryard

gardens, agrobiodiversity, and the subaltern
economies of slavery

Judith A. Carney

To cite this article: Judith A. Carney (2020): Subsistence in the Plantationocene: dooryard
gardens, agrobiodiversity, and the subaltern economies of slavery, The Journal of Peasant Studies,
DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2020.1725488

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1725488

Published online: 10 Apr 2020.

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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1725488

Subsistence in the Plantationocene: dooryard gardens,

agrobiodiversity, and the subaltern economies of slavery
Judith A. Carney
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The expansion of monocultures across New World tropical landscapes Plantationocene;
threatens an Afrodescendant smallholder farming system that has transatlantic slavery;
long prioritized agrobiodiversity and agroecological practices. These Afrodescendant smallholder
farming systems;
practices emerged during the plantation era, when slaves leveraged
agrobiodiversity; bio-cultural
subsistence precarity for the right to food plots, independent refugia
production, and partial autonomy over their labor. Historical
continuities connect this subaltern food system to the agricultural
repertoires maintained by present-day Afrodescendant smallholders.
The landscapes that collectively embody the plants, practical and
cultural knowledge, and social memories held by these communities
are recognizable as bio-cultural refugia, extending to the New World
tropics a concept validating European heritage landscapes.

Introduction
A defining signature of the Great Acceleration is the rapid expansion of plantation agricul-
ture across tropical landscapes. Tania Li’s recent exhortation that ‘plantations are back’ (Li
2018, 328) applies not only to Indonesia but also recalls the world region where planta-
tions first appeared, the New World tropics. Indeed, colonial era plantations so radically
shaped and altered landscapes that they can be said to epitomize a global epoch that
is still dominated by their land-use legacies. Today, oil palm plantations are expanding
not only across Indonesia, but also Colombia and Brazil; an additional 60 million hectares
in South America have been planted exclusively to soybeans. The resurgence of planta-
tions across neotropical landscapes poses new threats to smallholder farming and to
the biomes that harbor the globe’s richest species diversity. An urgent environmental
issue of our time is how to reconcile food production with the biodiversity loss attending
the expansion of industrially farmed monocultures.
The biodiversity of agriculture and food systems – agrobiodiversity – has not received
much attention in Anthropocene scholarship (Zimmerer et al. 2019). However, the concept
of the Plantationocene offers one way forward. The Plantationocene identifies the emer-
gence of plantation economies in the sixteenth century as a watershed event in human-

CONTACT Judith A. Carney carney@geog.ucla.edu Department of Geography, University of California, 1160

Bunche Hall, Box 951524, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1524, USA
A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the conference, Environmental History as if the Future Mattered, held at
the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva, 3–4 October 2018. The author wishes to thank
the attendees for the comments they provided on the draft article.
© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. A. CARNEY

mediated history (Haraway 2015; Mitman 2019). Emphasis on large-scale cultivation of a

single exotic crop coupled with reliance on enslaved labor distinguishes the plantation
as an epochal transformative institution in human and environmental history (Tsing
2012). Plantations instantiate a founding model for the Great Acceleration’s carbon-con-
suming and carbon-emitting industrial food production system, and anticipate the agribu-
siness monocultures, factory meat production, and simplified ecologies implicated in
biodiversity loss and species extinctions. The Plantationocene recognizes the power
relations that inform capitalist and imperialist structures and the erasures of certain
forms of life and human relationships with the material world (Mitman 2019). The
concept also engages the historical and socio-ecological legacies of plantation capitalism
expressed today in pro-agribusiness state policies, land concentration, racialized conflicts
over land use and access, and mounting concern over biodiversity loss (Perfecto, Van-
dermeer, and Wright 2010; Phalan et al. 2016).
Nevertheless, the problem of subsistence in the plantation period is underexplored in
Plantationocene scholarship. A careful reading of historical sources (written accounts and
artwork) in fact reveals an alternative food system that developed within the interstices of
plantation landscapes, one that materialized on the small plots the enslaved planted for
their daily sustenance. Critical components of this food system survive today on Afrodes-
cendant smallholder farms of the Neotropics.
Even during its apogee, the neotropical plantation agricultural system was not totaliz-
ing. Plantation owners could not always apportion all the acreage under their command to
commodity production. Mountainous terrain and barren or unproductive tracts at times
gave the enslaved opportunities to cultivate food dedicated to their own survival. In con-
trast to the vast acreages sown to commodity crops, slave food plots were reservoirs of
agrobiodiversity where they cultivated plants from two continents in dense, multi-
layered assemblages. These compact ‘food forests’ emerged in the small yards surround-
ing slave dwellings and on marginal land deemed unsuitable for commodity crop pro-
duction. Here, the enslaved curated plants and portfolios of knowledge that testified to
another way of growing food in the New World tropics.
Such modest sites provided crucial spaces where enslaved Africans and their descen-
dants creolized the agronomic heritages of the Old and New World tropics. The funds
of agronomic expertise and social memories they endowed were applied anew after Abol-
ition, when freedpersons sought unclaimed land to grow food and escape new forms of
coerced labor. This evolution gave rise to the Afrodescendant peasant farming system
that received considerable scholarly attention in the latter half of the twentieth century,
and which today is threatened by the expansion of industrially farmed monocultures.
Slave subsistence plots add a subaltern history to narratives of agricultural production
in the Plantationocene. These were not only sites of survival but also sites of resistance and
liberation. As such, the dual function of the slave subsistence plot reveals the crucial, but
often overlooked, linkage of food sovereignty to enactments of political and economic
freedom. These plots engendered a distinctive food system in the New World tropics,
which in turn pivoted on stewardship of an agrobiodiverse, multi-species matrix of
plants and animals. The smallholder farms that inherit this repertoire of agroecological
practices are both enclaves of agrobiodiversity and a resilient, alternative food system;
today, they inform a new paradigm that has bearing on contemporary debates over
incompatibilities of species conservation with global food production.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3

The Plantationocene and transatlantic slavery

Plantations represented a transformational moment in human and natural history. Based
on large-scale cultivation of an exotic crop produced by enslaved labor, they were the
engine of wealth generation that propelled European capitalist and imperialist expansion
(Tsing 2012). Plantation development powered the unparalleled dislocations of plants,
peoples, and pathogens across the Atlantic in the early modern world. Colonists from
the European mid-latitudes introduced tropical crops such as sugarcane and indigo to tro-
pical and subtropical America. The consolidation of plantation landholdings depended on
the seizure of lands held by Amerindians, either by warfare or treaty, and the enslavement
of native peoples to produce the commodity crop.
Plantations concentrated in lowland tropical ecologies, where the terrain’s flatness facili-
tated forest clearance and the demarcation of landscapes into geometric landholdings with
boundaries (Mintz 1966; Dean 1995; Monzote 2008). The initial century of colonization,
forced labor, and introduced diseases so decimated native populations that colonists
increasingly turned to enslaved Africans as a replacement labor force (Crosby 1972; Mon-
teiro 2018). By the eighteenth century, plantation laborers were principally African and
the defining characteristics of the Plantationocene now set: massive environmental trans-
formations, monocultures, the transatlantic slave trade, and racialized labor regimes.
This discussion of New World African agency in shaping and maintaining agrobiodi-
verse food systems inculpates the eighteenth century and the institution of transatlantic
slavery as a critical inflection point. More than half the estimated 12.5 million Africans for-
cibly migrated to the Americas arrived in plantation societies during this period, one of the
greatest demographic shifts in world history (Mintz 1966; Eltis 2001; Eltis and Richardson
2010). The same century witnessed the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the
pivot towards carbon dependence emblematic of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoer-
mer 2000). By the twentieth century, mechanized production had replaced enslaved labor
in industrial agriculture. Reliance on fossil-fuel energy sources has continued to soar
during the Great Acceleration, evident in the expansion of petroleum-based monocul-
tures, especially oil palm and soybean plantations in recent decades. The mutually consti-
tutive accumulation of capital and industrial food production continues to inform
transoceanic movements of crops and profits beyond the New World tropics (Moore
2015; Patel and Moore 2017).
A recent IPCC (2019) report warns that the deforestation that attends the monoculture
food order is exacerbating climate change, and so compels rethinking the way the world
produces food. Agroforestry and other agroecological and ecosystem-based practices are
cited as a more resilient and sustainable alternative given their emphasis on agrobiodiver-
sity and adaptability to local environmental conditions. Many of these practices are
evident at smaller scales in the food forests developed by enslaved Africans and main-
tained by their smallholder descendants. However, the living remnants of this subaltern
food system that emerged in the New World tropics is today imperiled by the Plantatio-
nocene’s modern industrial incarnation.
This discussion of the genesis and evolution of slave food gardens in plantation econ-
omies contextualizes the emergence of an agroforestry system that has long sustained
smallholder farmers in former plantation societies. Artwork from the colonial period illus-
trates these patchworks of subsistence cultivation disrupting plantation monocultures. A
4 J. A. CARNEY

more complete understanding of this subaltern food system is also possible through a
critical reading of historical accounts and studies of Afrodescendant farm communities
by geographers and anthropologists over the past half century.

Plantations, subsistence, and African crop introductions

In the initial period of plantation formation white colonizers of neotropical America arrived
with little knowledge about agriculture in the tropics. The principal crop that concerned
them was sugar, a manifestly profitable but exotic commodity that required apprentice-
ship for growers eager to learn its cultivation and processing methods. With their attention
and energies focused on commodity production, European planters in the New World
tropics largely left the crucial matter of producing food to their enslaved laborers. There
was reason for this. The peoples that the colonizers subjugated – initially Amerindian,
then African – were for the most part already expert tropical farmers. Tropical agriculture
relies on an entirely different array of crops and cultivation methods than those used in
temperate climates. It requires expertise in adapting agricultural practices and cultivars
to high temperature and precipitation regimes, soils of often limited fertility, and the
year-round menace of insect pests (Carney and Rosomoff 2009). For the uninitiated, the
production of food in the tropics presented considerable challenges met only by inculca-
tion of radically new practices and paradigms.
Slaveholders affected little concern for the nourishment of those they held in bondage.
They preferred to make slaves directly responsible for their daily sustenance – no doubt
motivated by the desire to reduce overhead. Seventeenth-century visitors described the
precarious subsistence situation of the enslaved on newly formed sugar plantations and
left telling portraits of planter indifference: they received ‘nothing save sufficient
ground on which to plant food crops, build a house, and produce some other subsistence
items’, wrote Du Tertre about the French Caribbean holdings (as quoted in Carney and
Rosomoff 2009, 108). Nevertheless, the plantation’s oppressive labor regime left little
time for the enslaved to grow food and feed themselves, with predictable outcomes.
George Warren noted slaves in Surinam1 ‘having nothing [to eat] but what they can
produce … to live upon. … These wretched miseries not seldom drive them to despe-
rate attempts for the Recovery of their liberty, endeavouring to escape’ (Warren 1667,
19). Despite attempts by some European states to enforce minimal dietary standards for
slaves, decrees from the metropole such as France’s Code Noir of 1685 were seldom
heeded in distant colonies.
Survival thus depended vitally upon the food slaves could produce after a grueling
day of labor in plantation fields. The time to do so was repeatedly a point of contestation
with plantation owners. Other than outright escape, slaves used tactics such as temporary
marronage, petitioning of colonial administrators – even revolt – to compel plantation
owners to provide sufficient time for subsistence cultivation (Schwartz 1977;
McFarlane 1986). Such efforts sought to establish conventions that recognized not only
the right to an individual food plot but also unsupervised time off from plantation labor
to tend it.
1
The colony is spelled here as ‘Surinam.’ The modern spelling of ‘Suriname’ refers to the country, which became an inde-
pendent state in 1975.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 5

The initial cultigens and knowledge base for food production in tropical America had
been Amerindian. But as the native populations declined and the importation of enslaved
Africans escalated, food introductions from Africa also increased, becoming fully evident
by the sixteenth century. Guinea yam, plantain, and the guinea fowl were, for example,
among the earliest established in New World plantation societies. In the seventeenth
century other important foodstaples of tropical Africa had been introduced, notably
sorghum, millet, black-eyed, lablab, and pigeon peas, hibiscus, okra, kola nuts, African
rice, the African oil palm, and the Bambara groundnut (Carney and Rosomoff 2009,
123–125). These crops reached the New World as occasional remainders from slave ship
food stores; the leftovers provided the enslaved opportunities to establish African seeds
and root stock in their food plots. There, slaveholders and naturalists encountered these
novel plants for the first time. With no prior familiarity with these African foodstaples,
they often adopted the names by which the crops were known to their slaves. In such
instances, the African vernacular names at times entered into colonial languages, an
unwitting testimony to slave agency and the role slaves played in their introduction
(Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 139–142).2
The cultivation of African foods in plantation societies was instigated by the enslaved
under circumstances that today are scarcely imaginable. Oppressive physical labor in com-
modity production, the daily need for sustenance, and the time to provide for it, favored
the infiltration of readily grown tropical foodstaples into slave subsistence strategies.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants combined the tropical farming systems of the
Old and New World tropics in their subsistence plots, which emerged as active sites of
crop experimentation and plant exchanges. These food fields became the staging
ground for African foods that eventually made their way into the kitchens of slaveholders
and came to define the celebrated foodways of former plantation societies.3

The subaltern food system

Africans in ancient times had actively participated in plant domestication. Especially
important domesticates include African rice, sorghum, millet, and yams. Over millennia,
Africans initiated new processes of agrarian creolization. First, when taro, ginger, and
plantains reached Africa from Asia 2000 years ago; and again, some 500 years ago
when African farmers incorporated introduced Amerindian crops into their farming
systems. A third episode began during the early plantation period when enslaved
Africans often labored alongside Amerindian slaves or encountered them as runaways
(maroons). Such contact at times provided Africans apprenticeship in the plants and
practices of native peoples, for which the former became caretakers as subjugated
Amerindian populations declined or disappeared (Carney and Rosomoff 2009). Despite
the brutal conditions of their bondage, enslaved Africans were able to synthesize a
robust mosaic of agrarian knowledge forged over millennia of human settlement in
the New and Old World tropics.
2
Examples of adopted African language loan words include bissy (kola), okra, benne (sesame), yam, dendê (oil palm or palm
oil), cuxá (sorrel), ackee, and banana.
3
Examples of dishes based on African ingredients include Hoppin’ John (rice and black-eyed peas), gumbo or callaloo (okra),
acarajé (black-eyed peas and palm oil), abaré (black-eyed pea meal in banana leaf), jambalaya (rice), moqueca (palm oil),
and fufu (plantains).
6 J. A. CARNEY

The reservoir of practices and experiences that slaves and maroons created and safe-
guarded began with the subsistence sites established on plantation estates. These
included: the food fields set aside as plantation provision grounds; the dooryard
gardens surrounding slave dwellings; and marginal or idle land unsuited to the commodity
crop such as the flanks of inutile hillslopes and ravines.
Provision grounds were set aside for slave rations. They were planter-managed, laid out
and cultivated on level land according to European custom, which is to say, in rectangular
plots of single crops planted in rows (Figure 1). The crops chosen were typically not Euro-
pean but tropical species better adapted to the environment: manioc, sweet potato,
banana, and plantain, for example. These staples of the New and Old World tropics are
high in starch; however, they lack essential nutrients needed to preserve life.
Survival thus depended upon more aggressive subsistence strategies to achieve basic
nutritional requirements. To this end, the enslaved judiciously improvised an assemblage
of plants and fruit trees around their dwellings that supplemented their rations and
ground provisions. These dooryard gardens were closely tended and could be harvested
continually (Figure 2). Here, seed and root crops, fruit trees, and medicinal plants were
interplanted and organized as actively managed polycultures. Some colonial observers
noted the care that the enslaved lavished on their gardens and the small animals they
occasionally reared (Figure 3):
Behind the house is the garden filled with plantains, ochras, and other vegetables, which are
produced at all seasons. It abounds also with cocoa-nut and calabash trees. … Every family
has their hogsties … the chickens are carefully gathered at night, and hung in baskets, to
preserve them from the rats. (Barclay 1827, 313–315)

The enslaved additionally planted African and Amerindian crops such as yams, sweet
potato, pigeon peas, black-eyed peas, peanuts, maize, oil palm, pineapple, papaya, plan-
tain, hibiscus, and cocoyams; they also grew leafy greens, including varieties of herbs,
medicinals (e.g. castor bean, ginger), and plants with practical household applications (Pul-
sipher 1990; Carney and Rosomoff 2009). English plantation owner (and slavery apologist)
Bryan Edwards (1793, 163) noted how food plants were ‘always intermingled with fruit-
trees’, effectively creating dense, blended food forests. In 1768 the Moravian missionary
C.G.A. Oldendorp recorded more than 18 different interplanted crops being grown on
Virgin Island slave food plots, including many of African origin (Oldendorp et al. 1987).
These slave food plots were, in effect, ‘the botanical gardens of the Atlantic world’s dispos-
sessed’ (Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 135).
In contrast to the dooryard gardens, the food fields the enslaved improvised on mar-
ginal land or plantation peripheries improved subsistence reserves even though their cul-
tivation intensified labor burdens. The right to an individual plot and the time to work it
was realized on these sites, enabling slaves to forge within the confines of their bondage a
measure of what Fellows and Delle (2015) call ‘spatial sovereignty’. The convention was
more readily achieved in plantation areas with marked topographic relief where the less
favored tracts were situated, since plains and intermontane valleys were often entirely
planted to the monoculture (Figure 4). The ecological niches allowed the enslaved fre-
quently presented edaphic challenges. Nevertheless, the broad array of African plants
and practices, which the enslaved integrated within the socio-ecological and spatial
boundaries of the plantation, made their food fields resemble, according to one
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 7

Figure 1. Plantation Provision Grounds, Saint Domingue, 1796. The planter-managed slave provision
grounds are the food plots shown on either side of buildings identified in the legend. Source:
‘Avalle’s Idealized Sugar Plantation,’ in Watts, West Indies, 390.
8 J. A. CARNEY

Figure 2. ‘Dwellings of the Blacks,’ 1820s. Johann Moritz Rugendas was the illustrator for a
scientific expedition to Brazil. Source: Rugendas, Viagem pitoresca através do Brasil, 1954, Plate 4/5,
following 205.

eighteenth-century observer in Saint Domingue, ‘une petite Guinée’ (Tomich 1993, 222).
The enslaved guided the propagation and spatial movement of myriad crops, including
their translocation from the plantation to the food fields of fugitive slave communities.
The multistoried slave garden is evident in paintings of Caribbean sugar plantations
(Figures 5–7). In each, fields of cane are punctuated by the food forests surrounding
slave dwellings. From a contemporary vantage point, slaves’ modest subsistence plots
can be seen as islands of agrobiodiversity disrupting a sea of commodity monoculture.
The paintings are representative of a landscape genre that was frequently commissioned
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to attract private investment from the metro-
pole to the colonies. The images present highly idealized views of plantations that served
both a commercial function – investment in land and new plantation development – and
the ideological conceits of empire and its civilizing virtues. Their intended audience was
mostly people who had never visited the colony, in particular potential investors or absen-
tee owners who sought information and reassurance about their holdings. Nevertheless, in
illustrating the spatial arrangement of a plantation, they reveal the location and biophysi-
cal settings of slave habitations and food forests (Cossin and Hauser 2015).

Independent production as sites of liberatory practices

The concession of an individual food plot represented considerably more than a physical
space for growing food. It set the stage for a more expansive right to independent pro-
duction. Independent production gave slaves the opportunity to plant crops without
supervision, to produce beyond their dietary needs, to realize petty cash or goods from
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 9

Figure 3. ‘Slave Quarters, Sugar Plantation, Martinique, 1826.’ Source: Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny,
Voyage pittoresque dans les deux Amèriques … , 1836, facing p.19, Figure 1. In Slavery Images: A
Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, Image: NW0309,
accessed 29 November 2019. http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/386.

marketable surpluses, and to derive direct benefits from a portion of their overall labors.
With this right the enslaved determined what to grow, how to grow it, and what to do
with the harvest. Plantation owners waived claims on the crops raised on these plots.
Slaves could sell their surpluses, along with small animals, in local markets (Cardoso
1988; Tomich 1993; Barickman 1994; Marshall 1996; Higman 1998; Heath and Bennett
2000) (Figure 8). Once the convention was established in Jamaica, eighteenth-century
plantation owner and historian Edward Long noted the flourishing subaltern economy
where the enslaved sold ‘their hogs, poultry, fish, corn, fruits, and other commodities, at
the markets in town and country’ (quoted in Sweeney 2019, 217).
Individual food plots were the foundation on which the enslaved established the right
to independent production and partial autonomy over their labor, including the time to
work them and entitlement to market proceeds. Mintz and Hall (1960) made this point
many decades ago, when they linked independent production – or enslaved people’s cus-
tomary right to cultivate provisions – to the advent of an internal marketing system in
Jamaica. Mintz (1966, 1974) subsequently argued that independent production catalysed
an emergent protopeasantry of the enslaved. By providing a strategy for expanding social
10 J. A. CARNEY

Figure 4. ‘View of a Sugar Plantation, French West Indies, 1762.’ The mountainous areas at the upper
left (numbers 13 and 14) correspond to food plots slaves cultivated on the remote hillslopes of a sugar
plantation. These areas were often planted with tropical root crops. Source: Diderot, Encyclopédie, 1762,
vol. 1, plate I. In Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early
African Diaspora, Image sucrerie_plate1, accessed 29 November 2019. http://slaveryimages.org/s/
slaveryimages/item/3122.

networks beyond the plantation, it was a crucial step towards asserting new rights, orga-
nizing resistance, and gaining leverage in an exploitative system. It was not only for want
of food that the enslaved took up these new burdens and risks.
The emergence of an internal market was tolerated by colonial societies because it also
stabilized and subsidized plantation slavery by reducing the subsistence costs intrinsic to
owning people (Sweeney 2019). Slaveholders may also have agreed to independent pro-
duction as a pacification strategy that would prevent uprisings. Even so, newly won mobi-
lity enabled the enslaved to create an oppositional politics, one promulgated by social
networks based on ‘sustenance that would serve their pursuit of free life both before
and after emancipation’ (Sweeney 2019, 201, n.13). This point is succinctly captured by
White (2018), who epitomises slave food gardens as sites of liberatory practice. With inde-
pendent production the enslaved developed and affirmed a radically different food order
than that of the monoculture fields on which they labored. Cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter
views this dichotomy as ‘the basic confrontation … between the plantation and the
[slave] plot, and the structure of values which each represent’ (Wynter 1971, 99).
Independent production served as a springboard for the enslaved to negotiate
additional rights, such as a free day to provide sustenance, and the ability to bequeath
a food plot to a person of his or her choosing. The right to designate an individual
plot’s heirs was reported in northeast Brazil, the Windward Islands, and the French Carib-
bean (Conrad 1984, 190; Marshall 1993; Tomich 1993). French abolitionist Victor Schoel-
cher, just years before the Republic’s emancipation decree of 1848, reported that slaves
in France’s Caribbean colonies could ‘pass [plots] on from father to son, from mother to
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11

Figure 5. ‘Sugar Plantation, Antigua, West Indies, 1801.’ Watercolor by English artist Nicholas Pocock,
1805. In Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Dia-
spora, Image NW0090, accessed 29 November 2019. http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1433.

Figure 6. ‘Montpelier Estate, St. James’s.’ Source: James Hakewill, A Picturesque Tour of the Island of
Jamaica, from Drawings Made in the Years 1820 and 1821, 1825, plate 19. In Slavery Images: A Visual
Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, Image HAKE5, accessed
29 November 2019. http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1391.
12 J. A. CARNEY

Figure 7. ‘Sugar Plantation, St. Kitts, West Indies,’ ca 1795. Source: Watercolor attributed to Lt. James
Lees. Courtesy of Percival L. Hauley at the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park Society, St. Kitts, West
Indies.

daughter, and, if they do not have any children, they bequeath them to their nearest kin or
even their friends’ (quoted in Tomich, 234).
Both enslaved men and women cultivated provisions (see Figure 5); however, females
played such a prominent role in their trade and sale that they were collectively called ‘hig-
glers’ in British colonies and quitandeiras in Brazil (Carney and Rosomoff 2009, 182–184). In
this respect, Sweeney (2019, 201) sees ‘the internal marketing system as a sphere of rela-
tive autonomy that was, in turn, a gendered site of production and distribution.’ Her argu-
ment diverges from Mintz and Price (1992, 77), who contended that the gendered division
of labor in the internal marketing system emerged only after the abolition of slavery.
Throughout the period of slavery vending provisions and the sale of foodstuffs in public
markets remained a distinctly female occupation.
Slave gardens also provided the seeds and root cuttings that maroons carried with
them to the isolated areas they settled. These cultivars were renewed – along with an
extensive portfolio of agroecological knowledge and practices – in the clandestine habi-
tats to which runaways escaped. Here, in remote mountains, swamps, mangrove forests,
and upstream hideaways, maroons faced the additional challenge of prioritizing crops
and practices that could be concealed while providing flexibility and mobility to hedge
against the perils of discovery or attack. The crops and knowledge slaves developed on
plantations had to be adapted to new and demanding circumstances, not least of
which was the maroons’ fugitive status. Historical accounts and oral histories of maroon
communities in Suriname and Jamaica mention the role of women in cultivating pro-
visions, a pattern still evident among their contemporary descendants (Dallas 1803;
Kopytoff 1978; Counter and Evans 1981; Sheridan 1986; Price 1990).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 13

Figure 8. ‘Marketplace, Antigua, West Indies, 1806.’ Source: Print by W. E. Beastall and G. Testolini. In
Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora,
Image NW0147, accessed 29 November 2019. http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/757.

The subsistence and survival strategies of maroons instantiate James Scott’s (2009,
189–190) concept of ‘escape agriculture’ within the racialized landscapes of slavery in
the New World tropics. Robert Charles Dallas (quoted in Sheridan 1986, 164), who
visited Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century, described the agrobiodiversity
of maroon food fields:
Plantain, Indian corn or maize, yams, cocoas, toyaus, and in short all the nutritious roots that
thrive in tropic soils, were cultivated in their grounds. In their gardens grew most of the culin-
ary vegetables, and they were not without some fine fruits: for though to these, in general, the
soil of their mountains was unfavourable, being either moist of clayey, yet they had some valu-
able fruit-trees. … and pine-apples grew in their hedges. They bred cattle and hogs, and
raised a great quantity of fowls. When to this domestic provision of good and wholesome
food, we add the luxuries afforded by the woods, the wild boar, ring-tail pigeons, and other
wild birds, and the land-crab, which some esteem the greatest dainty in the West Indies.

Eighteenth-century Moravian missionaries in Surinam similarly documented the crop

diversity of maroon agricultural fields. They listed 29 crops – many of African origin –
grown by Saramaka Maroons who had recently negotiated a peace settlement with the
Dutch colonial government (Price 1991).

Agrobiodiversity in the transition from slavery to Abolition

Emancipation brought freedom, but typically left former slaves dispossessed of the indi-
vidual food plots they had negotiated with plantation owners. Freedpersons sought
14 J. A. CARNEY

unclaimed or abandoned land to farm in order to avoid new exploitative labor regimes –
for example, wage work, tenant farming, and sharecropping – on existing estates. Afrodes-
cendant modes of self-sufficiency remained crucial. In the transitional period after slavery,
the agrobiodiverse food systems they had developed renewed a strategy of food sover-
eignty by which freedpersons sought autonomy and self-determination. Slave food
gardens and the funds of knowledge that built them prefigured the Black peasant
farming system that soon materialized throughout former plantation societies (Figures 9
and 10). The system’s antecedents are evident in the maroon communities that remained
after Abolition, as well as on the unclaimed (and frequently marginal) land that freedper-
sons came to occupy.
In the second half of the twentieth century geographers and anthropologists began to
study in detail these post-Emancipation Black farming systems (West 1957; Innis 1961).
Very generally, the theoretical debates of this period centered around the formation of
a peasantry and peasant resistance; specifically, modes of production and the extent to
which smallholders were being incorporated into the broader capitalist economy (Mintz
and Hall 1960; Wolf 1966; Mintz 1978, 1996). Another focus of scholarship emerged
from longstanding interest in the cultural adaptation of ‘traditional’ communities to the
environment. West’s (1957) study of Black communities along Colombia’s Pacific coast
adumbrated research that would later gather momentum in cultural ecology studies.
This research illuminated the diversity of food crops and polyculture management prac-
tices that characterized neotropical smallholder farming systems. Human adaptation to
the environment, with a new focus on tropical regions, drew attention to the home

Figure 9. ‘Negro Habitations.’ Source: Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo, past and present, with a glance
at Hayti, 1873, facing, 368. In Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in
the Early African Diaspora, Image Hazard4, accessed 29 November 2019. http://slaveryimages.org/s/
slaveryimages/item/1364.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 15

Figure 10. ‘Trinidadian mixed crop cultivation of cacao and banana, 1903.’ Source: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fotg_cocoa_d066_trinidadian_mixed_crop_cultivation_of_cacao.png.

gardens and polycultures that are a distinctive landscape feature of Amerindian and
peasant agriculture (Kimber 1966; Brierley 1985; Berleant-Schiller and Pulsipher 1986;
Watts 1987; Hills 1988; Pulsipher 1990, 1994).
These studies were enriched by fieldwork on peasant farms in former regions of planta-
tion slavery in tropical and subtropical America. Some scholars emphasized the local knowl-
edge systems developed by communities with shared histories and experiences in farming
tropical soils. They examined the agronomic repertoires that wrested food from marginal
land, recording as many as 20–50 different crops grown together in a single food plot
(Hills and Iton 1983; Brierley 1985, 1991) (Figure 11). Much of this research anticipated con-
temporary interest in agroecology and sustainable food systems of tropical regions (Altieri
and Toledo 2011; Chappell 2018). A recent study by Steward and Lima (2017) extends
this work to a maroon (quilombo) community in Brazil, where the authors discuss the tra-
ditional plant management practices that support cultivation of 84 food crops.
Interest in Afrodescendant sites of food production expanded with research on Diaspo-
ric women’s history in the US South (Jones 1985), which scrutinized the gendered use of
farm spaces that females managed in post-slavery societies (Glave 2003). These studies
suggest that while rural men tended agricultural fields, dooryard gardens increasingly
became the domain of women after the Civil War (Jones 1985, 88; Glave 2003). Similar
to plantation-era antecedents, these gardens were morphologically complex and
assembled a diverse number of cultivated tubers, grains, legumes, and interplanted fruit
trees that required additional oversight in the form of supplemental watering or protec-
tion from pests. Women’s management of these spaces was also complemented by the
husbandry of chickens, guinea fowl, and hogs, whose dung improved garden fertility.
16 J. A. CARNEY

Figure 11. (a) (left): Woman farmer, Jamaica, 1979. (b) (right): Sketch of polyculture food plot, Brierley,
‘West Indian kitchen gardens,’ 1985, 9. Photo credit: Judith Carney.

By 1910 Black smallholders in the Jim Crow South had accumulated nearly 16 million
acres of farmland (Penniman 2018; Kahrl 2019). But by the end of the twentieth
century, 11 million acres had been lost, often through fraud, deception, unjust levies, or
outright violence. This dispossession in the US now figures prominently in national discus-
sions over slavery reparations (Kahrl 2019). Recent scholarship on ‘Black Agrarianism’ con-
nects Diasporic agrarian history in the United States to food sovereignty, political
resistance, and self-determination (Carney and Rosomoff 2009; Glave 2010; Bandele and
Myers 2017; Baxter et al. 2017; Penniman and Snipstal 2017; White 2017, 2018; Davy
et al. 2018). This scholarship has many epistemological intersections with the peasant
studies research tradition of tropical America and the Caribbean. Recognition of these con-
tiguities demands urgent consideration as twenty-first century monoculture expansion
threatens Afrodescendant farm communities – made vulnerable by their inability to
gain secure land titles – with imminent expulsion. One way to further credential their
land claims is to consider them as ‘bio-cultural refugia’, a concept originally developed
for heritage landscapes of temperate Europe.

Bio-cultural refugia of the new world tropics

Many smallholder Afro-descendant communities remain the guardians of a rich repertoire
of agroecological knowledge, shaped and stored during centuries of hardship and exper-
imentation, and these sites continue to activate social memories related to food security
and biodiversity stewardship. Barthel, Crumley, and Svedin (2013, 1143) term such place-
specific areas bio-cultural refugia, defined as ‘places that not only shelter species, but also
carry knowledge and experiences about practical management of biodiversity and ecosys-
tem services’ that have been curated by generations of inhabitants. Such knowledge and
experiences are often supported by oral histories (e.g. plant-origin narratives), embodied
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 17

rituals, and sacred rites (Carney 2001; Barthel, Crumley, and Svedin 2013). Agricultural
landscapes found in these enclaves are low-intensity and commonly characterized as ‘tra-
ditional’ or ‘peasant’ farming systems.
The bio-cultural refugia concept, developed for heritage farmlands in Europe, can be
extended from temperate zones to former areas of New World slavery. Those of neotropi-
cal regions harbor diverse species whose stewards carry practical knowledge of ecosystem
management. However, Afrodescendant refugia differ from those described in Barthel
et al. – beyond the obvious distinctions of geography, culture, and climate – in that the
funds of knowledge and experience cohere with social memories of slavery, food insecur-
ity, and struggles for freedom. Furthermore, these enclaves exist today in highly contested
areas experiencing direct challenges to their survival.
Recognition of Afrodescendant bio-cultural refugia reveals living laboratories for inno-
vations in landscapes of tropical food production. Moreover, the reservoir of practices has
been tested under adversarial regimes of slavery, uncertain land tenure, and post-slave
societies’ history of Black dispossession. This speaks to their resilience – used here, as
the capacity of socio–ecological systems to absorb shocks, utilize them, and adapt
without losing fundamental functions (Barthel, Crumley, and Svedin 2013).
The political-economic objectives behind Plantationocene landscape transformations
have been much investigated. However, there is less written about the implications for
biodiversity conveyed by the spatially fragmented food forests that took root in plantation
agricultural complexes – which is to say, the islands of agrobiodiversity embedded within a
topography of monocultures. These bio-cultural refugia are intimately connected to large-
scale land transformations not only by their historical provenance, but also by their rel-
evance to conservation, food production, and current contestations related to capitalist
agribusiness expansion.
The smallholder refugia that the Afrodescendant peasantry sustained after Emancipation
figure prominently in contemporary Plantationocene land struggles. Scholars have ably
documented the pervasive tension between neotropical smallholders and the corporate
and state-sponsored agricultural interests arrayed against them (e.g. Wolford et al. 2013;
Oslender 2016; Chappell 2018; Oliveira and Hecht 2018). This is acutely evident in Brazil,
where Afrodescendant smallholders and quilombos struggle to secure collective legal title
to their historically occupied lands (Thorkidlsen 2014; Leite 2015; Chappell 2018). In these
areas, soybean and oil palm monocultures, not to mention timber, mining, and livestock
interests, have been advancing against the food forests created and maintained by gener-
ations of quilombolas, Amerindians, and other smallholder farmers. Brazil’s 1988 constitution
granted quilombos the right to land titles; however, only 219 communities out of nearly 3000
quilombo land petitions have received legal title thirty years later. If all claims were granted,
quilombos would keep twenty million hectares of rural Brazil in agrobiodiverse farming
systems Mongabay.com 2018. However, a series of federal legislative proposals are threaten-
ing to rescind the law altogether (Branford and Torres 2018).
Elsewhere, oil palm plantations in Colombia are encroaching on longstanding Afrodes-
cendant settlements of the Pacific lowlands (Oslender 2016). This region abounds in man-
groves and smallholder farms where rich, agrobiodiverse landscapes also activate a social
memory of the African presence in tropical America. Colombia’s landmark Law 71, enacted
in 1993, represents another retreat from presumed legislative guarantees of land rights. It
established the legal framework to designate five million hectares of the Pacific Lowlands
18 J. A. CARNEY

as communal property belonging to its historically black occupants. However, the law has
proved hollow, as oil palm plantations – with government acquiescence – continue to
invade and occupy Afrodescendant land (Oslender 2016, 215–17). Both heritage areas
of Colombia and Brazil are threatened by political-economic interests that disparage alleg-
edly anachronistic farming practices and endorse the soy and oil palm agribusinesses vio-
lating Black community lands. Economic policy backs the new commodity monocultures
that translate into regimes of racialized violence, land appropriation, and biodiversity loss.
These historical and ongoing struggles echo the observation of McKittrick (2013) that
the geographies of slavery, post-slavery, and Black dispossession carry in them a history
of racial encounters and innovative Black diaspora practices that spatialize acts of survival.
The bio-cultural refugia of Afrodescendant landscapes may thus be seen not only as sites
of survival and resistance but also as vital evidence for the legitimation of civil rights and
legal recognition.
Contemporary debates over ‘land sharing’ versus ‘land sparing’ illustrate why bio-cul-
tural refugia matter. The debates aim to reconcile how landscapes can be used to
address two of the most pressing problems of our time: conserving biodiversity and
feeding a growing human population (Fischer et al. 2014; Kremen 2015). Land sparing
argues that the urgency to prevent extinctions requires that land be set aside as protected
areas. Land sparing is the standard model for conservationists; typical examples include
nature preserves and national parks, which are often emptied of their traditional human
inhabitants (so-called ‘fortress conservation’).4 Land-sharing takes a different view of bio-
diversity protection, identifying the ‘best practices’ agroecological principles inherent in
many smallholder farming systems as central to a comprehensive solution. Such
systems can form the basis of a high-quality landscape matrix where ecologically
farmed areas are compatible with conservation objectives. The matrix comprises a wild-
life-friendly ecological network through which biota can migrate, thus extending
species habitats and mitigating loss (Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright 2010).
Land-sparing conservation does not in principle immunize smallholder farmers against
the predations of large-scale agricultural enterprises that covet their land. Land-sparing
tacitly supports farmland intensification through industrial food production as an offset
exchanged for conservation set-asides. Land-sharing envisions agroecological smallholder
farms as mainstays of food production and as bulwarks against commodity monocultures
and biodiversity loss. It argues for a more integrative and sustainable approach to conser-
vation and food availability. To this end, Perfecto, Vandermeer, and Wright (2010) find that
smallholder agroecological practices continuously promote biodiversity and high-quality
landscape matrices. Altieri and Toledo (2011) are supportive, estimating that approxi-
mately half of the estimated 1.5 billion smallholder farmers globally observe agroecologi-
cal practices.
To the extent that land-sharing becomes policy, bio-cultural refugia are almost certainly
more compatible with its principles. Afrodescendant farmers, maroon and Amerindian
communities, and those with livelihoods in extractive reserves (for example, rubber
tappers and nut harvesters) comprise the bulk of smallholders in the New World tropics.
They typically employ proven in situ methods to overcome the constraints of growing

4
For an example of quilombolas dispossessed of their traditional land in favor of a biological reserve, see Steward and Lima
(2017).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 19

Figure 12. (a) (left): Quilombo food plot, Maranhão, Brazil. (b) (right): Quilombo food plot, Minas Gerais,
Brazil. Photo credits: Judith Carney.

food in the tropics, where climate, soil, and insect pests present year-round challenges that
agroecological practices mitigate. Their species-rich food forests have their provenance in
the bio-cultural refugia shaped by tropical peoples of the Americas who have occupied
these landscapes for generations (Figure 12).
Watkins’ (2011, 2018) study of Afro-descendant smallholder communities in one region
of Bahia, Brazil illustrates how an ethnoecological agroforestry system represents both an
important African contribution to landscape transformation and a model for sustainable
agriculture. Farmers here tend subspontaneous groves of African oil palm, a tree native
to central-west Africa, and known in Brazil as dendê, a word of Kimbundu (Angola)
origin. Dendê oil is fundamental to Afro-Brazilian cooking and is used as a sacramental
in the syncretic candomblé religion (Voeks 1997; Watkins 2011). Palm oil is also one of
the world’s most produced edible oils, increasingly in demand by the processed food
industry. Dendê is an emblematic plant introduction of the African diaspora, and figures
centrally in the food forests created by plantation slaves, quilombolas, and their small-
holder descendants. In contrast to other parts of Brazil such as Pará – a hub of the country’s
industrial oil palm monoculture – dendê production in coastal Bahia remains primarily
small-scale and artisanal, produced and processed by Afro-descendant smallholder
farmers (Watkins 2011). Indeed, the prevalence of dendê production in Bahia serves as a
fitting example of a smallholder agricultural matrix in which agroecological practices res-
onate with social memories of Africa, slavery, subsistence, survival, stewardship, and econ-
omic independence. As one Bahian dendê producer expressed it:
Africans worked with palm oil for thousands of years. Now afrodescendentes (descendants of
Africans) in Bahia work with palm oil. It is important to our culture and it gives us a way to work
for ourselves. … Now it employs my whole family and allows us to work with liberty and
dignity. (quoted in Watkins 2011, 21)
20 J. A. CARNEY

Throughout Brazil, this distinctive bio-cultural landscape is known as the Costa do Dendê,
an implicit recognition of the historical and cultural significance of this African plant intro-
duction and its Afro-descendent stewards (Watkins 2011).

Conclusion
The Plantationocene concept engages the historical and socio-ecological residues of plan-
tation capitalism that contemporary patterns of conflict, racism, land concentration, and
species extinctions make visible. What the concept does not yet effectively do is bring
into relief the subaltern archipelagos of agrobiodiversity that the Plantationocene
spawned. Enslaved men and women established food plots in their dooryard gardens
and in other plantation areas deemed unsuitable to the commodity crop. These food
plots were comprised of cultivars that married the botanical heritages of the Atlantic
world’s tropical regions. Plants and trees were blended into dense, complex agroforests
that gave rise to an alternative food system that even today stands in contrast to an agri-
cultural order dominated by monocultures. Their opposition is vividly captured in period
paintings of Caribbean sugar plantations.
Slave food plots were also sites of liberatory practice and resistance. They enabled the
enslaved to stave off hunger but also provided the bedrock upon which slaves built hard-
won rights, such as unsupervised time to tend plots and the right to independent pro-
duction. Female vendors had a prominent role in the internal marketing system that
evolved with independent production, while the markets themselves encapsulated
social networks through which resistance could be organized and disseminated. For
slaves who chose self-liberation, fugitives carried their cultivars and agroecological knowl-
edge with them; the maroon communities that survive continue to use the portfolio of
plants and practices inherited from their ancestors.
The post-Abolition period did not render this subaltern food system archaic. New forms
of oppression in the guise of tenant farming and sharecropping, intensification of rural vio-
lence and land dispossession – all ratified by state power and harsh settler colonial
regimes – compelled new waves of coerced migration within post-slavery societies. As
freedpersons moved to occupy unclaimed or marginal lands, they mobilized the reservoirs
of agroecological knowledge that had long proved indispensable to survival and now
abetted escape from semi-servitude.
Understanding this alternative system through a broader bio-cultural refugia frame-
work pays tribute to this past and offers important historical context for contemporary
debates over sustainable land use, biodiversity loss, and resilient food systems able to
meet the challenges of a changing climate. Bio-cultural refugia are places that shelter
agrobiodiversity and embed the cumulative knowledge and cultural experiences of resi-
dents whose engagement with the local environment spans generations. Afrodescendant
bio-cultural refugia are inscribed with social memories of slavery, food insecurity, and the
struggle for land rights and freedom.
By effecting more resilient agricultural mosaics, this alternative food system offers a
hedge against the dominant food order’s vulnerability to pest outbreaks, epidemics,
climate change, and global economic shocks. It adds reserves of adaptability to landscapes
that have become more simplified and concentrated over time. Such alternative agricul-
tural systems have the potential to decentralize food production, democratize
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 21

participation, and reduce inequality and hunger (Chappell 2018). Altieri et al. (2015, 888)
make this point forcefully: ‘The transformation and democratization of the world’s food
system is the best way to adapt to climate change, while simultaneously eradicating
hunger and poverty, as the root causes of inequality and environmental degradation
are confronted head-on.’ However, building food futures in tropical America that are equi-
table and sustainable also demands a reckoning with the history and places made legible
by black geographies. The plantation-plot alterity illuminates not only the subaltern econ-
omies and agroecologies that emerged within and against the plantation world of the
past, but also the bio-cultural refugia that precariously exist within and against the planta-
tion world of the present. The hard-won agroecological knowledge originally invested in
the plantation food plot is worthy of protection as part of a collective human heritage. As a
stewardship strategy, it also allows us to imagine a food future compatible with the survi-
val of other-than-human species.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and
suggestions. The author also acknowledges Richard Rosomoff for his help in bringing the manuscript
to fruition. Gratitude is also extended to the participants of the Sawyer ‘Interrogating the Plantatio-
nocene’ seminar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where an earlier version of this paper was
presented. I thank you for your stimulating commentaries. Lastly, this article was written with fond
memory of the late Sidney Mintz, who first encouraged me to think about the genesis of slavery’s
internal marketing system.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Judith Carney is a geographer who studies the political ecology of food, agriculture, and environ-
mental change. Her major writing has focused on gender and agricultural modernization in West
Africa; indigenous knowledge and food sovereignty; the environmental history of African rice in
the Atlantic world; and foodways of the African Diaspora. She is a professor of geography and
environmental studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Email: carney@geog.ucla.edu.