Architecture and Extraction in the Atlantic World, 1500-1850 (Routledge Research in Architectural History) [1 ed.] 9781032431116, 9781032434575, 9781003367413, 1032431113

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Architecture and Extraction in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850

This edited collection examines the development of Atlantic World architecture after 1492. In particular, the chapters explore the landscapes of extraction as material networks that brought people, space, and labor together in harvesting raw materials, cultivating agriculture for export-level profits, and circulating raw materials and commodities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas from 1500 to 1850. This book argues that histories of extraction remain incomplete without careful attention to the social, physical, and mental nexus that is architecture, just as architecture’s development in the last 500 years cannot be adequately comprehended without attention to empire, extraction, colonialism, and the rise of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called the world system. This world system was possible because of built environments that enabled resource extraction, transport of raw materials, circulation of commodities, and enactment of power relations in the struggle between capital and labor. Separated into three sections: Harvesting the Environment, Cultivating Profit, and Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures, this volume covers a wide range of geographies, from England to South America, from Africa to South Carolina. The book aims to decenter Eurocentric approaches to architectural history to expose the global circulation of ideas, things, commodities, and people that constituted the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic World. In focusing on extraction, we aim to recover histories of labor exploitation and racialized oppression of interest to the global community. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural history, geography, urban and labor history, literary studies, historic preservation, and colonial studies. Luis Gordo Peláez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Design and Art History at California State University, Fresno. His work examines the urban reform projects and public works agenda of the late colonial Mexican cities, particularly in Bourbon Guanajuato and the region of El Bajío. Paul Niell is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. His research focuses on the art, architecture, and material culture of the Hispanophone Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Routledge Research in Architectural History Series Editor: Nicholas Temple

Books in this series look in detail at aspects of architectural history from an academic viewpoint. Written by international experts, the volumes cover a range of topics from the origins of building types, the relationship of architectural designs to their sites, explorations of the works of specific architects, to the development of tools and design processes, and beyond. Written for the researcher and scholar, we are looking for innovative research to join our publications in architectural history. The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra Spatial Entanglements Joseph Godlewski Architecture for Spain’s Recovered Democracy Public Patronage, Regional Identity, and Civic Significance in 1980s Valencia Manuel López Segura Arieh Sharon and Modern Architecture in Israel Building Social Pragmatism Eran Neuman Developing Iran Company Towns, Architecture, and the Global Powers Hamidreza Mahboubi Soufiani The Life and Work of Jerzy Sołtan the “last modernist architect” Szymon Ruszczewski Architecture and Extraction in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850 Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/architecture/series/RRAHIST

Architecture and Extraction in the Atlantic World, 1500–1850 Edited by Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell

Designed cover image: The Mines at Potosi, ca. 1585, Watercolor on parchment, The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, K3. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gordo Peláez, Luis, editor. | Niell, Paul B., 1976– editor. Title: Architecture of extraction in the Atlantic world, 1500–1850 / edited by Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge research in architectural history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023035772 (print) | LCCN 2023035773 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032431116 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032434575 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003367413 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. | Architecture—Economic aspects—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. | Mines and mineral resources—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. | Cultural landscapes—Atlantic Ocean Region—History. Classification: LCC NA203 .A75 2024 (print) | LCC NA203 (ebook) | DDC 720.9182/1—dc23/eng/20230901 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035772 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023035773 ISBN: 978-1-032-43111-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43457-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36741-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Introduction: Building for Atlantic Extraction

vii xi 1

LUIS GORDO PELÁEZ AND PAUL NIELL

PART I

Harvesting the Environment 1 Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires

13 15

JANNA ISRAEL

2 Purchasing a Poisoned City: Indigenous Andeans and Urban Space in Sixteenth-Century Huancavelica

30

MARK P. DRIES

3 New Functions of Mining Heritage in Mexico

45

MIGUEL ÁNGEL SORROCHE CUERVA

4 The Ice House: Industry and Ritual in the NineteenthCentury Frozen Water Trade

59

LOUISA IAROCCI

5 Contesting the Colonial Illu: Sealing and Social Change in Kalaallit Architecture, 1750–1860

74

KIRSTINE MØLLER AND BART PUSHAW

PART II

Cultivating Profit 6 From Ireland to Barbados: Architecture of Extraction in British Colonies LEE MORRISSEY

89

91

vi

Contents

7 Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic World Extraction Sites: A Comparative Study of the Indigenous Diamond Hill and Black Melrose Plantations

106

BARRY L. STIEFEL

8 Absentee Architecture: Remote Building Across the British Atlantic, c. 1800

123

JONAH ROWEN

9 Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden

140

LEE SESSIONS

PART III

Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures

155

10 The World’s Greatest Depot: West India Docks, Warehouses and Flexibility

157

GEORGIOS EFTAXIOPOULOS

11 Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery: Samuel Blodget’s First Bank of the United States

170

PETER MINOSH

12 Castle Brew: Dreams Realized and Dreams Devastated

184

COURTNAY MICOTS

13 Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context: The Case of Charleston and Rio de Janeiro in the Eighteenth-Century

201

ALEXANDER LIMA REIS

14 From Caravans to Railroads: Trails, Architecture, and Urban Networks in Rio Pardo’s Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Landscapes of Extraction

217

RAFAEL AUGUSTO SILVA FERREIRA AND RENATA BAESSO PEREIRA

Index

232

Figures

0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4

“The furnace prescribed for the smelting of the silver coming from the mines,” Histoire Naturelle des Indes, also known as the Drake manuscript 1586. Trapiche, Ingenio de Santa Ana, later known as Engombe, sixteenth century. Near Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Map of Temascaltepec, c. 1560. Pen-and-ink and watercolor on maguey paper. Antonio Aymerich y Villajuana. “Vista y fachada principal de la Real Cassa de Moneda que se construie en la ymperial villa de Potossí, cortada por la línea 1, 2,” 1765. Patio (courtyard), Casa de la Moneda, Mint Building, c. 1759–73. Potosí, Bolivia. Georgius Agricola, mine shafts from De Re Metallica, (Basel, 1565). Heinrich Gross, Silver Mines of La Croix-aux-Mines, fol. 13v-14r, 16th century. The Mines at Potosi, ca. 1585, Watercolor on parchment. Jörg Kölber, Falkenstein from the Schwazer Bergbuch, 1556, pen in ink and watercolor. An early map of South America from 1584. Huancavelica’s approximate location was between Guamanga and Guanuco in the center. This illustration of a huayra, or guayra, is from Alvaro Alonso Barba’s Arte de los metales, published in Madrid in 1640, which is one of the most comprehensive works on mining and metallurgy in the New World. This image of Huancavelica is taken from Andean Chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El Primer Crónica y Buen Gobierno, first published in 1615, and shows the early ovens on the outskirts of the town. Size of the original: ca. 18 × 12 cm. This is an image of restored Bustamante Furnaces in Almadén, Spain.

2 3 4 6 7 17 19 21 24 31

33

36 40

viii 2.5 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1

7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Figures Remains of a Bustamente furnace on the outskirts of Huancavelica, not far from the Parish of Santa Ana. Taxco, Guerrero. Zacatecas. Hacienda de Loreto. Pachuca. Estado de Hidalgo. Mina El Boleo. Santa Rosalía. Baja California Sur. “Ice Houses and Cooling Rooms,” from William Eassie, A Handbook to the History, Defects, and Remedies of Drainage, Ventilation, Warming and Kindred Subjects (New York: Appleton & Company, 1872), 214–215. Ice harvesters at work on Fresh Pond, 1830. From Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion 8, 11, 1855, 172. New York Ice Company. Cutting Ice at Athens, 1847. Handcolored lithograph. After John W. Hill. Endicott & Co., printers. PR 020 – Geographic Images Collection. A hand-colored print of Ice House, Calcutta, from the Fiebig Collection: Views of Calcutta and Surrounding Districts, taken by Frederick Fiebig in 1851. Photograph of the ice house at Madras (Chennai), Tamil Nadu, taken by Frederick Fiebig in c.1851. Christian Rudolph, Innuin nejugæt (Interior of a Kalaallit Home), created in 1847, printed in 1852, lithograph. Aalut Kangermiu (Kalaaleq), Kalaallit pigissut (Wealthy Kalaallit), 1860, ink on paper. Rasmus Berthelsen (Kalaaleq), Kalaallit perlilersut (Starving Kalaallit), 1860, ink on paper. Doe Castle, Sheephaven Bay, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Cavanacor House, begun in the first decades of the seventeenth century, Ballindrait, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Drax Hall, 1638–1647, Barbados. St. Nicholas Abbey, Barbados (completed in 1658 or 1659). Springhill House, c. 1658 with modifications in 1680 and 1780, Magherafelt, Co. Derry, Ulster, Northern Ireland. Reconstructed Cherokee architecture at Oconaluftee Village, North Carolina. Bottom: An example of the typical Cherokee house before the Trail of Tears (1820s) is similar to a vernacular European-derived log cabin. Top: This is in contrast to the Cherokee house style of the mid eighteenth century. The main house of Diamond Hill near Chatsworth, Georgia. Chief Joseph Vann as depicted in an oil painting from before the Trail of Tears, dressed in the latest Euroamerican fashion of the day. Melrose near Natchitoches, Louisiana, with the main house (bottom) and African House (top). Nicolas Augustin Metoyer in an oil painting from 1836 at the new St. Augustine Catholic Church, Natchitoches, Louisiana.

41 49 51 54 55

61 63 64 67 68 80 82 83 94 95 99 101 102

110 111 112 114 116

Figures 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

8.5

9.1 9.2 9.3

10.1

10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 11.1 11.2

Adolphe Duperly, “Golden Grove Estate, St. Thomas in the East,” Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica (Kingston, 1844). Henry Davy, Glevering Hall, Hacheston, Suffolk, the Seat of Andrew Arcedeckne Esqr., from Davy, Views of the Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen in Suffolk (Southwold, Suffolk, U.K., 1827). William Clark, “Planting the Sugar Cane,” Ten Views on the Island of Antigua (London, 1823). Humphry Repton, Glevering Hall, Hacheston, Suffolk, U.K., c. 1791. Detail from “Suffolk Sheet LIX.SW,” Ordnance Survey Engraved Six Inch Maps of Great Britain (London: Ordnance Survey, 1884). Decimus Burton, Orangery, Glevering, Hacheston, Suffolk, U.K., 1834–1835. “The Orangery, Glevering Hall, Easton Road, Hacheston,” Buildings at Risk Register (Suffolk: East Suffolk Council, 2017). Francisco Lemaur, “Plan y distribución del jardín de la Habana,” 1821. Ink and watercolor, size unknown. Madrid de Migas Calientes, “Plano del Jardín Botánico de Madrid en 1781,” 1875. Engraving. Page 445 of Anales de la Sociedad Española de Historia Natural (Madrid, 1875). Detail, Eduard Laplante, “Ingenio San José de la Angosta,” 1855–1857. Lithograph, 21.3 in. wide. Plate 24 of J. G. Cantero, Los Ingenios: Coleccion de Vistas de Los Principales Ingenios de Azucar de La Isla de Cuba (Habana: Impreso en la litografia de Luis Marquier, 1857). Originally produced by the island of Barbados’ land surveyor, John Swan, the map shows 285 plantations across the island’s coast in the 1650s. “A Topologicall Description and Admeasurement of the Yland of Barbados in the West Indyaes. With the Mrs Names of the Seuerall plantacons (sic)” in Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657). A view across the Import Dock and its gigantic warehouses. Samuel Owen, Hood & Sharpe Vernor, West India Docks, 1811. Ground floor plan, south elevation and cross section. George Gwilt & Son, No. 1 & No. 2 Warehouses, North Quay, Import Dock, West India Docks, 1800–3. Second floor plan. George Gwilt & Son and Thomas Morris, No. 11 Warehouse, West Quay, Import Dock, West India Docks, 1807. From left to right: St. Katharine Docks (1828), London Docks (1802), Surrey Docks (1804), West India Docks (1802), East India Docks (1805). Samuel Blodget, First Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1795. Lorin Blodget, Estate of Samuel Blodget Jr. showing properties on Jamaica Farm ceded to the United States, 1888.

ix 124 125 129

130

131 144 145

147

159 161 162 163 166 171 174

x

Figures

11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4

Thomas Cooley, Royal Exchange, Dublin, 1769–1779. Engraving by James Malton, 1792. Castle Brew Complex as viewed from Fort William/Anomabo fort. Rear façade of Castle Brew. Courtyard facing south. Southwest courtyard. Masonry apparatus on the island of Martinique, 1742. Masonry apparatus, 1762 model. Map showing wooden apparatus in South Carolina, 1773. Apparatus with mechanized decantation stage, 1770. Wooden apparatuses in Rio de Janeiro, 1785. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. Nove estampas das fábricas de anil nos distritos do Rio de Janeiro. Diachronic map of the urban network 1900, representing the main trails, secondary paths, railways, urban nuclei and the network of farms and rural properties. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), Repos d’une caravane (1835). Santa Mathilde Farm Manor House. Chapel of the Santa Mathilde Farm.

176 185 190 190 191 203 204 205 207 208 220 221 224 225

Contributors

Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva is Associate Professor of art history at the University of Granada, Spain, where he has taught since 1999. His research focuses on cultural heritage, pre-Hispanic art in Mexico, and the art of the missions in New Spain, with a particular emphasis on the processes of cultural exchange. More recently, he has been the main researcher and coordinator of two projects: “Misiones, oasis y sistemas hidráulicos: estudio interdisciplinar del patrimonio artístico, socio-cultural y ambiental de Baja California Sur (México),” funded by the University of Granada; and the project titled “Las misiones de Baja California (México) entre los siglos XVII y XIX. Paisaje Cultural y Puesta en Valor,” financed by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation. He has recently co-edited two monographs: Las riberas del Pacífico. Lengua e identidad cultural hispanas (2017) and El Camino Real de Coahuila y Texas, patrimonio cultural compartido (2016). Mark P. Dries is a historian whose research explores the social and cultural conflicts arising from colonial encounters in the Spanish Empire, drawing on the methods of urban history, Native American studies, and Ethnohistory. His work on Huancavelica challenges assumptions about urban space as a site of acculturation and reveals how Indigenous Andeans adapted and redeployed European colonial logics to resist Spanish efforts to reduce Andean subjects to sources of labor and tribute. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of California, Davis, where his research received support from the Davis Humanities Institute, the Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and the Bilinski Educational Foundation. He is an assistant professor of History at Southeastern Louisiana University. Georgios Eftaxiopoulos (BArch(Hons), AADipl, AAPhD) is an architect and Assistant Professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he practiced in Belgium and Switzerland, and, most recently, he has taught at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, and the Aarhus School of Architecture. Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira has been an undergraduate professor of architecture and urbanism since 2018. He obtained his undergraduate degree in architecture

xii

Contributors and urbanism from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (2015) and obtained his PhD in Architecture and Urbanism from the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2022 through a government research grant. He wrote his doctoral thesis, titled Under the chapel’s shadow: the religious heritages in the composition of the urban spaces and in the formation of the territory that was polarized by the Casa Branca and Caconde villages in São Paulo in the 19th century, under the supervision of Professor Renata Baesso Pereira. His current research interests include urban networks in the territory of São Paulo and Minas Gerais (Brazil), territorial formations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, history of architecture and urbanism, and urban planning.

Louisa Iarocci is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she teaches architectural history, theory and design. She is a licensed architect who has worked in architectural firms in Toronto, New York and Boston. She completed her Master’s in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis and her PhD in the history of art and architecture at Boston University. Her publications included the anthology Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling (2013) and the monograph The Urban Department Store in America (2014). More recently, she has contributed essays to the anthologies Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities, edited by Caitlin DeClercq and Mohammad Gharipour (2021), and Building/ Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, edited by Mark Crinson and Charlotte Ashby (2022). Her current research focuses on the forms and operations of the architecture of the supply chain in North America. Janna Israel is the Mellon Curator of Academic Engagement at the Princeton University Art Museum. She is currently completing her book project, The Nature of Ores: Early Modern Metalwork. Janna received a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a specialization in early modern art and architecture. Her research has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including the Rome Prize, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti. She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University and has held positions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art. Courtnay Micots is Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts program at Florida A&M University (Tallahassee, Florida, USA). She has worked in Ghana for over ten years as well as in the Republic of Benin, South Africa, England and Brazil. Her research encompasses a variety of resistance art forms, including carnival, architecture, sculpture and asafo flags. Her book Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana was published in 2021. Peter Minosh is an Visiting Associate Teaching Professor in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. He is a historian of architecture, urbanism, and landscape with a focus on relationships between politics and the built environment. His research considers architecture’s modernity in relation to formulations of sovereignty and revolutionary and decolonizing movements from the

Contributors

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Enlightenment to the present. His writing has appeared in the Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians, Race and Modern Architecture, Writing Architectural History, and The Burlington Magazine. His book Atlantic Unbound: Architecture in the World of the Haitian Revolution is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Kirstine Møller is a PhD fellow at the Greenland National Museum and Archives with joint enrollment at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador and Ilisimatusarfik – the University of Greenland. She is an Indigenous Arctic archaeologist whose research interests include identity narratives, entangled histories, cultural encounters and colonialism in the Arctic, and decolonisation practices as well as rehumanisation. Her PhD project, “Colonial Encounters” (2019–2023), is funded by the Greenlandic Research Council (NIS) and includes a multi-season archaeological field school in Nuuk, Greenland. She is a board member of the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) Danish charter. Lee Morrissey, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at Clemson University, author of From the Temple to the Castle: An Architectural History of British Literature, is writing a transatlantic study of the literature and architecture of early British plantations. Thanks to support from Clemson’s College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, research for this essay involved site visits across Barbados and in Ulster, Ireland. Paul Niell is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Florida State University. His research focuses on the art, architecture, and material culture of the Hispanophone Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is co-editor with Stacie G. Widdifield of Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910. He is the author of Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828. His articles have appeared in the Colonial Latin American Review, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and The Art Bulletin, among others. Luis Gordo Peláez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Design, and Art History at California State University, Fresno. He has previously taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, College of William & Mary in Virginia, and the University of Tennessee. His work examines the urban reform projects and public works agenda of the late colonial Mexican cities, particularly in Bourbon Guanajuato and the region of El Bajío. Two of his recent publications are “Grain Architecture in Bourbon New Spain: On the Design of Guadalajara and Querétaro’s Alhóndigas,” published in Arts (2022), and the chapter “Water and Infrastructure in Late Colonial Guanajuato,” that appeared in the volume The Routledge Handbook on Infrastructure Design: Global Views from Architectural History (2022). Renata Baesso Pereira is Full Professor of the History of Architecture and Urbanism in the graduate and undergraduate programs of Architecture and Urbanism

xiv

Contributors

at the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (Brazil). She obtained her PhD in architecture and urbanism from the State University of São Paulo. She is the leader of the research group “History of the City, Territorial Formation and Urban Ideologies” and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Oculum Ensaios at the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (Brazil) – an open access, peerreviewed, online architecture and urban planning journal. Bart Pushaw is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and a historian of the arts of the colonial Americas, with a particular focus on the Circumpolar North and Central America between 1700 and 1945. He teaches at the University of Copenhagen, where he is affiliated with the international research project “The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories” and is at work on his first manuscript, Indulgent Images: Indigeneity and Colonial Art in the Global Arctic. Recent publications examine the temporalities of early Inuit printmaking, artistic affinities between the Indigenous Arctic and Black Atlantic, and Sugpiaq sculpture in the late eighteenth century. Alexander Lima Reis has studied history at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has a master’s degree in Social History from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. At the moment, he is a doctoral student at the Postgraduate Program in History of Sciences and Health at Casa de Oswaldo Cruz. He also has experience in the area of History of Sciences and Techniques with emphasis on Natural History and agriculture in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jonah Rowen is an architectural historian whose work focuses on intersections between architectural technics, economics, materials and commodities, and race and labor. He received his PhD from Columbia University, where he wrote a dissertation on nineteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean colonial exchanges and buildings’ design and production figured as technologies of risk management and security. He teaches architectural history at The New School – Parsons School of Design and Pratt Institute. He has published essays in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Aggregate, The Avery Review, Grey Room, Architecture & Culture, and Platform, and he was a founding editor of Project: A Journal for Architecture. Lee Sessions is the Permanent Collection Associate Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and is currently completing an ecocritical study of the intersection of race and science in Latin America. Tentatively titled Urgent Necessities: Science and White Identity in Colonial Cuba, this project is under contract at Yale University Press. He received his PhD from Yale University and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden. He has also worked at the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and Lohin Geduld Gallery.

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Barry L. Stiefel is Associate Professor in the Historic Preservation and Community Planning program at the College of Charleston. He is interested in how the sum of local preservation efforts affects regional, national, and multi-national policies within the field of cultural resource management, natural heritage conservation, and land use planning. Dr. Stiefel has published numerous books and articles, including Jews and the Renaissance of Synagogue Architecture, 1450–1730 and Jewish Sanctuary in the Atlantic World: A Social and Architectural History. His forthcoming book is titled Monuments of Diverse Heritage: Early American Placemaking and Preservation by Black, Indigenous, and Jewish Peoples.

Introduction Building for Atlantic Extraction Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell

In a painted image from 1586 in the Histoire Naturelle des Indes, workers in the Caribbean smelt silver to cast ingots in preparation for making coins (Figure 0.1). Two clothed figures of European descent labor beneath a thatched canopy, one man pouring the mined ore into a furnace while another tends the flow of the molten silver into channels that terminate in molds. A nude Indigenous man with darker skin, meanwhile, sits on the opposite side of the furnace, operating a bellows to fuel the fire. The addition of tropical fruits and a hammock further a sense of “the Indies,” as the image and associated text underscores the centrality of local resource extraction to European history in this area. In addition to describing the process of rendering silver from ore, the so-called Drake manuscript accounts for the mining of gold and emeralds. In this way, the work speaks to the existence of encomiendas (grants of land and the Native inhabitants of that land for use as labor), an early tool of Spanish colonial enterprise in the Caribbean that set the stage for what would become a central preoccupation for Europeans in the Americas. The extraction of precious metals (gold, silver, copper), minerals (emeralds, pearls), and agricultural production (sugar, tobacco, indigo) powerfully shaped the built environments necessary for carrying out these activities. This process drew upon maps and representations of space that informed the making of physical and social spaces in the early Americas, including the reconfiguration of Indigenous landscapes. Archaeologists Kathleen Deagan and José Cruxent, at one of the earliest Spanish settlement in the hemisphere, La Isabella, on the northeast coast of Quisqueya or La Española (in today’s Dominican Republic), excavated the footprints of a gubernatorial palace likely occupied by Christopher Columbus, a church, houses, and an alhóndiga (granary).1 This ill-fated settlement furnished Europeans with a physical, social, and political emplacement that aided their efforts to acquire land, labor, and resources. When, in 1496, the city of Santo Domingo was established on the island’s southern coast, plantations emerged in its vicinity within a few years. The sixteenth-century Ingenio de Santa Ana, later named Engombe, on the Haina River served as an ingenio (the mill and its larger complex) and preserves the ruins of a stone trapiche (an animal-powered mill) used to crush sugar cane harvested by enslaved and/or tributary workers from neighboring fields (Figure 0.2). Built of quarried stone with buttresses and two entryways, this ruin speaks to a mill owner’s vision of permanence in his extractionary project. DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-1

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Luis Gordo Peláez and Paul Niell

Figure 0.1 “The furnace prescribed for the smelting of the silver coming from the mines,” Histoire Naturelle des Indes, also known as the Drake manuscript 1586. Source: Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Introduction 3

Figure 0.2 Trapiche, Ingenio de Santa Ana, later known as Engombe, sixteenth century. Near Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Source: Photo: Paul Niell.

Decades later, in the viceroyalty of New Spain, sixty miles southwest of Mexico City, the Real de Minas (mining district) of Temascaltepec was emerging as a mining center in precious metals c. 1560 when a map was made of the area, just five years after the discovery of silver ore (Figure 0.3). Found today in the special collections of the Newberry Library, the map of the Temascaltepec region, fashioned of pen-and-ink and watercolor on four leaves of maguey paper, speaks to an evolving colonial visual culture. Possibly used as part of a legal suit, the image refers to the land petitions of several individuals, including Miguel Luis Álvarez, Antonio de Ávila, Juan González, and Luis de León. Various elements within the map suggest the well-documented coexistence and mutual transformation of Nahua and European pictorial conventions to represent three churches that identify the towns of San Martín, San Miguel Yxatapan, and Santa María, along with several mining sites.2 A circle of tools, including pickaxes, labeled “minas y cerros del Pinal” [“mines and hills of Pinal”] marks the location of mines, while nearby Indigenous houses shaped like I-beams contain ingenios (mills) and ore refineries. Green mountains taper down to blue rivers with orange footpaths traversing the landscape. The image thus speaks to how extraction had begun to reshape Indigenous relations to and experiences of the land as colonial landscapes emerged out of these agendas. In this volume, we consider landscape to be a dynamic human production that makes and is made by physical objects like architecture as well as social relations, the mental life of individuals and groups, and the experience of

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Figure 0.3 Map of Temascaltepec, c. 1560. Pen-and-ink and watercolor on maguey paper. Source: Newberry Library Special Collections, Chicago. Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Ayer MS 1906.

everyday life.3 Barbara Bender writes, “Each individual holds many landscapes in tension.”4 In the colonial Americas, the architecture of extraction was nested within multiple landscapes shaped by buildings within emergent colonial hierarchies or race, social rank, and gender, as well as the agencies of a wide range of individuals things, and environments. In 1580, the region and landscape of Temascaltepec was transformed by its expanding silver industry. In his response to the Relaciones Geográficas, the questionnaire issued by King Philip II to gather information about Spain’s colonial dominions in the Americas, Temascaltepec’s alcalde mayor (district magistrate) Gaspar de Covarrubias informed him: The settlements and housing of the miners are located in a valley surrounded and fenced off by many mountainous hills. Three rivers flow through it with

Introduction 5 an abundance of water, which carry it all year round. And, without the rivers, there are some springs. It [Temascaltepec] is fertile and abundant with pastures, and it does not bear fruit, because they occupy themselves in the business and refining of silver, and they carry it from the neighboring towns. In this valley of the mines there were no settled Indigenous [people], because those that are presently there were brought by the same Spanish miners who settled there, and those that currently exist are foreigners from many parts who come to work in the mines.5 Along with tributary native workers, other non-Indigenous laborers were forced into this Mexican landscape of colonial extraction. Historian Rafael García Castañeda has argued that in c. 1580, there were thirty mines operating in the Real de Temascaltepec, with a population of 50 Spaniards, 250 Native Americans, and 250 Black slaves.6 The development of the Atlantic World after 1492, which included the seizure of land from Indigenous people, the insatiable pursuit of labor, and the pursuit of raw materials for commodities, unleashed a widespread process of extraction, one deeply entangled with the built environment. The foundation and expansion of cities, agricultural districts, smaller population centers, trade routes, and sources of material wealth established new global relations between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the present volume, we contend that Atlantic World extraction cannot be fully understood without its being grounded in the architecture and landscapes that furnished it with a physical infrastructure, reinforced the major social divisions sown by these processes, was negotiated by a wide range of people, and opened the way for the flow of wealth. Extraction required buildings for its perpetuation, including those for mining and the processing of natural resources (silver refining plants, sugar mills, boiling houses, and water infrastructures), for storage, commercial exchange, and coining (mints, treasuries, market spaces, and custom houses), and for the conspicuous display of wealth (country houses of mine owners and planters). The mobilization and control of labor likewise necessitated a built environment in the dwellings, hospitals, chapels, and barracks used to house, attend, and punish enslaved and/or coerced workers. The Casa de la Moneda, or Mint Building, c. 1759–73, at Potosí, Bolivia, is a key example of the variety of typologies of extraction-related architecture designed in late Spanish Colonial America at a time when the Bourbon monarchs aimed to implement a reformist agenda to grow the colonial bureaucracy, centralize royal power, and boost the economy. Built to produce currency adjacent to the largest silver mine ever created, the Cerro Rico, the eighteenth-century mint was planned as a massive construction and architectural embodiment of Potosí’s immense wealth and the power of the Spanish Crown. Upon crossing the threshold of its majestic portal, topped by the royal arms, two consecutive central courtyards organize a uniform and regular spatial sequence of structures that housed the residential quarters of the superintendent and other officials, administrative offices, and rooms to carry out the mint’s systematic functions. Its construction, in replacement of its sixteenth-century predecessor, prompted an abundance of planning and exchange of correspondence between the superintendents of the mint and the viceregal

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authorities in Lima. Drawings penned and circulated from 1757 onward disclose the location of the new fabric and the layout of offices and workshops, as well as visualizing cross sections of the building and elevations of the main facade. Several figures were involved in the planning and direction of the works, among them the Spaniards Salvador de Villa, an architect who had previously served the Crown in a similar role in the mints of Mexico City and Lima, and Antonio Aymerich y Villajuana, an engineer experienced in the building of fortifications in the Río de la Plata region. The copious amount of plans associated with the structure mirrored a similar impetus of the colonial administration elsewhere in Spanish America to gather detailed information and precise architectural evidence of state-sponsored building projects with the aim to render more efficient and profitable the imperial agenda, efforts in architecture that had direct impacts on projects of extraction in the mines of Potosí (Figure 0.4–0.5). Recent scholarship has considered the multifaceted history of the agricultural and mining industries of Spanish Colonial America with an emphasis on capitalist production and global economic transformation, as in historian John Tutino’s work on central and northern New Spain.7 Scholars have also examined extraction’s impact on the shaping of urban communities, as in social and ethnohistorian Dana Velasco Murillo’s study of Indigenous people in colonial Zacatecas, Mexico; the cultural production that emerged from mining districts in literary scholar Lisa Voigt’s work on colonial festivals in South American mining towns;

Figure 0.4 Antonio Aymerich y Villajuana. “Vista y fachada principal de la Real Cassa de Moneda que se construie en la ymperial villa de Potossí, cortada por la línea 1, 2,” 1765. Source: Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya. Ms. 400/45-I. Public domain image.

Introduction 7

Figure 0.5 Patio (courtyard), Casa de la Moneda, Mint Building, c. 1759–73. Potosí, Bolivia. Source: Photo, Dan Lundberg. Retrieved from https://flic.kr/p/FVyxmx. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

and the environmental degradation caused by some industries, the subject of environmental and social historian Nicholas Robins’ work on the ecological price of silver mining in the Andes.8 Despite the important strengths of these sources, less attention has been given in the relevant literature to the architecture and physical infrastructures that shaped and were shaped by extraction. In the Caribbean and North America, several studies have reevaluated the architecture and landscapes of slavery in its urban and plantation environment, such as that of archaeologist Theresa Singleton on a Cuban coffee plantation and the volume by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg on the architecture of North American slavery.9 Architectural historian Louis Nelson’s groundbreaking work on the architecture of colonial Jamaica emphasizes the networks of space constituted through the built environment that linked Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe in systems of wealth accumulation based on enslaved labor in Britain’s early empire.10 These studies point to the need to examine architecture and extraction in the Atlantic World from a global and transnational perspective, where models generated for one locality under British, United States, or Spanish domination might help us to understand another. Furthermore, recent scholarship points to the need to consider the myriad functions of this architecture, calling for a landscape approach wherein we

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are thinking about how the built environment was lived, experienced, negotiated, and eventually repurposed by multiple human actors. The present volume takes these sources as a point of departure to examine the constitution of extractionary landscapes as material networks that brought people together in hierarchical relationships to harvest raw materials, refine, exchange, and thereby generate value in the world market and within local economies. Our volume is grounded in a series of critical questions. What is the place of extraction in the production of built environments of the Atlantic World from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries in terms of labor regimes, social relations, and dynamics of domination, negotiation, and resistance? What roles did architecture play in the constitution of Atlantic extraction economies? How can a focus on extraction help us to see the history of architecture in new ways, such as the interrelationships between building typologies, technologies of construction, political regimes, colonial projects, and networks of use and experience not traditionally taken into consideration by the field? How can a focus on the architecture of extraction help us to make new connections between Atlantic World loci, such as cities and rural areas? How might the study of the architectures of extraction in the Atlantic World provide a lens for understanding the interaction of local and global forces in sites of production, exchange, and consumption? How can this type of study offer a means to recover subaltern voices, experiences, and agencies? Our chapters engage these questions on an Atlantic stage, thereby bringing disparate geographical contexts into juxtaposition from Kalaallit Nunaat (Inuit word for Greenland) to Central America, London to West Africa, and the early eastern United States to South America. We divide the volume into three parts that underscore differences that have developed in historic situations of extraction. In Part I, “Harvesting the Environment,” the authors investigate the architecture and landscapes associated with the often destructive and dangerous processes involved in drawing out the stuff of the earth, the mineral wealth, oil, ice, and ore. Janna Israel examines exchanges in mining knowledge across the Habsburg domain in Europe and the Atlantic. Germanic knowledge of the mining of ore and its physical requirements circulated and reaped vast fortunes for the Spanish when put to use in the Potosí silver mine of South America. In the Peruvian Andes, another mining center known as Huancavelica became the preeminent source of mercury in the Americas. In his chapter, Mark P. Dries employs a range of evidence to examine the actions and agencies of marginalized Indigenous Andeans in the colonial urban landscape of Huancavelica and within a larger regime of extractionary policies. Mining’s legacy in Mexico is felt today at heritage sites of Zacatecas, Pachuca, Guanajuato, Taxco, and Baja California, where the silver mines and their history are brought to public attention by museal display. Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva exposes through his chapter the ways in which this cultural and architectural past is being recovered in service of agendas in several states of today’s Central and Northern Mexico. Before refrigeration and freezers, the United States dominated a nineteenthcentury global trade in ice. Shipped to the Caribbean, the southeastern U.S., and parts of Asia, the trade required an infrastructure in the abundant ice houses that Louisa

Introduction 9 Iarocci examines in her chapter. These wood structures specializing in cold storage occupied the docks of many ports and facilitated the efficient transit of slippery cargo. Kirstine Møller and Bart Pushaw look at the exploitation of Inuit people under DanoNorwegian missionaries in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) who harvested whale oil to supply energy to Europe and the American colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They examine Inuit home or illu as a “site of community and resilience” during Danish efforts to exploit the labor of these people. Together, the chapters in this first part of the volume focus on the architectures invested in taking from the environment the raw material that was already there for sale (in some cases) to the world market and its transformation into commodities. In Part II of the volume, “Cultivating Profit,” authors consider the making and experience of the architectures involved in the planning and execution of largely export-oriented agricultural enterprises, the extraction of plants and crops for sale domestically and abroad. Lee Morrissey considers the linkages and multi-directional flow of ideas between plantation sites in Barbados and England. In North America, Barry L. Stiefel’s chapter complicates our understanding of the plantation landscape as being one of white supremacy over non-white labor. Diamond Hill plantation near what is now Chatsworth, Georgia, and Melrose plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, were owned and run by free Indigenous and African descendant individuals. Jonah Rowen addresses the connections between plantations in Jamaica and England in relation to the phenomenon of absenteeism. Finally, Lee Sessions examines the spatial development of the Havana Botanical Garden in the early nineteenth century in relation to plants, science, and slavery, an institution designed to benefit the interests of the island’s plantocracy. In the final part of the volume, “Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures,” the authors address the architectural and spatial networks that made goods and commodities fungible, that kept value in motion, and that facilitated the circulation of capital in the Atlantic. Georgios Eftaxiopoulos focuses on the architectural development of the West India Docks in London that furnished the means of receiving Jamaican sugar and other commodities. Peter Minosh considers Samuel Blodgett’s First Bank of the United States and its relation to conceptions of free trade that connected it to distant buildings and sites in the Caribbean. Courtnay Micots examines the architecture and physical infrastructure of slavery on the West African coast in what is today the nation of Ghana, where the British built forts for orchestrating the transformation of people into commodities for shipment into the Atlantic. Alexander Lima Reis considers the architecture of indigo dye extraction and the circulation of this material, looking trans-imperially at Charleston and Rio de Janeiro for similarities and differences. Finally, Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira and Renata Baesso Pereira consider the physical infrastructures of extraction in Rio Pardo’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapes. Built linkages between places and within cities through architecture, roads, and trails furnished the vital connective tissue of commodity flow and exchange. On the whole, our volume exposes many ways in which the activity of Atlantic World extraction from 1500 to 1850 necessitated and made its own architecture, physical infrastructures, social orders, mental conceptions, and everyday

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experiences that drove and nourished a system of Atlantic trade. The diverse situations and geographies presented by our authors underscore the global reach of this historical process. The essays herein speak to the need to consider the mutual constitution of architecture and empire in the early modern period and to reflect upon the legacies of extraction in the built environments of the Atlantic world. Notes 1 Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent, Columbus’ Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). 2 For the interplay of these visual traditions on maps in the sixteenth century, see Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). For the spatial distribution of gold mining and smelting houses in the Caribbean, see Allison Margaret Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonia Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 62–78. 3 We acknowledge Henri Lefebvre’s important triadic conception of space as conceived, perceived, and lived in The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991). 4 Barbara Bender, “Introduction: Landscape – Meaning and Action,” in Landscape: Politics and Perspectives, ed. Barbara Bender (Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993), 2. 5 “Están situados, los asientos y vivienda de los mineros, en un valle rodeado y cercado de muchos cerros montuosos; pasan por él tres ríos con abundancia de agua, que todo el año la llevan. Y, sin los ríos, hay algunas fuentes. Es fértil y abundoso de pastos, y no se dan frutos, porque se ocupan en el ministerio y beneficio de la plata, y los traen de acarreto de los pueblos comarcanos. En este valle de las minas no había poblados ningunos indios, porque, los que al presente hay, fueron traídos por los mismos mineros españoles que en ellas poblaron, y, estos que al presente hay, son advenedizos de muchas partes que vienen a trabajar en las d[ic]has minas.” Relaciones Geográficas del siglo XVI. México, ed. René Acuña, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017), 216–217. http://ru.iia. unam.mx:8080/handle/10684/98 6 Rafael García Castañeda, Esclavitud africana en la fundación de Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021), chapter 5, Kindle. 7 John Tutino, Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011). 8 Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Lisa Voigt, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016); and Nicholas Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 9 Theresa Singleton, Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015) and Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds., Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 10 Louis Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).

Introduction 11 Reference List Acuña, René, ed. Relaciones Geográficas del siglo XVI. México. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017. http://ru.iia.unam.mx:8080/handle/10684/98. Bender, Barbara, ed. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993. Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Castañeda García, Rafael. Esclavitud africana en la fundación de Nueva España. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021. Deagan, Kathleen, and José María Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost among the Taíno: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Ellis, Clifton and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Kindle Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991. Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Murillo, Dana Velasco. Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Nelson, Louis. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Robins, Nicholas. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Singleton, Theresa. Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015. Tutino, John. Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Voigt, Lisa. Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Part I

Harvesting the Environment

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Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires Janna Israel

In his Treatise on Architecture written in the 1460s, the artist and architect Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete, recounts a visit to an ironworks site to see how ore was processed.1 On his journey, Filarete tracks the steady rhythm of mountains interrupted by a river, the locals who reminded him of gypsies, and a few disorderly houses burrowed into the rocky outcrops. Filarete describes the infrastructure of the ironworks, noting that the furnace used to refine the mineral was a square building located at the base of the mountain near a river, and that in an adjacent building, charcoal was inserted through the mouth of the furnace, fueled by bellows, while smelters poured molten iron into a sulfurous well. Filarete seems to be describing a wind-operated blast furnace, common in the area around Bergamo, which claimed a large portion of the iron artillery market in Renaissance Italy. In the margins of the text, Filarete sketches the valley encircled by high mountains interrupted by a river, but he fails to explain the significance of the river for milling the ore. He writes, “I prepared to see how iron was made, how the iron building looked, and by that, I mean the furnace where it is melted. This is done in such a way that it is hard to explain with words. Nor can it be completely explained by drawings.”2 He draws only the bellows and a square opening to indicate the furnace, unable to provide context or an etiological overview of the ironworks. Filarete’s inability to illustrate the ironworks encapsulates the dearth of written information about metallurgical techniques and anticipated the need for a rich visual and textual discourse about mining and metalwork that ricocheted across geographical domains during the sixteenth century. In his treatise De Re Metallica published in 1556, the German physician and mining master Georgius Agricola noted that he felt compelled to write his tract on metalwork after the Venetian diplomat Federico Badoer gave him a copy of De Pirotechnia by Vannoccio Biringuccio, the Sienese metallurgist and polymath.3 Published in 1540, a year after the author’s death, De Pirotechnia provides technical information about a range of metallurgical processes. Agricola found fault with a few of Biringuccio’s techniques for testing metals and fabricating machinery, but in general, the two authors addressed similar topics, and their recommendations usually overlapped. The texts explained methods for detecting the presence of minerals in geologically rocky outcrops, primarily through sensory and empirical means – by looking for geological indications of mineral veins in the rocks, even identifying the smell and taste DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-3

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of specific ores.4 They also conveyed techniques for refining and manipulating ore after excavation, and they established parameters for experimentation to refine processes. The accumulation of metallurgical treatises during the sixteenth century reflects an increasingly competitive mineral market and a bureaucratic impulse to inventory the mineral wealth buried within nation-states as well as land possessions that transcended political borders. The early modern mercantile economy – which demanded the physical presence of material to define value – fostered speculators who sought a working understanding of the nature that they monetized. Agricola’s mention of Biringuccio’s work in his preface presents a glimpse into the international transmission of technical expertise.5 As a mining specialist, Agricola likely knew of Biringuccio’s treatise before Badoer gifted it to him. In the 1530s, around the time that Vannoccio wrote De Pirotechnia, Germany held the distinction as the most advanced metallurgical center in Europe due principally to the ore-rich mines found in Saxony and the Alps and the techniques of mining and smelting perfected there. Early in his career, Vannoccio made a pilgrimage to Germany where he was shown how to operate artillery by the emperor’s artillery master, and he toured mines and foundries. The requisite presence of German translators at Venetian mining sites in the ore-rich Dolomites and the mining ledgers written in German at excavation sites south of the Alps testify to the frequent requests for advice from German mining virtuosi, who offered their expertise to operations throughout Europe.6 Unlike Filarete, Biringuccio and Agricola were metalworkers; they illustrated the complex techniques and machinery described in their writing with images (Figure 1.1).7 Biringuccio does not credit the illustrator of his treatise, in contrast to Agricola, who “hired illustrators to delineate forms, in case descriptions conveyed by words are not understood by men of our own times or posterity.”8 Agricola believes that the principles of subterranean mineral extraction and the instruments of metalwork should be translated into visual imagery. The illustrations not only supplement Agricola’s text but they peel back the earth’s crust to represent the interior site of extraction. For example, a cross-section of three mine shafts intersected by horizontal tunnels conveys the depth of subterranean mining sites in the Tyrol and activates the site with the insertion of a miner pushing a wheelbarrow through the galleries. Agricola captures miners in various states of work and repose – in one image, two workers sit on trolley tracks looking dejected, a sympathetic gesture to the intensity of working the mines. Miners and metalworkers might have absorbed Agricola’s precepts when they saw an efficient version of their own labor practices reflected in the illustrations of the text. These treatises codified essential technical information to foster an emerging extraction economy as well as an impulse to inventory land holdings. In this vein, the Spanish scholar Bernardo Pérez de Vargas did not include images in his De Re Metallica of 1569, but he repeated guidelines for metalwork established by Biringuccio and Agricola, adapting them to territories under the control of Philip II of Spain.9 The Spanish held a virtual monopoly on saltpeter ores, which comprised about 50% of the formula for gunpowder in siege artillery, but they also plundered gold and silver in the Americas. Pérez de Vargas’ text includes a

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 17

Figure 1.1 Georgius Agricola, mine shafts from De Re Metallica, (Basel, 1565). Source: The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, K3.

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preface by a Diego de Meneses, who claims to have owned mining sites in Peru and other parts of the Americas for about thirty years. He commended Spaniards who went to the Indies in search of raw wealth and encouraged other practitioners to “take advantage” of the information in Pérez de Vargas’ treatise.10 A series of at least twenty-six drawings signed by an artist named Heinrich Gross or Groff and dated to 1527 encapsulates the desire to map and visualize territory within technical treatises. The drawings present a panorama of mining infrastructure in the silver-rich Vosges mountains from a variety of perspectives, with captions identifying geographical locations and processes.11 The drawings were likely produced to lay claim to disputed territory against the backdrop of a brewing ownership feud. During the first half of the sixteenth century, the duchy of Lorraine controlled the western part of the Vosges, but in 1518, when the duchy attempted to take over the valley northeast of the Liepvrette river, where the Ribeaupierre family had sovereignty, the Habsburg empire supported the Ribeaupierre.12 Based on an inscription in an administrative drawing that identifies the Ribeaupierre, the drawings may have been made to assert their possession of the mines. The drawings situate mining in an expansive context: distant views of the property around the mines include the churches that served the spiritual needs of mining communities and the church bells that marked liturgical time as well as work shifts for the miners. In one drawing, laborers harvest wood in a richly contoured landscape, suggesting that the industrial enterprise required, and even celebrated, the plundering of natural resources as an enactment of land sovereignty.13 Another image depicts four hewers adorned in mining aprons and pit caps entering a tunnel with their lamps and pickaxes. In contrast to the four miners walking into the mountain at an even tempo, Gross depicts a dynamic performance of activity compressed into a cross-section of three registers of horizontal mining galleries depicting the “Rouge Myne” of Sainte Marie-aux-Mines, located just below the crest of the Vosges (Figure 1.2).14 At the bottom of the image, a fourth, even lower horizontal gallery is indicated as miners look down a shaft to hoist ore from a gallery below. The drawings likely represent a measure of idealism and revisionism, given that the miners in the Vosges participated in the Peasant’s Revolt of 1524 to fight the injustices of an unfair agricultural system.15 They advocated for improvements to dangerous and horrific working conditions, better wages, opportunities to invest in their operations and earn revenue on extracted minerals.16 The mine owners crushed protests as the labor force struggled against the lethal conscription of their bodies to maximize productivity for profit in a system that deemed landholding a metric of wealth and power.17 The middle managers and proxies embedded within Gross’ drawings, adorned in mining garnitures and the more distinguished pantaloons, represent the interests of the landowners; they assert an authorial surveillance over the manufacturing process and its anonymous labor, pushing the ambitions of the miners out of the ambit of the page. Gross’s drawings form part of an incipient genre in the region. Around the 1550s, the Bohemian Emperor Ferdinand I commissioned illustrated books documenting regulations of the Schwaz mines in the Tyrol that parallel on Gross’

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 19

Figure 1.2 Heinrich Gross, Silver Mines of La Croix-aux-Mines, fol. 13v-14r, 16th century. Source: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg.

images.18 The Schwazer Bergbuch also presents the stages of metalwork from multiple perspectives – distant views of metalliferous topography, with details of mining and refining equipment and processing mills spread out at the base of massive and complex mountains with salient geological, topographical, and operational sites identified by inscriptions. The images arranged the mine as an extension of the domestic sphere and as natural an environment for miners as the home. The Habsburg emperor Ferdinand I represented the vast territorial holdings of the Habsburgs in various media, commissioning local artisans to compose more than thirty vignettes of mining sites with similar scraps of precious metal.19 In several of these artifacts, miners burrow into the rock to remove ore from the mountainous configuration of minerals, often adorned with the tunnel entries, furnaces, and the silver furnace huts depicted in the texts by Biringuccio and Agricola and illustrations of extraction sites. Displayed in Ferdinand’s kunstkammer, these dioramas were not only valuable curiosities, but as compressed microcosms of geological currency, they reinforced the territorial claims of the Habsburg princes over Bohemia and the Tyrol, thematizing the profitability of land holdings. The Habsburgs were not unique in rendering portraits of their mineral and manufacturing terrain, but the growth of the printing industry and the expansion of their investments into highly metalliferous mountains throughout Europe and the Americas

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likely contributed to the proliferation of representations of their mines. The repetition of extraction and refining infrastructures in various media created the impression of a standardized mining industry. Emperor Ferdinand I’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, pursued mining initiatives with other banking conglomerates, such as the Fugger in Germany and the Medici in Italy, who maintained property and investments in territories where Biringuccio and Agricola acquired the experience to write their treatises.20 In his later years, the Charles V scrambled to pay off debts accrued from his overzealous speculation in Saxony and the slow realization of profit from transatlantic mining prospects after engineering the conquest of Mexico and Peru, but he constructed an extraction empire that his son, Philip II, would inherit and expand. Charles V laid the foundations for that expansion. The appointment of his emissary, Francisco de Toledo in 1570 as the fifth Viceroy of Peru and the radical changes he undertook in the Americas must have been motivated by experiences that he acquired negotiating land holdings and mining enterprises in Tuscany for the Medici dukes.21 At the time, Potosi was one of the most robust sources of silver in the world, responsible for between 60% and 80% of the world’s silver supply due in large part to a system of forced labor.22 With the architect Jerónimo Bustamante de Herrera, de Toledo intervened in the local politics of Tuscany to strengthen the territorial holdings of their Medici allies.23 From the ferrous-rich town of Piombino, de Toledo sent dispatches to the Florentine dukes about the power struggles of local oligarchic families, and he advised Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici on suppressing movements to overthrow the Medici oligarchy and restore a republican system in Tuscany. In 1546, when Charles V asked Cosimo I to construct a fortress in Piombino as an assertion of power, de Toledo managed the project while dispatching reports to Cosimo about mining infrastructure in the town. In the constant struggle for control over discovered veins of ore, the Medici claimed mines throughout Tuscany. Soon after Cosimo assumed control of Piombino, de Toledo worked on behalf of Charles V to help Cosimo gain purchase over Elba, an island roughly twenty kilometers off the Tuscan coast, where the Medici established a potentially powerful naval site and attained sole access to the rich iron supply on the island.24 Francisco de Toledo was also sent to Innsbruck and Augsburg, the locations of active silver and gold mining operations, to oversee deals with the Fugger banking conglomerate, but in Tuscany, de Toledo witnessed experiments undertaken to streamline refining processes. In a letter dated March 18, 1563, Duke Cosimo expressed displeasure with the head of refining operations in Pietrasanta because he purified silver in a wind furnace powered by bellows which made it difficult to conserve the lead slag.25 In 1564, Cosimo replaced the foreman of mining in Pietrasanta with Matteo Inghirami, who had informed Cosimo about a silver purification process that preserved the lead slag from excavated silver ore. Described by Biringuccio a century earlier in De Pirotechnia, this process of amalgamation involved crushing mercury together with the extracted silver ore before it was heated to preserve a greater portion of the silver than smelting. The correspondence about streamlining the refining process demonstrates that the Medici calculated a

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 21 considerable profit in recovering a greater portion of the extracted material and devising workflows. In Peru, de Toledo implemented a similar process of amalgamation, restructuring the extraction process and producing legislation to facilitate control over the resource landscape in the Americas. He manipulated the Incan mita system of shared labor into a hierarchical system of conscription and forced labor for the Spanish with echoes of the work practices the Medici established in Piombino.26 A watercolor dated to the late sixteenth century charting the metallurgical activity of colonized Potosi – the mining territory under Spanish control located in the Andes in contemporary Bolivia – reflects changes made to the site when Francisco de Toledo was viceroy and, by extension, the transmission of extraction mechanisms across the Atlantic (Figure 1.3). In the intense polychromatic surface of the watercolor, the vibrant red highlights on the mountain indicate the siliceous shell encasing the copious mineral content. The miners and herders dotting the circumference of the mountain wrangle the horses and llamas required to carry the ore to a processing mill located near the river and the furnaces and foundries at the base of the mountain. The llamas and horses also transported mercury from the mines at Huancavelica, about 1,300 kilometers from Potosi, for amalgamation, the silver

Figure 1.3 The Mines at Potosi, ca. 1585, Watercolor on parchment. Source: The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, K3.

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refining method instituted by de Toledo in Peru. After de Toledo made amalgamation obligatory in his laws of 1572, the row of blast smelting furnaces, depicted on the side of the mountain in the watercolor, fell into disuse.27 The amalgamation process is shown at the base of the mountain. After rinsing the ore in basins, the silver would be mixed with mercury, crushed with a mallet in the waterwheel, and stored in the open-air drawers, labeled caxones. With the inclusion of the wheel, the refining system draws on the amalgamation process described by Agricola.28 The main wheel axle rotates the stamps that crush the ore and pushes the mineral through the hopper to be pulverized before it is washed in a basin. The refining operations are overseen by an elegantly adorned master dressed in the doublet, hose, and top hat typical of Habsburg nobility, representing an emissary of the viceroy. Workers placed the small piles of refined silver in bags to be hauled to the mint to be cast as ingot bars or stamped into coins to receive the mark of Spain as an assurance of quality and value. Before de Toledo became viceroy, the ore was stamped into coins at the mint in Lima, about 2,000 kilometers away. However, de Toledo established a mint in the city he founded at the base of the mountain at Potosi to streamline the process and mitigate the possibility of fraud or debasement at a site so far away.29 On a folio adjacent to the watercolor elevation of the Cerro Rico, the plan of the city of Potosi is represented by a grid of spiritual, economic, and social institutions that marched across the north base of the mountain to serve the extraction site and aid in the conversion of Indigenous miners to Catholicism. The two folios of the mountain elevation and the plan of the city below – the topography of a prized natural resource and the civic and religious structures embedded within the grid of the city—formed the physical apparatus of colonialism. Various sites and stages of extraction operations are labeled as if to draw the viewer through an ethnographic narrative of mining, but they also convey to the absent Spanish administrators that processes tested in Europe are followed abroad. The watercolor depiction of Potosi draws on an image of the mountain in the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León’s Cerro de Potosí of 1553.30 In the text, the mountain is shown in contours with labels on the four principal veins of ore that roughly cut through the vertical axis of the east side of the mountain. Cieza de León must have observed the extensive mining operations at Potosi and the coveted leases on a vein of ore that enabled the Spanish conquistadors and speculators to explore for precious minerals. Richard Kagan notes that the image of Potosi at the Hispanic Society likely accompanied the Relación general de la villa imperial de Potosí written by the engineer Luis Capoche in 1585 and addressed to the Viceroy of Peru, Fernando Torres de Portugal y Mesia, who governed Potosi from Spain.31 The watercolor image of Potosi identifies sites mentioned by Capoche, including the road to Tucuman and the mountain of Tollocchi, located about 250 kilometers from the Cerro Rico. In its detailed description of the access, topography, and operations of Potosi, Capoche’s text responds to the questionnaire that Spanish commissioners distributed to colonies in the Americas beginning in the mid-1570s.32 The questionnaire requested textual and visual descriptions of coveted agricultural and extractive areas and the adjacent towns that the Spanish developed to serve

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 23 them, the flora, and the population of the Indigenous community. The responses, the Relaciones Geográficas, formed an archive of Spanish landholdings belonging to the absent Spanish viceroy and monarchy and may have also been conceptualized as evidence the Spanish could deploy in the tribunals over disputes land claims by Indigenous populations displaced and disenfranchised by the Spanish conscription of land.33 That the questionnaire is attributed to the royal Spanish cosmographer Juan López de Velasco points to an impulse by the Habsburgs to chart imperial territory. The questionnaire requests a drawing or polychrome painting of the urban infrastructure and the direction of the winds: “Describe the site, whether it lies high or low or in a plain, and give a design or colored painting showing the streets, squares, and other places; mark the monasteries as you can. This can be easily sketched on paper so that it can be shown as well as possible.”34 These imaging structures – the questionnaire, the watercolor image of Potosi, and other colonial territories portrayed in the Relaciones – related to an impulse to chart imperial territory and mining sites controlled by the Habsburgs throughout Europe and the Americas. The watercolor image of Potosi depicts a metal-rich mountain sustaining the town at its base, where manufacturing, spiritual, and residential services are contained. The depiction is similar to other responses to the imperial questionnaire, the Relaciones, sent to the Americas as well as the images of mining operations described earlier, at Vosges and the Schwazer. The image of Potosi was created with watercolor and ink, like the depictions in the Schwazer Bergbuch. In an image of the mountainous outcrop in the Tyrolean town of Falkenstein, salient topographical features, including ore deposits, mine entrances, and the refining mill and the town at the base of the image, are indicated in ink and highlighted with washes of watercolor (Figure 1.4). Like the responses to the Relaciones, these images from Europe cataloged the dispersed natural resources and labor bolstering the Habsburg empire. The drive to represent and identify productive transatlantic terrain possessed by the Habsburgs suggests an attempt to create a continuum of power at a geographical scale. Despite the immense resources of Peru and other occupied territories in the Americas, in 1588, the economist Luis Ortiz informed Philip II that extracted ore alone would not sustain the empire; without manufacturing the mountains of metals, the Spanish would lose ground in the competitive mercantile cycle of production and exchange.35 A similar sentiment was expressed by Giovanni Botero in 1589. He wrote, “the things produced by industry, man’s artificial hand, are greater in number, and even greater in price, than things generated by Nature… Wool is a simple and crude commodity deriving from nature; how many beautiful, varied, and multifaceted things does art fabricate from it?”36 Botero praised Milan as more important than Peru and the Indies as more worthy to the Habsburgs because of its industry and commerce. This dichotomy between agriculture and manufacturing was reinforced by the economist Antonio Serra in 1613, who believed that manufactured goods generate a greater profit than agricultural pursuits.37 These texts summarizing mercantile economics encouraged the transportation of raw metals from agrarian sites to urban centers for production.

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Figure 1.4 Jörg Kölber, Falkenstein from the Schwazer Bergbuch, 1556, pen in ink and watercolor. Source: Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, SL.5.2019.9.13

When he was Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo elected not to combine the two generative methods of profit at Potosi and other extraction sites under his authority. De Toledo established refining operations as he had in Habsburg-controlled mining sites in Europe, and he shipped Peruvian resources according to Spanish currency and export standards. However, he did not establish factories or workshops to transform resources into commodities. Missives sent to Spain described the tremendous quality of the objects crafted by the Indigenous population. In one example, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera wrote to the Medici Pope Leo X in 1530 about the beautifully crafted jewelry from Mexico destined for the Spanish emperor: “If ever artists of this kind of work have touched genius, then surely they are these natives. It is not so much the gold or the precious stones I admire, as the cleverness of the artist and the workmanship, which much exceed the value of the material and excite my amazement.”38 Despite the emphasis on extraction in the Americas, scenes of local craft and fabrication are contained in the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, or Florentine Codex, a compilation of preconquest Mayan culture in Nahuatl and Spanish.39 Indigenous artisanal traditions, including the creation of metal artifacts and textiles, persisted into conquest. Locally produced commodities were occasionally accepted as payment for the tithes that the conquistadors demanded for

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 25 residence and work privileges on land now claimed by the Spanish.40 Like the contemporaneous Relaciones Geograficas, which described and represented landscapes filled with advantageous potential for Philip II, the ethnographic synopses of labor assets in the Florentine Codex may have been compiled with similar ambitions – to transmit the depiction of skilled Indigenous artisans ripe for spiritual and physical conversion into Catholics and an industrious workforce. However, as Europe increased production of a range of luxury and artisanal hardware goods with imported raw materials, the Spanish administrators like de Toledo curtailed manufacturing in their colonies, likely to avoid competition with European enterprises. In the images of mineral manufacturing and laws governing resources and labor transmitted across territorial regimes, representation was colonialism, grafted onto the armature of conquest like a grid imprinted onto the urban infrastructure for easy legibility and domination. * This essay draws from material presented in the annual conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians in 2021 and the Renaissance Society of America in 2011. Notes 1 Filarete, Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete. Trattato de Architettura, eds. A. M. Finoli and L. Grassi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1972), Book XVI, f. 127r. 2 Ibid. 3 Vannoccio Biringuccio, De Pirotechnia (Venice: Curzio Navo, 1540); Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica (Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1556). 4 Ibid., Book II.6. 5 Agricola, De Re Metallica, preface. 6 Archivio di Stato, Venice, Deputati alle Miniere 1, f. 1r–10r. 7 Mino Gabriele, Le incisioni alchemico-metallurgiche di Domenico Beccafumi (Florence: G. Giannini, 1988). 8 Agricola, De Re Metallica, preface. The illustrator of Agricola’s text, Blasius Weffring, was from Joachimsthal, a major mining center. 9 Bernardo Pérez de Vargas, De re Metallica (Madrid: Casa Pierres Cosin, 1569). 10 Ibid., preface; Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales, Bolivia, EP 1, 95v-96. XVI/Potosi. On July 20, 1549, Diego de Meneses received a license to mine at Potosi. He could be the same author of the preface of Pérez de Vargas’ text. 11 Francis Pierre and Jean-Pierre Gaxatte, Les dessins des mines d’argent de La Croix: reproductions conservées à la Médiathèque de Saint-Dié-des-Vosges des dessins d’Heinrich Gross (La Croix-aux-Mines: les Édition de la Stingelle, 2012); MarieChristine Bailly-Maître and Benoît Paul, “Les mines d’argent de la France médiévale,” Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public 28 (1997): 17–45; Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia (Basel: Heinrichum Petri, 1545), 209–223. 12 Claude Muller and Valentin Kuentzler, eds., Alsace: espace, identité, frontière: colloque (Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2016); Benoit Jordan, La noblesse d’Alsace entre la gloire et la vertu: les sires de Ribeaupierre, 1451–1585 (Strasbourg: Editions Société savante d’Alsace, 1991). 13 Joseph Gauthier and Pierre Fluck, “Assaying ores at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (Alsace, France) in the 16th Century: Diffusion and Role of a Technical Innovation,” Acta rerum naturalium Muzeum Vysočiny Jihlava 28 (2013): 25–30; Michael Ziegenbalg, “An Interdisciplinary Cooperation: Painters of Landscape, Cartographers, Surveyors of Land and Mountain in the Renaissance,” Histoire & Mesure 8, no. 3/4 (1993): 313–324.

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14 Matthew Laube, “Singing and Devotion in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries,” Early Music History 38 (2019): 305–316. 15 Sebastian Felten, “Mining Culture, Labour, and the State in Early Modern Saxony,” Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 119–148. 16 George H. Waring, “The Silver Miners of the Erzgebirge and the Peasants’ War of 1525 in the Light of Recent Research,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 2 (1987): 231–247. 17 James W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso Books, 2015). 18 Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis 10.852. Pierre Terjanian, The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019); Franz Kirnbauer, “Das Schwazer Bergbuch Eine Bilderhandschrift des österreichischen Bergbaues aus dem Jahre 1556,” in Blätter für Technikgeschichte, ed. Josef Nagler (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1956), 77–94. 19 Henrike Haug, “Artificial Interventions in the Natural Form of Things: Shared Metallogenetical Concepts of Goldsmiths and Alchemists,” in Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century, ed. Sven Dupre (Cham: Springer, 2014), 79–103. 20 Renée Raphael, “Producing Knowledge about Mercury Mining: Local Practices and Textual Tools,” Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 95–118. 21 Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park, PA: Penn sylvania State University Press, 2016), 70–78. 22 Ward Barrett, “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires, ed J. D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 237. 23 Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF), Mediceo del Principato 3918, 5, f. 446. 24 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 11, f. 339. 25 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 219, f. 72, March 18, 1563; ASF, Mediceo del Principato 220, f. 51, July 5, 1564. 26 Carlos Sempat Assadourian, El tráfico de esclavos en Córdoba de Angola a Potosí, siglos XVI-XVII (Córdoba, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1966). 27 Pedro de Cieza de León, Cerro de Potosí (Seville: Martín de Montesdoca, 1553), 109–110. 28 Agricola, De Re Metallica, Book VII. 29 Eddy van Cauwenberghe and Franz Irsigler, eds., Münzprägun, Geldumlauf, und Wechselkurse: Akten des 8th International Economic History Congress (Trier: Verlag Trierer Historische Forschungen, 1984); Kris Lane, “From Corrupt to Criminal: Reflections on the Great Potosí Mint Fraud of 1649,” in Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, ed. Christoph Rosenmüller (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 33–62. 30 Cieza de León, Cerro de Potosí, 1553, 109–110. 31 Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 100–106. Peter J. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). 32 Luis Capoche, Relacion General de La Villa Imperial de Potosi, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela (Madrid: Plaza Conde Barajas, 1959). 33 Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 34 Juan López de Velasco, Instructio, y memoria, de las relaciones que se han de hazer, para la descripcion de las Indias, que Su Magestad manda hazer para el buen govierno (Madrid, 1577). “El sitio y asiento donde dichos pueblos estuvieren, si es en alto o en bajo, o en llano, con la traza y diseño en pintura de las casas y plazas, y otros lugares señalados de monasterios como quiera que se pueda rasguñar fácilmente en un papel.” 35 Luis Ortiz, Memorial del Contador Luis Ortiz a Felipe II (Madrid: Instituto de España, 1970).

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 27 36 Giovanni Botero, Della ragion di stato libri dieci: con tre libri delle cause della grandezza, e magnificenza delle città (Venice: Appresso i Gioliti, 1589), Book 2, 182. “Le cose prodette dall’artificiosa mano dell’huomo sono molto più, e di molto maggior Prezzo che le cose generate dalla natura… La lana è frutto semplice, e rozo, della natura; quante belle cose, quanto varie, e moltiformi ne fabrica l’arte?” 37 Antonio Serra, Breve trattato delle cause che possono far abbondare li Regni d’oro e argento dove non sono miniere. Con applicatione al Regno di Napoli (Napoli: Regno di Napoli, 1613). Geronimo de Uztáriz, The Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs, trans. John Kippax vol. 1 (London: John & James Rivington, 1751), 95. Concerning manufacturing, Uztáriz wrote that it, “is a mine more fruitful of gain, riches, and plenty, than those of Potosí.” 38 Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, De orbe novo, trans. Augustus MacNutt, vol. 2 (New York: Putnam, 1912), 46. 39 Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence MS. Mediceo Palatino 219, f. 358r; Allison Caplan, “Blowers of Sun-Excrement: Nahua Lost-Wax Gold Casting in the Florentine Codex, Book 9, Chapter 16,” West 86th 28, no. 2 (Fall -Winter 2021): 215–231. 40 Codex Tepetlaoztoc, 1994, British Library, Ms. add. 13964.

Reference List Agricola. De Re Metallica. Basel: Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, 1556. Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF), Mediceo del Principato, 11. Archivio di Stato, Venice, Deputati alle Miniere, 1. Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales, Bolivia EP 1. ASF, Mediceo del Principato, 219. ASF, Mediceo del Principato, 220. ASF, Mediceo del Principato, 3918. Assadourian, Carlos Sempat. El tráfico de esclavos en Córdoba de Angola a Potosí, siglos XVI-XVII. Córdoba, Argentina: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1966. Bailly-Maître, Marie-Christine, and Benoît Paul. “Les mines d’argent de la France médiévale.” Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public 28 (1997): 17–45. Bakewell, Peter J. Miners of the Red Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Barrett, Ward. “World Bullion Flows, 1450–1800.” In The Rise of Merchant Empires, edited by James D. Tracy, 224–254. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Biringuccio, Vannoccio. De Pirotechnia. Venice: Curzio Navo, 1540. Botero, Giovanni. Della ragion di stato libri dieci: con tre libri delle cause della grandezza, e magnificenza delle città. Venice: Appresso i Gioliti, 1589. Brown, Christopher Boyd. “Art and the Artist in the Lutheran Reformation: Johannes Mathesius and Joachimsthal.” Church History 86, no. 4 (2017): 1081–1120. Caplan, Allison. “Blowers of Sun-Excrement: Nahua Lost-Wax Gold Casting in the Florentine Codex, Book 9, Chapter 16.” West 86th 28, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2021): 215–231. Capoche, Luis. Relacion General de La Villa Imperial de Potosi. Edited by Juan Pérez de Tudela. Madrid: Plaza Conde Barajas, 1959. Cauwenberghe, Eddy van, and Franz Irsigler. Münzprägung, Geldumlauf und Wechselkurse: Akten des 8th International Economic History Congress. Trier: Verlag Trierer Historische Forschungen, 1984. Cieza de León, Pedro de. Cerro de Potosí. Seville: Martín de Montesdoca, 1553.

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Valle, Perla. Códice de Tepetlaóztoc (códice Kingsborough). Toluca: Colegio Mexiquense, 1994. Felten, Sebastian. “Mining Culture, Labour, and the State in Early Modern Saxony.” Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 119–148. Filarete. Antonio Averlino detto il Filarete. Trattato de Architettura. Edited by Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi. Milan: Il Polifilo, 1972. Gabriele, Mino. Le incisioni alchemico-metallurgiche di Domenico Beccafumi. Florence: G. Giannini, 1988. Gauthier, Joseph, and Pierre Fluck. “Assaying ores at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, Alsace, France in the 16th century: Diffusion and Role of a Technical Innovation.” Acta rerum naturalium Muzeum Vysočiny Jihlava 28 (2013): 25–30. Haug, Henrike. “Artificial Interventions in the Natural Form of Things: Shared Metallogenetical Concepts of Goldsmiths and Alchemists.” In Laboratories of Art: Alchemy and Art Technology from Antiquity to the 18th Century, edited by Sven Dupre, 79–103 Cham: Springer, 2014. Jordan, Benoit. La noblesse d’Alsace entre la gloire et la vertu: les sires de Ribeaupierre, 1451–1585. Strasbourg: Editions Société savante d’Alsace, 1991. Kagan, Richard L. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Kirnbauer, Franz. “Das Schwazer Bergbuch Eine Bilderhandschrift des österreichischen Bergbaues aus dem Jahre 1556.” In Blätter für Technikgeschichte, edited by Josef Nagler, 77–94. Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1956. Lane, Kris. “From Corrupt to Criminal: Reflections on the Great Potosí Mint Fraud of 1649.” In Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks, edited by Christoph Rosenmüller, 33–62. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Laube, Matthew. “Singing and Devotion in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries.” Early Music History 38 (2019): 305–316. López de Velasco, Juan. Instructio, y memoria, de las relaciones que se han de hazer, para la descripcion de las Indias, que Su Magestad manda hazer para el buen govierno. Madrid, 1577. Markey, Lia. Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence. University Park, PA: Penn sylvania State University Press, 2016. Martyr d’Anghiera, Peter. De orbe novo. Vol. 2. Translated by Augustus MacNutt. New York: Putnam, 1912. Mathesius, Johann. Sarepta, oder Bergpostill. Nuremberg: J. vom Berg und U. Newbar, 1562. Moore, James W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso Books, 2015. Muller, Claude, and Valentin Kuentzler, eds. Alsace: espace, identité, frontière: colloque, Strasbourg: Editions du Signe, 2016. Mundy, Barbara. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Münster, Sebastian. Cosmographia. Basel: Heinrichum Petri, 1545. Norris, John A. “The Providence of Mineral Generation in the Sermons of Johann Mathesius, 1504–1565.” Geological Society 310, no. 1 (2009) 37–40. Ortiz, Luis. Memorial del Contador Luis Ortiz a Felipe II. Madrid: Instituto de España, 1970. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Codex Vindobonensis 10. Pérez de Vargas, Bernardo. De Re Metallica. Madrid: Casa Pierres Cosin, 1569. Pierre, Francis, and Jean-Pierre Gaxatte. Les dessins des mines d’argent de La Croix: reproductions conservées à la Médiathèque de Saint-Dié-des-Vosges des dessins d’Heinrich Gross. La Croix-aux-Mines: les Édition de la Stingelle, 2012.

Early Modern Mining Exchanges Across Empires 29 Raphael, Renée. “Producing Knowledge about Mercury Mining: Local Practices and Textual Tools.” Renaissance Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 95–118. Sahagun, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. MS. Mediceo Palatino, 219, 1577. Serra, Antonio. Breve trattato delle cause che possono far abbondare li Regni d’oro e argento dove non sono miniere. Con applicatione al Regno di Napoli. Naples: Regno di Napoli, 1613. Terjanian, Pierre. The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019. Uztáriz, Geronimo de. The Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs. Vol. 1. Translated by John Kippax. London: John & James Rivington, 1751. Waring, George H. “The Silver Miners of the Erzgebirge and the Peasants’ War of 1525 in the Light of Recent Research.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18, no. 2 (1987): 231–247. Ziegenbalg, Michael. “An Interdisciplinary Cooperation: Painters of Landscape, Cartographers, Surveyors of Land and Mountain in the Renaissance.” Histoire & Mesure 8, no. 3–4 (1993): 313–324.

2

Purchasing a Poisoned City Indigenous Andeans and Urban Space in Sixteenth-Century Huancavelica Mark P. Dries

On June 9, 1571, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo signed an order authorizing the local authorities to establish a colonial town near an emerging mining center high in the Peruvian Andes northwest of the city of Huamanga. The Viceroy had received word that the Spanish population there had grown to the extent that the creation of a formal urban settlement would serve the Crown by facilitating both the exploitation of the area’s mercury mines and the administration of royal justice.1 The work of choosing a site fell to a local official named Francisco de Angulo, who laid out the traza, the characteristic grid pattern of Spanish colonial towns that radiated outward from a central plaza.2 Angulo proceeded methodically, choosing sights for the buildings and institutions required for urban living: the church, jail, hospital, market, and butcher shop, among others. His care extended to the name he chose for the new town: “Oropesa,” after the Viceroy’s hometown in Spain. From a legal perspective, these actions marked the foundation of a town that would play a crucial economic and symbolic role in the colonial mining regime; the situation on the ground, however, was quite different: de Toledo’s and Angulo’s efforts were little more than a post hoc recognition of the realities at the site. Spanish and Indigenous actors had already laid the foundations of the colonial mining center in Huancavelica, and their influences, both intentional and epiphenomenal, could not be wiped away with the stroke of an official’s pen (Figure 2.1). Indigenous people played a vital role in shaping urban space in Huancavelica, despite attempts by Spanish authorities to create a mutually reinforcing relationship between their desired colonial order and the towns they saw as its exemplars. The realities of mining and extraction complicated Spanish efforts to shape and control population centers for several reasons. The boom-and-bust cycle common to mineral extraction led to rapid fluctuations in population and prosperity that could threaten established hierarchies. Also, coercive labor relations often existed along a spectrum in which some Indigenous actors found ways to establish a more permanent and less exploitative relationship with the extractive regime.3 In Huancavelica, the rapid rise in importance and production made early relationships between Spanish and Indigenous actors foundational for the emergence of the mining center.4 As a result, Andeans were woven into the urban fabric, beginning in its physical and symbolic center: the main plaza. Yet even then, the relationship was far from an equal one. For example, marriages could be a means of solidifying DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-4

Purchasing a Poisoned City 31

Figure 2.1 An early map of South America from 1584. Huancavelica’s approximate location was between Guamanga and Guanuco in the center. Source: Ortelius, Abraham, Cartographer, Diego Hurtado De Mendoza, Geronimo Chaves, Christophe Plantin, and Abraham Ortelius. Pervviae avriferae regionis typvs/La Florida/auctore Hieron. Chiaues; Gvastecan reg. [Antwerp: Christophe Plantin,?, 1584] Map. www.loc.gov/item/84696980/. Cropping/Editing by the author.

social relationships between Spanish and Andean actors, but Andean wives of Spanish miners held a complicated, if privileged, position between the two groups. The early history of the mines was a period of fluidity in which Andean elites blended to a certain extent with Spanish ones. Conditions changed, however, as the colonial relationship matured. Early attempts to merge with the nascent colonial hierarchy gave way to an Andean emphasis on their distinct status and on the royal favors it could incur – Andean and Spanish society in Huancavelica became both more socially divided and more legally bound together. This transition is clear in the shifting urban footprint of Huancavelica from the 1570s to the early 1600s, as Andeans became more likely to engage in property transactions even as the value

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of those transactions decreased, and their geographic locations shifted toward outlying areas and away from the symbolic centers of the town. This geographic shift took on an added significance as technological changes eventually concentrated mercury refining, and its palpable environmental dangers, in the urban space occupied by Andeans. As this chapter argues, these changes in urban space were the result of the maturing colonial society and reflected the social, technological, and environmental conditions that characterized extraction in Huancavelica. Colonial Mining: Silver and Mercury To understand the impact of the extractive regime on the urban footprint of Huancavelica, one must first situate it in the broader emergence of mineral extraction in the Spanish empire and its global significance. Even as tales of the spoils taken from central Mexico and Peru circulated in the Atlantic world, a more profound economic activity was emerging in the form of large-scale silver mining in both regions. Beginning in the 1540s, silver mining became a central pillar of the colonial economy. In colonial New Spain, several important mining centers emerged, beginning with Zacatecas in 1547 and Guanajuato in 1548. In South America, loosely organized into the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru in 1542, a single site played such a vital role in the growth of silver production that its name became synonymous with the wealth that drove colonization. Spaniards began exploiting the silver deposits of Potosí, located in present-day Bolivia, in the 1540s, and production rapidly rose based on the geologic conditions and technology available: abundant surface deposits of silver ore and efficient autochthonous refining methods employed by Indigenous Andeans.5 During this first mining boom, Andean laborers collected ore from superficial deposits and then took them to Indigenous refiners who used huayras, ovens stoked by the mountain winds, to smelt small amounts of ore at a time (Figure 2.2).6 Colonial accounts confirm the prevalence and utility of this Andean technology. Famed Jesuit José de Acosta noted in his 1590 Historia natural y moral de las Indias that, “There used to be on the slopes of Potosí… more than six thousand Guayras (sic), which are the ovens where they melt the metal, put out like luminaria, seeing them burn at night . . . was an agreeable spectacle.”7 Labor relations ranged from grants of native labor, encomiendas, issued to prominent Spaniards as a reward for service to the Crown to nascent wage labor. Silver production rose rapidly, and Potosí soon became the economic engine of Spanish colonialism in South America. The population around the mines grew as well, transforming an arid valley over 13,000 feet high (approximately 4,000 meters) into the largest population center in the New World by 1600. The population of Potosí was around 120,000 by 1570 and 150,000 by 1611.8 If the silver of Potosí reshaped the economy of the southern Andes, its global significance was no less profound. During the colonial period, Potosí produced 62% of all Peruvian silver, 26% of all New World silver, and 18% of world yields.9 This influx of silver underwrote Spanish imperial ambitions in Europe and played a role in balancing the rising trade between Europe and the Far East.

Purchasing a Poisoned City 33

Figure 2.2 This illustration of a huayra, or guayra, is from Alvaro Alonso Barba’s Arte de los metales, published in Madrid in 1640, which is one of the most comprehensive works on mining and metallurgy in the New World. Source: Image used with permission by National Library of Medicine Digital Collections from an 1817 reprint of Barba’s original work, pg. 167. (Barba, Alvaro Alonso, and Alonso Carrillo y Laso. Arte de los metales : en que se enseña el verdadero beneficio de los de oro y plata por azogue : el modo de fundirlos todos, y como se han de refinar y apartar unos de otros. Lima: En la Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1817. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2542023R). Cropping/Editing by the author.

By the 1560s, however, conditions had changed. Accessible surface deposits were on the point of exhaustion; while ore remained plentiful, its silver content was often too low for cost-effective refining using huayras. As a result, Potosí entered a period of steep decline, much to the chagrin of Spanish royal authorities dependent on tax revenue generated by the mines. By 1569, the incoming viceroy, Francisco

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de Toledo, bore instructions to make the revival of silver production at Potosí a central priority. As fate would have it, de Toledo would implement a series of reforms that would revolutionize mining in the Andes and lay the foundation for two centuries of colonial extraction. Since the 1550s, silver miners in Mexico had been using a new method to refine silver efficiently using mercury rather than the traditional forms of smelting. Bartolomé de Medina received credit for developing this process, although he claimed a German miner instructed him on the process of mixing mercury, ground ore, and other components.10 Medina adapted the instructions of his German colleague to the conditions of the silver mines of Pachuca, mixing ore with mercury, water, and other ingredients in large, paved areas. The mixture would then sit for a lengthy period, depending on the prevailing conditions, with regular mixing by either animals or human power. When officials believed the mixture had sufficient time for the mercury and silver to bond, they would wash away the remaining sediment, allowing the heavy mercury-silver amalgam to settle to the bottom of the patio. Workers then collected this malleable amalgam by hand and pressed it together, forming shapes referred to as piñas for their resemblance to pineapples. At this stage, only a brief heating to a relatively low temperature was necessary for the mercury to burn off, leaving silver that was frequently as much as 98% pure. Medina’s experimentation adapted techniques developed among European miners to the geologic and social conditions of the Mexican silver mines, allowing for increased production and profit for the Crown. This so-called “patio process” had three advantages over the smelting methods in place. First, it required far less fuel. The temperatures required to remove mercury from the amalgam were lower than required for smelting, and the quantity of minerals that required heating was far less, reducing the costs in mining centers that were often far from sources of fuel. Second, the system functioned on an industrial scale. Large, paved courtyards could hold tons of ore ground by water-driven stamp mills. Smelting operated on a far smaller scale, which added to its costs. Third, because of its larger scale and lowered fuel requirements, silver amalgamation could profitably refine lower-quality ores than smelting. In Mexican mines and later in Potosí, the introduction of amalgamation led to an immediate increase in production as miners refined ores previously discarded as too poor to be profitable. In Potosí, amalgamation carried the added benefit of putting the process of refining ore firmly in Spanish hands, reducing the role of Indigenous refiners operating huayras. De Toledo oversaw a process of revitalization in Peru, in part by sponsoring the experimentation necessary to adapt Medina’s method to the conditions in Potosí, and in part because he used the power of the colonial state to direct resources toward facilitating extraction.11 De Toledo directed the construction of a complex system of reservoirs to provide a steady stream of water to drive massive stamp mills and wash loads of mixed ore. These efforts created the famed “ribera” of Potosí, the central corridor of refining activities in South America’s greatest colonial mining center. He also established a rotation labor draft based on Andean custom that drew on the Indigenous population to provide a stable source of low-cost labor for mining

Purchasing a Poisoned City 35 and infrastructure in Potosí and Huancavelica. Colonial officials referred to this system by the Hispanicized name for its Inca precursor: the mita. At its height in the 1570s, the mita forced roughly 14,000 Andeans into the mines of Potosí. De Toledo and subsequent generations of colonial officials carefully stipulated acceptable conditions and remuneration for Andean workers.12 Nevertheless, the exploitative nature of the mita for Andean populations struggling to respond to the violence of conquest and the ravages of disease fueled the decline of the Indigenous population and the perception of the Spanish as uniquely cruel colonial masters.13 For all its horrifying human consequences, de Toledo’s work led to a dramatic reversal of fortunes for Potosí. Silver production grew rapidly, fueled first by refining discarded ore, then through the development of subterranean workings made possible by low-cost labor. Silver production at Potosí peaked in the 1590s, as the royal mint registered 69,240,000 pesos of silver, nearly 98% of Peruvian output and almost two-thirds of New World yields for the decade.14 This revival relied on a steady supply of two key inputs: low-cost labor provided by the mita and mercury supplied by the mines of Huancavelica. To ensure constant production in the two mining centers, de Toledo created a royal monopoly on mercury production and transport and established a mita for Huancavelica.15 Mercury toxicity made labor in the Huancavelica mines notoriously dangerous. Producing mercury from cinnabar required miners to heat the ore, volatilizing the mercury that then condensed as it cooled. Initially, this process used sealed clay pots placed in rows over an open fire. Over time, however, technology evolved. By the 1570s, domed structures housed dozens of pots heated over flames stoked by Indigenous workers, which facilitated efficient production by shielding the process from the low ambient temperatures and mountain winds (Figure 2.3).16 Refining indoors had other drawbacks, however. Inhalation of volatilized mercury had deadly consequences, particularly when greedy officials ordered the ovens reloaded before fully cooled. Although officially illegal, this practice was common enough that mitayos referred to it as “doing endiabladas,” possibly a reference to both the sulfurous odor and the deadly consequences it could produce.17 De Toledo’s reforms laid the foundations of a colonial economy based on the mineral extraction of the great mining centers of Huancavelica and Potosí. De Toledo recognized this, referring to Huancavelica and Potosí in correspondence with the Crown as “the axes around which turn the wheels of all of this kingdom and the royal estates your majesty has in it.”18 Huancavelica became a core area of colonial extraction in South America. As the next section demonstrates, the relationship between extraction, the built environment, and the Indigenous Andean population powerfully shaped the emerging urban space of Huancavelica. Indigenous Andeans, Extraction, and Urban Space in Huancavelica Sometime after 1599, Felipe Serrano died. The precise date is difficult to establish. He recorded his first will in 1592, only to update it in 1597. His wife, Juana Rodriguez, first refers to herself as a widow in the documentary record only in 1601. Nevertheless, whenever Felipe Serrano passed away, it brought to an end

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Figure 2.3 This image of Huancavelica is taken from Andean Chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El Primer Crónica y Buen Gobierno, first published in 1615, and shows the early ovens on the outskirts of the town. Size of the original: ca. 18 × 12 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Royal Danish Library. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c. 1615), page [1047 [1055]].

Purchasing a Poisoned City 37 a fascinating and profitable life. Felipe was the “hijo natural” (illegitimate son) of Spaniard Gomez Serrano and Ynes Chimbullo Palla, an Andean woman who lived in Huamanga.19 This seemingly inauspicious start to life served Serrano well; he acted as an interpreter for the Huancavelica notary, became a wealthy member of the miners’ guild, and controlled significant property near the mines and in the town itself. Serrano’s life, and more specifically, his property, shed light on the way Indigenous Andeans viewed the emerging colonial regime in Huancavelica. The study of mining centers has long been fruitful for historians of the colonial period, whose foci and methods are as varied as the communities they study.20 As central elements of the regional and imperial economies, mining communities are uniquely colonial creations in which imported legal frameworks frequently bent or broke while social and ethnic distinctions sharpened or blurred in the face of growth and conflict. Huancavelica provides a particularly rich opportunity to study these phenomena for three interrelated reasons. Huancavelica grew quickly – from a sparsely populated valley in the 1560s to a town of 10,000 by 1600. This rapid growth, spurred by the forced labor of thousands of Indigenous Andeans, challenged Spanish efforts to create an urban environment that reflected their ideal colonial order. Second, Huancavelica’s role in the mining economy made shaping urban space there important. The mita labor system forced thousands of Andeans into the mines, and mercury from Huancavelica underwrote the boom in silver production in Potosí after the 1570s. The construction of urban space could reinforce the social and ethnic distinctions on which this form of labor relied but could also blur the lines carefully drawn by colonial administrators. The third reason is the survival of well-preserved archival sources in the Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. These documents reveal that from the 1570s to the early 1600s, Andean elites shifted from collaborating with Spanish actors to benefit from the growth of mining to focus on protecting their communities from colonial exploitation, a transition evident from the patterns of urban property transactions in Huancavelica during that time. Given this rapid growth and the economic importance of mercury, Indigenous Andeans shaped the emergence of colonial Huancavelica, occupying roles along a spectrum from mining elites to conscript laborers. They also engaged the emerging legal regime to assert claims to urban space and property. While Andean elites appear to have a more significant documentary footprint, recent scholarship cautions against drawing any facile conclusions over nascent class differences and urges consideration of ways in which individual and collective identities could serve varying goals.21 The notarial record of property transactions in Huancavelica reveals several ways Indigenous actors shaped the emerging urban landscape. Document

Total

Andeans

1560s–1570s

1580s

1590s

Dotes Donaciones Ventas Alquileres/ arrendamiento

27 26 80 90

3 3 14 2

3 1 6 (4) 0

7 (2) 8 (1) 34 (1) 13 (1)

17 (1) 17 (2) 40 (8) 77 (1)

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Four types of property transactions predominated during this period: dotes (dowries), donaciones (donations of land or property), ventas (sales), and alquileres/arrendamientos (rent/lease agreements). These types of transactions were not equally common; sales and lease agreements were the most common transactions. As the table illustrates, the number of transactions grew along with the population of the town. Dowries were relatively rare, particularly those that included real estate. Only the wealthiest individuals could promise homes or plots of land as a part of marriage. It was more common to promise money, or even mercury, mining rights, or access to native labor. The number of dowries increased as a few families consolidated wealth, yet Indigenous Andeans also made use of the custom. In 1589, for example, Martin Delgadillo had a notary confirm his receipt of 400 pesos as a dowry upon his marriage to Isabel Morena.22 Isabel Morena paid her own dowry as the widow of a Spanish miner. She was also a wealthy Indigenous woman, described in later documents as an “yndia ladina,” or a Spanish-speaking Indian woman, who did not require an interpreter.23 Morena and Delgadillo would later be involved in several property transactions in an area of Huancavelica heavily populated by Andeans. Another uncommon form of property transaction was a donación. As with dowries, donations were more common among the upper classes. Given the small number of these donations, it is difficult to draw conclusions about their general function; two donations, for example, by Spanish parents, provided for their son as he studied to become a priest. In some instances, dowries and donations could be used in conjunction; in 1599, Juana Ticlla Carva, an Andean woman speaking through an interpreter, donated a 40-year-old enslaved woman named Maria Criolla to an illegitimate daughter as a dowry to her marriage.24 In a surprising twist, the young woman and her husband immediately sold Maria Criolla to her father and his wife for the sum of 500 pesos.25 Sales and lease agreements were more common and, therefore, shed more light on property transactions in urban Huancavelica. Most sales or leases took place between Spaniards, at least as far as one can tell. In many cases, it was difficult to identify the ethnicity of the parties involved unless they stated them explicitly. While some names suggested Andean origins, it was also common for individuals of Andean or mixed descent to use last names that were more non-descript – as in the case of Isabel Morena and Felipe Serrano. A few trends emerged looking at leases, rents, and sales on aggregate. First, many involved the Church. The Convent of Santo Domingo in Huamanga owned significant property in Huancavelica that it leased to prominent Spaniards. The “iglesia mayor,” or main church, of Huancavelica also controlled important pieces of real estate on the main plaza. This comes as little surprise given the importance of the Catholic Church as a colonial institution, an importance inscribed on urban space. Second, over time, prominent Spanish miners came to control the urban property near the main plaza and frequently rented out shops and houses to royal officials. In one instance in 1596, a prominent miner leased a house to the Crown to store mercury that did not fit in the royal storehouse.26 Third, over time, Indigenous Andeans appear more in the documentary record, even as the value of their property transactions seems to decrease. Their transactions also increasingly focus on the neighborhood of Santa Ana, an area in urban Huancavelica with many Indigenous residents.

Purchasing a Poisoned City 39 Conclusions: Urban Space, Colonialism, and Environmental Risk While further research into the urban development of Huancavelica and its architecture of extraction promises to shed further light on these dynamics, from the example of Felipe Serrano, we can draw some conclusions. Early land transactions between parties with close connections to Andean communities often involved Indigenous women who married or had children with Spanish men. Serrano was himself the product of one of these unions, and it did not seem to hold him back. He controlled mines and property in and around Huancavelica from the 1570s, but other than his ability to serve as an interpreter, or “lengua,” his archival footprint was similar to any prosperous Spaniard. His inclusion in the royal contracts to operate the mercury mines with conscripted Andean laborers in the 1580s demonstrates his status. In the first decades of the mines’ operation, Serrano’s ability to draw on Andean resources facilitated his integration into the area’s elite. By the 1590s, however, the situation for Andean elites had changed. The imposition of forced labor hardened colonial relationships, and local Andean communities sought to avoid the most onerous burdens, like labor in the mines. It became more difficult for Andean elites to join the ranks of Spanish miners as their communities increasingly bore the burdens of extraction. One response by Indigenous elites was to reaffirm their positions in their communities; if they could not join the Spanish hierarchy, they would reinforce their position in their own communities. The two versions of Serrano’s will shed light on his attempts to do just that. In 1592 he lists his mother’s name, Ines Chimbullu Palla, when identifying his family, and lists payments to various Andean communities in Jauja for their service.27 In 1597, he omits his mother’s name but refers to quipus held by Andean communities to document his livestock. Serrano clearly planned for his connection to these Andean communities to survive him. He also lists properties in Huancavelica not only near the main plaza, as expected for a prominent miner, but even more in the Indigenous neighborhood of Santa Ana.28 If his goal were to affirm his relationship with the local Andean leaders, he appears to have been successful. Although he died sometime after 1599, his Spanish wife, Juana Rodriguez, remained on good terms with the local Andean communities, especially the town of Acoria, whose leaders leased her and two others’ rights to a mercury mine in 1605. Rodriguez and her children would go on to be some of the largest landowners in the Andean parish of Santa Ana. This transition in the urban environment of Huancavelica, one which saw Indigenous Andeans increasingly segregated from prominent Spanish residents and gradually shifted to peripheral neighborhoods, fits in the Spanish colonial conception of constructing an urban center to reinforce the divisions that underwrote empire. In Huancavelica, however, these efforts shaped more than residential patterns. Mercury extraction also inscribed environmental consequences on the urban landscape in a way that concentrated the environmental dangers in areas inhabited by Andeans. Labor in Huancavelica was uniquely dangerous for several reasons. Exposure to mercury through inhalation combined with the prevalence of silica dust in the mines made respiratory problems common and deadly.29 As the cinnabar deposits formed by impregnating porous sandstone, ore and surrounding rock were often difficult to separate.30 Efforts to maintain or increase production contributed to the

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deliberate narrowing of supporting columns, which contributed to collapses in an already unstable geologic environment.31 Opening a long-awaited ventilation shaft in 1642 mitigated some but not all of these risks.32 Even as ventilation improved the working conditions in the mine, contemporaneous changes to the refining process began affecting the Indigenous neighborhoods of Huancavelica. In 1638, Spaniard Lope de Saavedra Barba invented a new oven designed to increase the efficiency of mercury refining. His method increased the size of the oven and replaced pots with grates of ore in a domed chamber. Barba designed his oven to channel air through the chamber, then upward through a series of clay tubes that ascended diagonally through a larger structure (Figure 2.4). This design removed sulfur from the heating chamber and channeled the mercury vapor upward, where it condensed for collection. Miners soon began building Barba’s improved oven, and the Crown granted him 2% of the proceeds of all mercury produced in Huancavelica.33 He enjoyed this prosperity only briefly, dying in 1645. Juan Alonso de Bustamante would modify and import his design to the Spanish mercury mines of Almadén in 1646, where they became the basis of mercury production into the nineteenth century. The ovens came to be known as aludeles, the term for the baked clay tubes, or more commonly, the Bustamente furnace.34

Figure 2.4 This is an image of restored Bustamante Furnaces in Almadén, Spain. Source: Photo Credit: Furnace of Bustamante of the mines of Almadén by Raimundo Pastor (July 21, 2012) Wikimedia Commons cc-by-sa-3.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode. For an eighteenth-century image of plans for Bustamante furnace in Almaden, see http://pares.mcu.es/ ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/21811?nm.

Purchasing a Poisoned City 41 Given the size of the new furnaces, the search for space to build them began near the mines and on the outskirts of town in the narrow valley below. Building the large refining ovens in the crowded and valuable space near the main plaza would have been impossible, so in a twist that presaged the toxic intersection of race, class, and industrial development, furnaces were constructed on the outskirts of Huancavelica (Figure 2.5). These activities concentrated environmental risks of mercury contamination in the same areas Indigenous Andeans occupied and distanced them from the Spanish neighborhoods in the center of the town. The risks were very real; subsequent research has proven that mercury levels in Huancavelica remain dangerously high to the present day.35 Living near refining ovens would have put the Indigenous residents of Huancavelica at even greater risk. Mercury extraction, the economic activity behind the foundation of Huancavelica, also profoundly shaped that urban environment, reinscribing colonial power by concentrating environmental risk in areas where it disproportionately affected the Andean population. Acknowledgements: The author would like to acknowledge his gratitude for feedback on early versions of this chapter from the University of California, Davis Virtual Symposium: The Extractive Pasts and Hollowed Futures Series, organized by Dr. Jose Juan Perez Melendez, Julio Aguilar, and Joel Daniel Calixto. In

Figure 2.5 Remains of a Bustamente furnace on the outskirts of Huancavelica, not far from the Parish of Santa Ana. Source: Photo taken by the author.

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addition, this work would not have been possible without the cooperation of the Dirección Desconcentrada de Cultura de Huancavelica, who provided access to their archival collections. Notes 1 “Don Francisco de Toledo Orders Founding of Huancavelica,” June 9, 1571. Box 1, Folder 8, Latin American Manuscripts, Lilly Library, University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN. 2 Angel Rama, The Lettered City, Latin America in Translation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 3 P. J. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984); Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). 4 Mark Pierre Dries, “Native Mercury: Discovery Narratives as Entangled Histories of Technology,” Colonial Latin American Review 31, no. 1 (2 January 2022): 114–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2022.2036009. 5 Kris Lane, Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World, 1st ed. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). 6 Alvaro Alonso Barba, and Alonso Carrillo y Laso, Arte de los metales: en que se enseña el verdadero beneficio de los de oro y plata por azogue: el modo de fundirlos todos, y como se han de refinar y apartar unos de otros (Lima: En la Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1817), 165–166. Pedro de Cieza de León, Parte primera de la Crónica del Perú, En Anuers: en casa de Iuan Steelsio . . . (impresso . . . por Iuan Lacio) (Seville: Biblioteca Nacional de España, 1554), 261–262. www.bne.es/es/Actividades/Exposiciones/ Exposiciones/exposiciones2016/BibliotecaIncaGarcilaso/Seleccion/obra04.html. 7 “Habia antiguamente en las laderas de Potosí, y por las cumbres y collados mas de seis mil Guayras, que son aquellos hornillos, donde se derrite el metal, puestos al modo de luminarias, que verlos arder de noche y dar lumbre tan lejos y estar si hechos de una ascua roja de fuego, era espectaculo agradable.” José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias: en que se tratan las cosas notables del cielo y elementos, metales, plantas y animales dellas, y los ritos y ceremonias . . . y guerras de los indios (en casa de Iuan de Leon, 1590), 219. 8 John Jay TePaske and Kendall W. Brown, A New World of Gold and Silver (Leiden, Netherlands and Boston: Brill, 2010), 151. 9 Ibid. 10 Luis Muro, “Bartolomé de Medina, Introductor Del Beneficio de Patio En Nueva España,” Historia Mexicana 13, no. 4 (1964): 517–531. www.jstor.org/stable/25135227. 11 Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Las Minas de Huancavelica En Los Siglos XVI y XVII, 2nd ed. (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Fondo Editorial, 1999), 59–61. 12 Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain. 13 Benjamin Keen, “The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 4 (1969): 703–719. https://doi.org/10.2307/2511162. 14 TePaske and Brown, A New World of Gold and Silver, 151. 15 Lohmann Villena, Las Minas de Huancavelica En Los Siglos XVI y XVII, 41–106. 16 Ibid., 137–39. 17 Ibid., 139. 18 Roberto Levillier, Gobernantes Del Perú, Cartas y Papeles, Siglo XVI Documentos Del Archivo de Indias, vol. 4 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra (s. a.), 1921), 175. 19 Testamento de Felipe Serrano. 04–08–1592. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. 20 Dana Velasco Murillo, Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016); Lane, Potosi; P. J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (Cambridge, UK:

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21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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University Press, 1971); Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Gabriela Sánchez Reyes, “An Approach to the Social History of the Mining District of Sultepec, México, 18th Century,” Geo.Alp., 2014, 8. Jose Carlos De La Puente Luna, “That Which Belongs to All: Khipus, Community, and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes,” Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 72, no. 1 (2015); José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). Dote. Juan Martin Delgadillo con Ysabel Morena. 17–04–1589. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Venta de censo. Juan Martin Delgadillo y Ysabel Morena. 05–08–1594. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Donación. Juana Ticlla Carva a Guiomar del Castillo su hija. 22–09–1599. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Venta. Juan Jurado y Guiomar del Castillo a Juana Rodriguez. 24–09–1599. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Arrendamiento. Juezes oficiales de la real Hacienda con Gabriel de la Cruz. 01–06– 1596. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Testamento de Felipe Serrano. 04–08–1592. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Testamento de Felipe Serrano. 20–10–1597. Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica. Kendall W. Brown, “Workers’ Health and Colonial Mercury Mining at Huancavelica, Peru,” The Americas 57, no. 4 (1 April 2001): 467–496. Instituto Geológico del Perú.; United States. and Robert Yates, Geology of the Huancavelica Quicksilver District, Peru (Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O., 1951). Lohmann Villena, Las Minas de Huancavelica En Los Siglos XVI y XVII, 254, 306, 327. Brown, “Workers’ Health and Colonial Mercury Mining at Huancavelica, Peru,” 481. Lohmann Villena, Las Minas de Huancavelica En Los Siglos XVI y XVII, 320. Luis Mansilla Plaza and José María Iraizoz Fernández, “Aproximación al laboreo de minas y a la metalurgia en las Minas de Almadén (Ciudad Real),” De re metallica (Madrid): revista de la Sociedad Española para la Defensa del Patrimonio Geológico y Minero, no. 19 (2012): 84. Colin A. Cooke et al., “Over Three Millennia of Mercury Pollution in the Peruvian Andes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 22 (2 June 2009): 8830–8834. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0900517106; Nicole Hagan et al., “Residential Mercury Contamination in Adobe Brick Homes in Huancavelica, Peru,” PLoS One 8, no. 9 (10 September 2013): e75179. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0075179; Willians Llanos et al., “Mercury Emission and Dispersion Models from Soils Contaminated by Cinnabar Mining and Metallurgy,” Journal of Environmental Monitoring 13, no. 12 (29 November 2011): 3460–3468. https://doi. org/10.1039/C1EM10694E.

Reference List Angel, Rama. The Lettered City. Latin America in Translation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Bakewell, Peter J. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700. Cambridge: University Press, 1971. Bakewell, Peter J. Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650. Albuquerque and New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1984. Barba, Alvaro Alonso, and Alonso Carrillo y Laso. Arte de los metales: en que se enseña el verdadero beneficio de los de oro y plata por azogue: el modo de fundirlos todos, y como se han de refinar y apartar unos de otros. Lima: En la Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1817.

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Colin, A. Cooke, et al. “Over Three Millennia of Mercury Pollution in the Peruvian Andes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 22 (June 2, 2009). Dana, Velasco Murillo. Urban Indians in a Silver City: Zacatecas, Mexico, 1546–1810. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016. De La, Puente Luna, Jose Carlos. “That Which Belongs to All: Khipus, Community, and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes.” Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 72, no. 1 (2015). De La Puente Luna, José Carlos. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Enrique, Tandeter. Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Gabriela, Sánchez Reyes. “An Approach to the Social History of the Mining District of Sultepec, México, 18th Century.” Geo.Alp., 2014. Guillermo, Lohmann Villena. Las Minas de Huancavelica En Los Siglos XVI y XVII, 2nd ed. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Fondo Editorial, 1999. Instituto Geológico del Perú, United States, and Robert Yates. Geology of the Huancavelica Quicksilver District, Peru. Washington, DC: U.S. G.P.O., 1951. John, Jay TePaske, and Kendall W. Brown. A New World of Gold and Silver. Leiden, Netherlands and Boston: Brill, 2010. Keen, Benjamin. “The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 49, no. 4 (1969): 703–719. https://doi.org/10.2307/2511162. Kendall, W. Brown. “Workers’ Health and Colonial Mercury Mining at Huancavelica, Peru.” The Americas 57, no. 4 (April 1, 2001). Lane, Kris. Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World. 1st ed. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019. Luis, Mansilla Plaza, and José María Iraizoz Fernández. “Aproximación al laboreo de minas y a la metalurgia en las Minas de Almadén (Ciudad Real).” De re metallica (Madrid): revista de la Sociedad Española para la Defensa del Patrimonio Geológico y Minero, no. 19 (2012). Mark, Pierre Dries. “Native Mercury: Discovery Narratives as Entangled Histories of Technology.” Colonial Latin American Review 31, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 114–132. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2022.2036009. Muro, Luis. “Bartolomé de Medina, Introductor Del Beneficio de Patio En Nueva España.” Historia Mexicana 13, no. 4 (1964): 517–531. www.jstor.org/stable/25135227. Nicholas, A. Robins. Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Nicole, Hagan, et al. “Residential Mercury Contamination in Adobe Brick Homes in Huancavelica, Peru.” PLoS One 8, no. 9 (September 10, 2013). Pedro de, Cieza de León. Parte primera de la Crónica del Perú. Seville: Biblioteca Nacional de España, 1554. Roberto, Levillier. Gobernantes Del Perú, Cartas y Papeles, Siglo XVI Documentos Del Archivo de Indias. Vol. 4. Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra (s. a.), 1921. Willians, Llanos, et al. “Mercury Emission and Dispersion Models from Soils Contaminated by Cinnabar Mining and Metallurgy.” Journal of Environmental Monitoring 13, no. 12 (November 29, 2011).

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New Functions of Mining Heritage in Mexico Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva

Introduction Mexico’s mining wealth is one of the most distinctive features of the country. Being a large-scale extractive activity, its weight in the economic, political, and social history of Mexico turns it into a pillar and a key part of current developmental dynamics. Since pre-Hispanic times, the Mexican subsoil has been exploited systematically, in one way or another, by the diverse groups that inhabited its lands, thus integrating the varied minerals in the creation of a rich and diverse material culture that represents its identity. The economic objectives that promoted transoceanic travel in the fifteenth century ensured that, together with the unexpected finding of America, these riches soon became one of the immediate goals of the newly arrived. For instance, the discovery of the mines in Zacatecas in the 1540s signaled a pivotal moment in the occupation process of New Spain’s more northerly territories. The legacy left by that process is being reevaluated today from heritage perspectives, with the potential that its recovery has, from a social perspective, reaffirmed identities and, from an economic perspective, generated development opportunities. However, these positive elements must not let us overlook the problems posed by the extraction that mining advances: it devastates ecosystems and water basins, causes pollution, affects biological diversity and brings about almost no substantial improvement in the life conditions of the inhabitants of these regions. Caught up in a mining tradition, these people have been deprived of their lands and displaced to marginalization and poverty situations. This chapter aims to reflect on the processes of identification and revaluing of a heritage typology that is known internationally but which, even to date, is not appreciated due to the negative perceptions associated with it. Industrial Heritage One of the areas to which the concept of industrial heritage is related is mining. Its development reached such a degree of damage that it affected the labor exploitation of miners, the environmental quality of the contexts close to the extraction areas, which were inexorably contaminated, and also the mere local development of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-5

46 Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva immediate surroundings, affected by the monopolization of the properties as well as the land use.1 All of these aspects have turned this heritage type into one of the most controversial ones from the point of view of their acknowledgment within the area of cultural heritage. Linked to the already-mentioned processes of damage in connection to contamination, displacement, etc., this type of heritage does not achieve the positive perception of other heritage typologies with which people have a greater identification.2 At the end of the twentieth century, the evolution of the heritage consciousness towards wider concepts permitted the appreciation of cultural heritage in all its diversity. Immersed in its urban, territorial, historic and social context, it has widened its dimensions until reaching a territorial scope that has turned the landscape into the scenario without which it cannot be understood today.3 The so-called emerging heritage sites are born in connection to this new definition, as cultural heritage stemming from, among others, the history of the industry, the territory and landscape, the underwater environment, contemporary history as well as ethnology. Thus, the perception of these sites is enriched, and the complexity of a multifaceted reality is shown, which, far from the traditional monumentalizing in force from the eighteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, encompasses a greater diversity of expressions that reaffirm identity traits.4 This new definition of the limits of heritage was linked to other changes in the social, economic and cultural fields, such as rapid transformations, made by technological revolutions that, since the 1980s, have changed the systems of production of goods in the case of industrial heritage. The changes that derived from these dynamics and affected consumption caused the accelerated deterioration of productive structures in Western countries. Today, these structures are faced with the challenge of being studied, preserved, and reused. These systems, sets or elements, which have their origins in the industrial sector, have played a major role in the evolution of the territories, be it at the urban or rural level, and in the formation of the historical and cultural character of their sites and landscapes.5 In all the cases that we can refer to, the testimonies of industrialization constitute a fundamental legacy to understand the history of a place, thus becoming essential pieces of planning the future economic and territorial development of a region.6 The Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage adopted by The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) in Moscow in 2003 defines this heritage type as the remains of industrial culture that are of historical, technological, social, architectural, or scientific value. These remains, which consist of those zones where extraction and transformation activities are developed, the infrastructures that communicate them, their buildings and machinery, as well as the places where social life, customs and ways of living take place, constitute the diverse group that make up this type of heritage. The Case of Mexico Mexico has witnessed the evolution and expansion of the set of elements that can be included under the umbrella term of industrial heritage. As a scientific field,

New Functions of Mining Heritage in Mexico 47 and as it is the case of other heritage areas, it encompasses a plurality of scenarios ranging from research to conservation, education and training for its protection and maintenance.7 Industrial heritage consists of the remains of structures, buildings, machinery, tools, or the marks that this practice has left on the territory in the shape of its landscape. It encompasses the whole industrial process, from extractive activities to those related to processing and refining goods, including the sectors indirectly connected, such as transport, means of communication, infrastructure, etc. As in the rest of Latin America, the processes that began during Colonialism created a situation where Indigenous inhabitants were not exterminated. Despite all this, upon inserting them in the operating mechanisms of the new dynamics generated in the occupied territories, the local cosmologies were altered, transforming them from a Eurocentric perspective, which not only allowed usury but fostered it within the inhabitants themselves as a clear sign of the process that had begun. Thus, the dispossession of useful resources for industry, mining and agriculture began. Accumulation was favored, and in the eighteenth century trade started with other American territories and Europe itself, with Mexico supplying raw materials for the Industrial Revolution.8 This way, Mexico became a fundamental export center for the development of the Industrial Revolution, which allowed Europe to become the nucleus of the new system with England as its vertex. Colonialism and modernity came together in the first phase, where the transfer processes took place only in one direction, that is, from Mexico to Europe, establishing some dynamics in which the exporting territories were slightly differentiated among themselves. The examples we can find in Mexico are implicitly related to the mechanized industrial processes of extraction and export that took place in different phases, to which other processes connected with more recent stages can be added. In any event, they all refer to preindustrial cases with a great presence of workforce, as in the case of silver mining, and which encompassed other industries like obrajes (weaving workshops), sugar mills, tobacco manufactures or haciendas to produce henequen, among others. All of them are representative of the continuous automotive process that extends to today.9 The set of structures dedicated to the exploitation of mines and the surrounding buildings constitute an object of study that must be addressed from a cross-curricular perspective that integrates the related activities and the fields involved. The possibility to obtain diachronic and synchronic data, as a result of stratigraphic and topographic analysis, respectively, enables us to understand the selection of the diverse infrastructures and their suitability for each period. As some authors remarked, “from a careful reading of the architectural and engineering marks left by the productive unit, the existence of constructive models of reference can be inferred, which represents an important clue to understand the level of originality, imitation and adaptation undergone by the Mexican industrial structures.”10 And we should not leave behind the implicit message left by these constructions, their eloquence towards the exterior, as they defined: “the solid territorial presence of the enterprise and it conveys a clear politico-social message based on discipline and public morals, the formation of the good citizen and the construction of national consciousness.”11

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Another work level that we cannot overlook in the Mexican case is that of the territory. Being the extraction scene, the diverse elements that make it up (the factory, extractive centers, or transport networks) are not free from the tension in the relationship between the productive world and its surroundings. Here is where the negative perception associated with industrial heritage becomes more apparent and, as it already appears in the discourse built around its image, it is also present in the clear signs left on the territory. Thus, it is at the landscape level where we would find the answer to the productive changes that take place with the passing of time, and we would verify whether they correspond to internal or external and natural or human causes by analyzing the evident environmental impact of the remains of the constructions and the accumulated production waste. A Mining Scene in the Reales de Minas Historically, ore extraction in Mexico has generated exploitation of natural resources in full view of national and local governments, generating unconscionable plundering which, far from strengthening the economy, has left regional and environmental problems, showing a dynamic common to other countries. The study of the extractive processes and the means of exploitation that made them possible in Mexico between 1500 and 1800 involves the analysis of the dynamics of occupation and territorial articulation. In the first case, the occupation of conquered space required that the city serve as an essential element of territorial articulation and consolidation of the population. Far from the generalization of the planned and regular urbanization model of the American city, the mining cities or reales de minas formed an urbanization model close to the mines characterized by its irregularity, which was more similar to the medieval European models than to the Renaissance utopian model. Taxco, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, Pachuca or Chihuahua cannot be interpreted without considering the dynamics born in the mining exploitations. This is an aspect that we can extend to the rest of Ibero-America during the period when the European presence was central to the continent: the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 One of the examples that illustrates this scenario is the city of Taxco. Located in the Guerrero estate, about 170 km (105 miles) south of Mexico City, it emerged under the influence of the silver mines that started being exploited from 1534 onwards (Figure 3.1). Its urban planning turns it into one of the clearest examples of a mining town, preserving its pre-Hispanic ascent and the country’s first silver craft exporter. Referent from the Mexican baroque style with its emblematic Santa Prisca church (1758), its presence minimizes the attention to its urban characteristics, with winding narrow streets following the contour lines that widen and open in small squares to decompress the labyrinthic characteristics of the design. This model can be encountered in the foundation of cities in contemporary times and beyond as an example of a spontaneous and barely regulated process, which derived from the accelerated growth of these cities that witnessed how their lives became enriched due to the mines, eventually a powerful reward of land occupation and urban foundation.

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Figure 3.1 Taxco, Guerrero. Source: Photo by Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva.

Routes of Circulation The exportation of natural resources to the production centers caused the development and emergence of new routes of circulation and sites that regulated the reception and distribution of products, which had Europe as a final destination. In Mexico, they were shipped in gallons from the port of Veracruz, heading to La Habana, where other routes from Panama or Colombia joined together. From Cuba, they directed toward the Canary Islands and finally to Seville or Cadiz. This circuit connected America and Europe during three centuries and was known as the Carrera de Indias. In this sense, the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro is the best example of the articulation of the territory stemming from mining exploitation. As a structure, it created a fast exit way for products like silver to get to the capital where other routes reached, for example, those that came up from the Caribbean and Pacific littorals from Veracruz or Acapulco. The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, which is about 2,600 km (1,600 miles) long, used to connect Mexico City and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico, passing on its way through Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, El Paso, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro was declared a Human Heritage site by UNESCO in 2010. Thus, giving back its historic value to this structure, which served not only for the circulation of the silver extracted from mines like Zacatecas,

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Guanajuato or San Luis Potosí and the mercury that arrived from Europe but also for establishing social and cultural relationships between Europeans and Indigenous groups. The planning of these routes cannot be understood as a whole without considering their taking advantage of the previous pre-Hispanic infrastructures that combined water and land sections. From the sixteenth century onwards, with the development of the roads where new means of transport should transit (like carriages), they became the channel for people, ideas, and objects to transit. For this reason, the roads were provided with the necessary structures so that both people and products could circulate more easily. In the case of ore, the circulation process encompassed from their extraction to their arrival at the centers of accumulation, transformation, distribution and, finally, export. Bridges, inns, haciendas, towns, etc., created the environment that arrived at Santa Fe in New Mexico, the antecedent to other roads that, although not clearly linked to the extraction process, articulated the territory due to other needs, as in the case of the Caminos Reales de Tierra Afuera13 and las Californias.14 In both cases, the defensive motivation was more important due to the tensions generated shortly after the end of the occupation of the Valles Centrales of the Altiplano as a result of the confrontation with Indigenous groups and other European powers like England or France, which competed against Spain to gain territories in the new continent. Extraction Technology On a third level of the scale that we have established, we must integrate the production contexts. The testimony on the technology for the extraction of ore that each period offered is the most evident illustration of that industrial heritage today. In the case of Mexico, tracking the testimonies of ore extraction from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century lets us understand some of the dynamics that reflect an evolution adapted to the demands of each time: from the pre-Hispanic heritage to original contributions and finally going through the incorporation of technologies imported from Europe. During the Viceregal period, characterized by the limited development of the productive forces, the processes relied on the extraction, beneficiation and trading of metals. These were obtained, first, through excavation in open-pit mines and, later on, going deeper into the ground through tunnels. The improvement came with the introduction of solutions that allowed the installation of ventilation systems through sloping tunnels and caverns that connected the galleries, and with which the miners’ breath, drainage and mineral extraction were facilitated. The first system was built in San Luis Potosí in 1556. As early as the seventeenth century, the use of black powder became widespread in underground explosions, which allowed the perforation of big mineshafts and galleries that required complementary basic machinery, such as pulleys and malacates (Figure 3.2).15 The first smelting processes that allowed the refining of small quantities of minerals with high concentrations of silver were also incorporated.

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Figure 3.2 Zacatecas. Source: Photo by Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva.

In this sense, the metal processing technique with quicksilver or mercury developed expansively from 1600, when the haciendas began to expand to extract silver where there was plenty of water to perform the washing process in the process of amalgamation. To this end, a wider range of minerals was used. These were ground with hydraulic and animal-powered mills when there was no water available. A few examples allow us to understand the development and expansion of these extraction processes. Possibly, the mine of La Bufa in Zacatecas may best symbolize the mineral searching and extraction processes in New Spain in the sixteenth century.16 Discovered by Juan de Tolosa in 1546, this deposit altered the dynamics of the Spanish occupation, turning the northern territories into the main expansion front until the eighteenth century. Back to Taxco, the importance of this site in the mining history of Mexico places it in a privileged position to learn about the transition dynamics between the pre-Hispanic and colonial worlds. The pre-Hispanic mine site discovered during the remodeling of the Posada de la Misión hotel may serve as an example of the initial ways of extraction. After the excavation works, it was found that there was still the presence of quartz, silver, and gold veins that dated back more than 500 years. Beyond the symbolic significance this may have, from the pre-Hispanic vision of the cave as a connecting space with the underworld and as a place for

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burial, these findings reflect the pre-Hispanic practice of ore extraction and the type of mines the Spaniards found when they arrived in these territories. As only 150 meters have been explored, most of the metals in the mine have been preserved and the mine is currently protected by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia).17 Undoubtedly, the city of Guanajuato symbolizes the occupation and foundation processes around the mining deposits in the sixteenth century and its later transformation into an urban center.18 In 1558, where the city of Guanajuato would be later on, the first mining extraction pits started being operated (the Rayas Mine and Mellado Mine), and the motherlode or main vein19 was discovered. Afterwards, two more gold and silver main veins were found: La Sierra de Santa Rosa and La Luz, which provided the region with immense wealth and, at the end of the eighteenth century, turned it into the major world silver producer. The three of them, the Veta Madre, Santa Rosa and La Luz, shape the most productive vein systems of the Sierra de Guanajuato. Time has left on the surface a constellation of mines, small towns and old extraction haciendas, which have created a unique landscape that has survived until the present day as an imprint of the articulation of the territory around the Camino Real and the emergence of estancias and paraderos, in this case, in the place known as Puerto de Santa Rosa. The extraction systems that were implemented in Guanajuato exemplify the diversity of resources available. From the moment the activity began, a system of lumbreras (vertical mineshafts) was used, which consisted of heating and cooling the rocks quickly, taking advantage of the superficial presence of gold and silver.20 To the beneficiation of the mineral, since the beginning of the sixteenth century, smelting was used first and the amalgamation later on, “with the patio process, using salt, water, copper sulfate and cold mercury.”21 This way the gold and silver were extracted together and were afterward separated with sulfuric acid in the mint. This system worked until the twentieth century.22 Dynamite was another method used in a generalized way in the eighteenth century, especially to obtain minerals located deeper underground, a method used in the mother lode. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, after the passing of the Mining Law in 1892, was electricity introduced, thanks to the participation of American industries that incorporated high-technology machinery in the extraction process. Undoubtedly, the beneficiation haciendas represent another benchmark stemming from the mining dynamics, and they are located all over the country.23 These haciendas are centers where gold and silver bars are produced and, together with the mineral extraction haciendas, they symbolize a singular architectural typology. To a certain extent, they can be considered the forerunners of the irregular urban planning of the mining cities since, originally, they looked for places close to water sources for ore management, which ended up being the germ of these cities’ urban nucleus. The oldest haciendas are located within the urban areas and are called de beneficio, as they receive the raw ore from the mining exploitations. Rather than clogging the center, they were located in the periphery and reached a peak in the eighteenth century with the Bourbon reforms. Between 1765 and 1808,

New Functions of Mining Heritage in Mexico 53 they appeared as housing complexes on which, apart from the mining facilities, there were orchards and stables to feed the workers.24 In the case of Guanajuato, the hacienda de beneficio of Valenciana Mine, built in 1791, is an example that lets us understand how the haciendas have survived until the present and the exploitation opportunities they offer, as it currently possesses a museum, which works as a referent in the construction of identity traits.25 What has given rise to the delineation of some characteristic mining landscapes is precisely the conformation of these peripheral areas around the cities. In this sense, Pachuca is a prominent example.26 Being the capital of the so-named Comarca Minera (Mining District), Pachuca is located in Sierra Madre Oriental, some 100 km (62 miles) north of Mexico City. In this region, the development of mining activities has been unequal. On the one hand, the bonanza periods for which it is widely well-known, and, on the other hand, periods of abandonment of these historical areas have created an industrial landscape that has lasted until the present and which must be valued to guarantee its preservation. They are vestiges distributed in different points of the city’s northwest area, which conform to the facilities around the mines that were run and worked by different industrial groups and are now a vivid testimony of Mexican mining history.27 Pachuca’s heritage integrates haciendas and mines such as San Buenaventura, Camelia, El Paraíso, Hacienda Loreto, San Juan Mine and Hacienda Purísima Concepción, where, at present, we encounter different degrees of conservation of part of the spots from which metal was extracted and processed (Figure 3.3). Also, part of the residential neighborhoods for workers have been preserved, shaping the urban tissue of the area, where the mining facilities constitute a singular historical and landscape heritage. In the case of Hacienda de San Buenaventura, there still stand the ruins of the facilities from which silver and gold were extracted by means of the patio process, windmills and waterwheels. As for Hacienda Loreto, situated south of the city of Pachuca, it remains active, keeping its buildings, machinery, equipment, tools and furniture in a good state of conservation. Finally, Baja California stands out in Mexico. Being a peripheral expansion area in the eighteenth century, it serves to exemplify that there had always been a combination of territorial exploitation and evangelization of the Indigenous populations in the northern Novohispanic territories. This way, the Spanish sought to make their presence permanent in view of the persistent incursions of European powers, which, from the sixteenth century, were interested in benefiting from the resources and strategic position of these regions.28 The wealth of this area was a key factor identified since the end of the seventeenth century when Manuel del Ocio29 started to develop activities concerning the peninsula’s mining wealth. In this case, the interesting city of Santa Rosalía, declared a historical monument in 1984 by the Congress of Baja California Sur, was built at the end of the nineteenth century by the French mining company El Boleo, which had obtained the concession to exploit the copper deposits therein (Figure 3.4). This illustrates the ex profeso construction of a comprehensive structure for extraction, taking advantage of the technological capacities that steel had brought to the new construction

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Figure 3.3 Hacienda de Loreto. Pachuca. Estado de Hidalgo. Source: Photo by Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva and Manuel Jesús González Marique.

systems. El Boleo, created by the French bank Mirabaud et Cie to exploit these rich deposits between 1885 and 1954, made use of the previous works in the Baja California deposits discovered in 1868 and originally exploited by the MexicanGerman company El Progreso, created in 1878.

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Figure 3.4 Mina El Boleo. Santa Rosalía. Baja California Sur. Source: Photo by Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva and Uriel Rafael Pabello Arvizu.

The deposit, located near the Las Tres Vírgenes Volcano and Santa María silver mine, has a richness of 15% in copper and received a fifty year exploiting concession granted by Porfirio Díaz in exchange for employing Mexican people and building a city in the middle of the desert. El Boleo company created the city of Santa Rosalía, offering agricultural lands, a hotel and a casona (manor house) with twenty apartments for their employees, a food warehouse, another industrial warehouse for spare parts and materials and a church made in France, in the Bibiano Duclos’ workshops. Due to its excellent location, the company also built an artificial harbor to import coke from Germany and England, furnaces, four steam engines and an electric power station, which made Santa Rosalía the second city in the country to lay electrical lines. Conclusions America’s wealth in natural resources has not brought about their rational exploitation. The potential of these territories overshadowed others, like Europe, which had always benefited from the extraction of their minerals from the sixteenth century. Nowadays, we seek to understand this mining past from an identity perspective. There, where the deposits have been overexploited, and only the marks of the extraction are left, we want to get the activity back by resorting to revaluing projects that allow us to understand a past from which we can learn. Commitments such as the Mineral del Chico in

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Hidalgo or the most spectacular Fundidora in Monterrey open the gateway to putting forward management projects making use of the abandoned structures. A country like Mexico, which has exploited its mining wealth since the preHispanic times, has the means to understand what the relationship between its societies and the surrounding environment has been like, among themselves and the foreign intromission to extract minerals for their own benefit, which created inequalities that can be observed even today. This reflection exercise should contribute to improving the quality of life in those territories that find in their past a possibility in the future. Further research into these aspects may allow a better understanding of the colonial period and the processes that were put forward once the Europeans arrived so as to reach conclusions that prevent us from repeating past mistakes. *Translated by: Verónica P. Recchioni, English Professor, University of Granada; and Soledad Montejo, Public Translator – UNCo. Notes 1 Aleida Azamar Alonso, “La mina de San Xavier: actividad extractiva y daño al tejido social en México,” Paradigma económico 7, no. 2 (2015): 47–67. 2 Aleida Azamar and José Ignacio Ponce, “Extractivismo y desarrollo: los recursos minerales en México,” Revista Problemas del Desarrollo 179, no. 45 (2014): 137–158. 3 Celia Martínez Yáñez, “Patrimonialización del territorio y territorialización del patrimonio,” Cuadernos de Arte de la Universidad de Granada 39 (2008): 251–266. 4 Camilo Contreras Delgado, “Construcción del patrimonio: la movilización de la memoria colectiva en localidades mineras de Coahuila, México,” Intervención, Revista Internacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museología 8, no. 16 (2017): 70–81. 5 Pilar Biel Ibáñez, “El patrimonio industrial y los nuevos modelos de gestión cultural,” Artigrama, 28 (2013): 55–82. 6 Manuel Valenzuela Rubio, Antonio Palacios García and Carmen Hidalgo Giralt, “La valoración turística el patrimonio minero en entornos rurales desfavorecidos. Actores y experiencias,” Cuadernos de Turismo 22 (2008): 231–260. 7 Joaquín Muñoz, “La minería en México,” Quinto centenario 11 (1986): 145–156. 8 Azamar, “La mina,” 47–67. 9 Ruth Robles and Guillermo Foladori, “Una revisión histórica de la automatización de la minería en México,” Revista Problemas de Desarrollo 197, no. 50 (2019): 157–180. 10 Sergio Niccolai, “El patrimonio industrial histórico de México y sus fuentes,” América Latina en la Historia Económica 23 (2005): 61–76. 11 Niccolai, “El patrimonio,” 64. 12 Francisco de Solano, Ciudades hispanoamericanas y pueblos de indios (Madrid: CSIC 1990). 13 The Camino Real de Tierra Afuera was traced towards the north of Mexico City, from Querétaro to Zacatecas, and from there it continued its way to Saltillo and finished at San Antonio, Texas, in its central part. It was initially thought of as a way to supply the populations close to the mines, like those in Mazapil; however, it later adopted a defensive function in order to control the presence of French troops in the areas near the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. Ana Sofía Rodríguez Cepeda and Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva, coords., El Camino Real de Coahuila y Texas, patrimonio cultural compartido (Saltillo: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2016). 14 In the case of the Pacific front, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, the Jesuits were allowed to head the occupation of a territory which, being far away and lacking riches, was not regarded as profitable by the Spanish Crown. Its strategic positioning was more important because it was on the coast where the Manila Galleon docked once

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it crossed the Pacific. From the southernmost part of the peninsula in Baja California, some Jesuit missions were established, which from 1767 onwards were complemented by other Franciscan and Dominican missions to reach the proximities of San Francisco Bay in the nineteenth century, completing this way the occupation under which the articulation of the territory was established in 1850. According to the Royal Academy of History dictionary (RAH): “Word of náhuatl origin which makes reference to a rotating object: Machine as a capstan, widely used in mining to extract minerals and water, which has a drum on top, and, below it, the handles to which the horses that move it are fastened.” https://dle.rae.es/malacate. Peter J. Bakewell, Minería y sociedad en el México colonial: Zacatecas (1546–1700) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976). Archeologists and specialists determined that for every twenty tons of stone extracted, only 800 grams of silver were obtained, which were used for bartering. The silver was exchanged for seeds or grains such as corn, beans or cotton and, probably, for birds for consumption. Apart from silver, other metals and minerals were found, for instance, gold, zinc, lead, iron and quartz. Diana Xcaret Azpeitia Jáuregui and Velia Yolanda Ordaz Zubia, “Guanajuato capital: identidad a través de su patrimonio minero,” Jóvenes en la Ciencia. Revista de Divulgación de la ciencia 4, no. 1 (2018). www.jovenesenlaciencia.ugto.mx/index.php/ jovenesenlaciencia/article/view/2452. Stone or metalliferous mass that fills an old fracture (or crack) in a rock formation. Nieves Martínez Roldán and Lola Goytia Goyenechea, “Huella minera en la ciudad de Guanajuato (México) entre los siglos XVI-XIX: morfología urbana y planimetría en el Archivo de Indias en Sevilla (España),” Contexto 21 (2020): 35–49. Ibid. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, another system was used, that of cyanidation, in which dynamite and cyanide were also applied. Cyanide was then poured back into the river course. C. René León Meza, Minas y haciendas de beneficio en la Nueva Galicia durante el siglo XVIII (Guadalajara: Universidad, 2020). Between 1686 and 1740, in the city of Guanajuato, there were 64 beneficiation haciendas, which were later divided to separate the groups of workers in teams being, in some cases, the germ of towns such as the reales de minas, like Mineral de Valencia or Mineral de Santa Ana, located around the haciendas or even neighborhoods in the same city. Diana Xcaret Azpeitia Jáuregui and Velia Yolanda Ordaz Zubia, “Guanajuato capital: identidad a través de su patrimonio minero,” Jóvenes en la Ciencia. Revista de Divulgación de la ciencia 4, no. 1 (2014). www.jovenesenlaciencia.ugto.mx/index.php/ jovenesenlaciencia/article/view/2452. Elvira Eva Saavedra Silva and María Teresa Sánchez Salazar, “Minería y espacio en el distrito minero Pachuca-Real del Monte en el siglo XIX,” Investigaciones Geográficas 65 (2008): 82–101. María Elena Sánchez Roldán and Elizabeth Lozada Amador, “El paisaje Minero de Pachuca, Hidalgo, México. Patrimonio Industrial en la Comarca Minera,” Gremium, 7, no. 13 (enero–julio 2020). https://editorialrestauro.com.mx/gremium/. Enrique Esteban Gómez Cavazos, “Una Company Town francesa en el desierto de la Baja California: Compagnie Du Boleo, Santa Rosalía, 1885,” Labor & Engenho, Campinas [SP] Brasil 10, no. 1 (January/March 2016): 74–84. http://periodicos.sbu. unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/labore/article/view/8644334. Manuel de Ocio was the first businessman and industrial civilian in the northeast of New Spain. A missionary soldier who traced a great quantity of pearls with which he raised a large capital and, thus, he gave up his profession as a soldier to get involved in commercial activities in Baja California. In the middle of the eighteenth century, he was granted a mining concession south of La Paz, in a zone close to the current towns of El Triunfo and San Antonio, in the vicinity of Sierra de la Laguna.

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Reference List Azamar, Aleida, and José Ignacio Ponce. “Extractivismo y desarrollo: los recursos minerales en México.” Revista Problemas del Desarrollo 179, no. 45 (2014): 137–158. Azamar Alonso, Aleida. “La mina de San Xavier: actividad extractiva y daño al tejido social en México.” Paradigma económico 7, no. 2 (2015): 47–67. Azpeitia Jáuregui, Diana Xcaret, and Velia Yolanda Ordaz Zubia. “Guanajuato capital: identidad a través de su patrimonio minero.” Jóvenes en la Ciencia. Revista de Divulgación de la ciencia 4, no. 1 (2018). www.jovenesenlaciencia.ugto.mx/index.php/jovenesenlaciencia/article/view/2452 (Accessed September 14, 2022). Bakewell, Peter J. Minería y sociedad en el México colonial: Zacatecas (1546–1700). México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976. Biel Ibáñez, Pilar. “El patrimonio industrial y los nuevos modelos de gestión cultural.” Artigrama 28 (2013): 55–82. Contreras Delgado, Camilo. “Construcción del patrimonio: la movilización de la memoria colectiva en localidades mineras de Coahuila, México.” Intervención, Revista Internacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museología 8, no. 16 (2017): 70–81. Gómez Cavazos, Enrique Esteban. “Una Company Town francesa en el desierto de la Baja California: Compagnie Du Boleo, Santa Rosalía, 1885.” Labor & Engenho, Campinas [SP] Brasil 10, no. 1 (January/March 2016): 74–84. http://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/ index.php/labore/article/view/8644334 (Accessed May 15, 2023). León Meza, C. René. Minas y haciendas de beneficio en la Nueva Galicia durante el siglo XVIII. Guadalajara: Universidad, 2020. Martínez Roldán, Nieves, and Lola Goytia Goyenechea. “Huella minera en la ciudad de Guanajuato (México) entre los siglos XVI-XIX: morfología urbana y planimetría en el Archivo de Indias en Sevilla (España).” Contexto 21 (2020): 35–49. Martínez Yáñez, Celia. “Patrimonialización del territorio y territorialización del patrimonio.” Cuadernos de Arte de la Universidad de Granada 39 (2008): 251–266. Muñoz, Joaquín. “La minería en México.” Quinto Centenario 11 (1986): 145–156. Niccolai, Sergio. “El patrimonio industrial histórico de México y sus fuentes.” América Latina en la Historia Económica 23 (2005): 61–76. Robles, Ruth, and Guillermo Foladori. “Una revisión histórica de la automatización de la minería en México.” Revista Problemas de Desarrollo 197, no. 50 (2019): 157–180. Rodríguez Cepeda, Ana Sofía, and Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva, eds. El Camino Real de Coahuila y Texas, patrimonio cultural compartido. Saltillo: Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, 2016. Saavedra Silva, Elvira Eva, and María Teresa Sánchez Salazar. “Minería y espacio en el distrito minero Pachuca-Real del Monte en el siglo XIX.” Investigaciones Geográficas 65 (2008): 82–101. Sánchez Roldán, María Elena, and Elizabeth Lozada Amador. “El paisaje Minero de Pachuca, Hidalgo, México. Patrimonio Industrial en la Comarca Minera.” Gremium 7, no. 13 (enero–julio 2020). https://editorialrestauro.com.mx/gremium/ (Accessed January 10, 2023). Solano, Francisco de. Ciudades hispanoamericanas y pueblos de indios. Madrid: CSIC, 1990. Valenzuela Rubio, Manuel, Antonio Palacios García, and Carmen Hidalgo Giralt. “La valoración turística el patrimonio minero en entornos rurales desfavorecidos: Actores y experiencias.” Cuadernos de Turismo 22 (2008): 231–260.

4

The Ice House Industry and Ritual in the Nineteenth-Century Frozen Water Trade Louisa Iarocci

The practice of harvesting and storing ice dates back to the ancient world, where the use of frozen water as a form of sustenance and as a cooling agent is first recorded.1 In the Anglo-American world, the earliest mentions of human consumption of this natural substance tend to characterize it as an exotic practice in foreign places by those driven by extravagant tastes and/or reasons of health.2 But by the early eighteenth century, the popular taste for ice was no longer confined to the residents of distant tropical lands, having made its way to the settled temperate regions of North America. By the mid-nineteenth century, the global trade of imported ice was firmly established, extending from the cold regions of the eastern United States to the tropical port cities of the Caribbean and South Asia. The construction of a built infrastructure for the removal, transportation and storage of this natural substance was essential to its transformation from an exotic luxury to a household necessity prior to the widespread availability of mechanical refrigeration. This chapter examines the commercial ice house as an essential component in this industry of extraction, both in its practical role as an engineered device for the collection and preservation of this unstable commodity and as a civic monument to the rituals of global trade. Some of the earliest mentions of ice as a commodity for human use in AngloAmerica appear in technical treatises concerned with the practical challenges of making and harvesting it. In 1665, Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia in 1665, was granted a patent “to gather, make and take snow and ice . . . and to preserve the same in such pits, caves, and cool places, as he should see fit.”3 The northern regions of the United States, especially in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, offered the combination of cold winters and natural locations in the mountains, lakes and rivers that provided bountiful seasonal sources of frozen water. As the product of a series of precise climatic and geological conditions, ice was uniquely bound to its place and time of origin. Upon removal, this perishable substance could degrade rapidly, making important the speed and efficiency of its journey from source to the intended user. The 1792 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica makes note of the importance of “fall[ing] upon a ready and cheap method of procuring . . . [this] solid, transparent and brittle body.”4 DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-6

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Ice House at Home The correct means to store and preserve ice at different scales and environmental conditions became a popular topic of discussion in American newspapers and trade periodicals, especially those focused on agriculture and horticulture. The unique properties of the substance itself and the various devices needed to properly store and preserve it were intertwined from the earliest discussions of the ice house.5 The author of “Of Ice and Icehouses” in The American Museum or Universal Magazine in 1791 claims they are the first knowledgeable builder to set forth a detailed account of the construction of a successful ice cellar in the Chesapeake peninsula.6 The range of topics addressed would reappear frequently in local newspapers and journals, including the desired topographic, geological and climatic conditions of the site to the materials and the construction and appearance of the physical structure.7 The sheer number of articles published (and republished) about “keeping ice” attest to the popularity of this subject for home builders and small businesses facing the challenge of creating a suitable environmental enclosure while accommodating the internal volume of ice. The ice house is depicted not simply as a mute container of its contents but as a technological device that is essential to the extractive process.8 The building type that appears in these early reports is typically for domestic use, small in size and located close to the home or farm of a family or a small business, rather than the original source.9 In his influential essay of 1803, Thomas Moore lays claim to what he calls the first “scientifically constructed ice-houses” along with other smaller-scale portable devices.10 The earliest versions of the ice house were either circular or square in plan and either fully or partially underground or in the side of a hill, preferably north-facing (Figure 4.1). The double walls were made of wooden planks or brick, the interstices filled with straw, chaff or sawdust for insulation, and the sides were angled to facilitate drainage and compaction.11 The ice chamber could be covered with earth or a steeply pitched thatch roof to protect it from the sun and rain and make it as air-tight and dry as possible. Any openings had to be large enough to permit the solid packing of the ice and yet small enough to minimize exposure of the product. Moore draws close parallels between the technology of “keeping ice” at multiple scales, from the ice building to the newly invented machine called the “refrigerator,” a portable cooled storage box of tin. Both, he argues, are engineered as a “tight vessel” of multiple layers, a kind of “house within a house” that was based on “the common method of defending our bodies from the inclemencies of the atmosphere by cloathing (sic).”12 By the early 1900s, what had been a luxury reserved for the country estates of the elite became a more common necessity for farmers and “proprietors of taverns, public gardens and other eating and drinking establishments.”13 The typical ice house that predominated in rural America rose above ground, argued by many to make it more convenient to access, less expensive to build and more effective in preserving ice, contrary to earlier assertions that the ground was the best insulator.14 This “North American ice shanty” was recommended to be located on high, dry ground to further assist with the serious problem of drainage of melted water

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Figure 4.1 “Ice Houses and Cooling Rooms,” from William Eassie, A Handbook to the History, Defects, and Remedies of Drainage, Ventilation, Warming and Kindred Subjects (New York: Appleton & Company, 1872), 214–215. Source: Public domain.

that had plagued the underground versions.15 Many variations in layout are evident in these above-ground versions, some having additional rooms or compartments for the storage of fruit, dairy and other cooled perishables. The author of “The Ice House and the Hot House” of 1846 argued that these previously “inconspicuous” storehouses should, now visible, “take something of an ornamental or picturesque character when close to a country residence… eschewing all ornaments that are inappropriate and unbecoming.”16 The writer argues the ice house should adopt the appearance of a working man’s humble cottage, with a rustic appearance, only the windowless exterior and deep overhanging roofs with vents offering a hint of its true function.

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In the first half of the nineteenth century, a constellation of forces converged that transformed the demand and supply of natural ice into a lucrative worldwide industry. The environmental resources and climate of the northeastern US, with its abundant lakes, rivers and ponds, put this region at the center of an emerging trade network that would eventually extend from the southern States of the Union to the tropical climates of the world.17 The growth of large urban populations and consumer markets fostered the burgeoning demand for ice as a product for the preservation of perishable goods and for healing fevered bodies. Despite interruptions in trade caused by the War of 1812 and the Civil War, by mid-century, the substance that was once regarded “an article of luxury” was noted to have “become one of prime necessity the world over entering into almost every house and place of business” including breweries, dairies, bars, restaurants, confectioners, pharmacies, labs and hospitals.18 Advances in transportation by rail and ship improved the efficiency and cost of moving ice rapidly from its source in New England and the Great Lakes regions to warmer climates in the states of the American South and overseas. Technical developments in the harvesting and “refrigeration” of ice further fueled the expansion in the time and space dynamics of the frozen water trade that is embodied in the architecture of the commercial ice house. Natural ice complexes sprung up along the sources of natural ice on the edges of lakes, rivers and ponds in the Northeastern and Great Lakes regions of the United States19 located near links to roads, rail and shipping networks. While containing various utility buildings like tool houses and railway car “houses,” the sites were dominated by the commercial ice house that grew in scale and complexity alongside the expansion of the ice industry. These buildings were basically enlarged versions of the domestic type – massive above-ground wooden structures that could hold up to 50,000 tons of ice, measuring as long as 400 feet in width, 150 feet in depth and up to 40 feet high (Figure 4.2). The wood frame structure was placed on a foundation of stone with a raised floor of brick that was often curved to facilitate better drainage. The long front façade, facing the water’s edge, enabled multiple points of access from the site of extraction to high access doors for loading ice in the interior. The double, and even sometimes triple, wood frame walls provided cavities that were “filled with non-conductors of heat like spent tan bark, sawdust or straw” – in many cases, previously useless products were given a new purpose.20 The steep gabled roofs could be painted white to reflect sunlight and were ventilated with air spaces that were also filled with a non-conducting material.21 Larger houses were often divided into compartments, each section having its own individual roof, “giving one the idea of a half a dozen barns cemented together at the sides.”22 One contemporary observer noted that these mammoth structures “present a singular appearance neither looking like barns nor houses, leading those unacquainted with the ice business would be almost certain to ask, on seeing them for the first time, ‘What are they?’”23 But others observed that these utilitarian buildings were perfectly adapted for their use, “being remarkable for their size and adaptation to the purposes for which they are intended.”24 Like their domestic predecessors, the commercial ice houses functioned as protective vaults for their perishable cargo, but the enlarged scale

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Figure 4.2 Ice harvesters at work on Fresh Pond, 1830. From Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion 8, 11, 1855, 172. Source: Reproduced courtesy of Rare Books Department, Boston Public Library (A.3432.1 v.7–8 1854– 1855 FOLIO).

revealed and amplified their “mode and means of filling and discharging.”25 This was especially true during the intense months of the short period of the winter harvest that typically took place between January and March. The elaborate procedure of harvesting and storing the ice produced a spectacular event that was said to have drawn viewers from near and far, captured in numerous contemporary accounts.26 The solid ice on the surface of the water was first cleared of snow and particle ice with plows and sometimes planed, then scored and cut into regular blocks of uniform size with picks, chisels, and saws. The heavy cakes of ice were lifted and directed manually with long poles and curved tongs onto sleds and floated along specially cut canals to the receiving doors of the ice house. Various modes of hoisting the ice into the building made use of human and horsepower as well as specially designed machines including pulleys, cranes, and elevator conveyors, some operated by steam engine.27 The goal was to pack the orthogonal blocks uniformly in layers or tiers, as tightly as possible, without any air spaces between them. As seen in the print view of the New York Ice Company building of 1847, the labor-intensive process that involved hundreds of men and horses at a time carving up the vast solid ice fields’ surface and piling up the square cakes into “walls of solid crystal . . . as even and true as the side of the barn” (Figure 4.3).28 The commercial ice houses played a leading role in the spectacle – their massive rectilinear forms and exposed circulation systems mapping out the extractive process of reaping the winter harvest, as “old King Frost himself was made to yield up his treasures and contribute to the comfort of man.”29

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Figure 4.3 New York Ice Company. Cutting Ice at Athens, 1847. Hand-colored lithograph. After John W. Hill. Endicott & Co., printers. PR 020 – Geographic Images Collection. Source: New-York Historical Society.

Ice House Abroad The rapid growth in the scale of these commercial ice houses in the United States between 1830 and 1870 was fueled by the expansion of the American ice trade beyond its own shores. The story of the ice trade that has been repeated in popular and business histories is a familiar blend of fact and myth that celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit and technical ingenuity of American business. The so-called “Ice King of the World” was Sir Frederick Tudor, a Boston businessman who is credited with initiating major commercial exports of ice in the first decade of the nineteenth century, shipping the first cargo to the West Indies in 1805. According to popular accounts, the ice was harvested from a pond in Saugus, Massachusetts, transported by horses and wagons to Gray’s Wharf in Charlestown, and then shipped on the brig Favorite to the port of Martinique in the West Indies.30 Tudor and his less wellknown collaborators experienced many setbacks, including shipping delays due to the Embargo Act of 1807 and the War of 1812, leading to repeated financial losses due to the technical challenges of preserving the ice. But as documented in his “Ice House Diary,” Tudor persevered, successfully landing another shipload at Havana, Cuba, in 1807 and then in cities in the southern states of South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana. Some observers even claimed that Tudor’s motives were altruistic rather than financial in nature, noting he sought “to assist in the crisis of yellow

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fever raging in the West Indies” and help to “stay the plague.”31 But David Dickason argues that Tudor’s motives were clearly for profit – and that he did not develop the trade alone.32 He notes that the factors for its growth certainly included “assiduous entrepreneurship” demonstrated by him and his contemporaries but were also due to the economic and environmental conditions of the time. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this once “worthless” substance was transformed into a lucrative American commodity at the center of a global trade dominated by the US.33 According to the American Almanac, between 1848 and 1853, the value of ice exports almost doubled, reaching the rank of roughly tenth in all US manufactures.34 Reports of shipments of ice from Boston in 1851 were dominated by ports of call in the American South35 but also included over 25 foreign destinations, the largest going to the East Indies, Cuba and Brazil.36 While ice could be sold directly from the vessel, building a more permanent infrastructure of distribution at its destination was recognized as a priority.37 Early accounts describe the fitting up of ship vessels with insulated “ice houses” to hold the tightly packed blocks of ice as one solid mass.38 But, a series of financial losses caused by ice wastage due to melting en route and upon arrival made it clear to early entrepreneurs that the construction of proper ice houses was critical to provide “a solid and permanent footing” for the business.39 Contemporary sources do not agree on the timing of the construction of the first large-capacity, purpose-built ice houses in domestic and foreign seaports.40 But, one of the first documented “permanent and prominent” facilities built by Tudor was in Havana, Cuba, around 1816.41 The above-ground building was described as being square in plan and of a double shell wood construction, located about 100 feet from where the ice vessel docked.42 The Havana Ice House was noted to contain a sales room and living quarters for the keeper in addition to the ice chamber, which could hold about 150 tons of ice.43 Prefabricated sections and carpenters to assemble them were shipped along with the ice itself to the various destinations, making assembly more rapid and cost-effective.44 The ability of these built containers – both on land and sea – to provide the necessary capacity of ice in terms of volume that would make the journey profitable and, at the same time, preserve the perishable cargo was further tested with the expansion of exports to India. The lengthening of the sea journey from under two weeks to four months made the building of a more permanent home for the storage and selling of cold cargo even more critical. In August of 1833, the Journal of the Asiatic Society reported that a shipment of one hundred tons of the “clearest crystal ice” had arrived in Calcutta (Kolkata), the precious cargo “finally deposited in the ice house on shore, a lower room in a house at Brightman’s ghat, rapidly floored and lined with planks for the occasion.”45 Other contemporary accounts in British-Indian newspapers describe the complicated process of financing and designing more permanent and purpose-built ice houses in other cities, including Madras (Chennai) and Bombay (Mumbai). While most writers seem to have supported these endeavors, labeling them as a benefit to the city, some dissenters saw it only as a boon to wealthy colonists only. In 1848, The Anti-Slavery Reporter decried the planned construction of an “ice-house in Georgetown as an unneeded and

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expensive ‘Luxury,’ an ostentatious display of wealth that would cause the locals distress.”46 Typically, the projects appear to have been funded by elicting subscriptions from the community and then leasing out space to American entrepreneurs for a nominal fee. In 1837, a British traveler commented on the construction of a “spacious ice-house in the city [of Calcutta] that supplied the inhabitants with any quantity at a moderate charge.”47 But notices continued to appear in local newspapers from ice suppliers appealing for additional funds to construct an even more spacious facility.48 By the mid-nineteenth century, permanent and prominent ice houses stood as outposts and symbols of American business in the seaports of several major colonial cities in India. Likely completed in the early 1830s, the ice house in Calcutta (Kolkata) was located on land donated by the governor general on the Strand, along a major wide thoroughfare in the city running along the east side of the Hooghly River.49 As seen in an 1851 hand-colored photograph, the white stone palazzo block takes on a neoclassical style that would have been consistent with nearby colonial governmental and civic buildings. Only the solid front façade with its high grilled windows and well-vented mansard roof offers a hint of its utilitarian use. In a rare description from 1852, “the immense warehouse” is said to have “triple walls, five distinct roofs, [that] incloses(sic) about three-fourths of an acre and holds upwards of 30,000 tons of ice!”50 In a letter home to his mother in 1862, H. Cotton makes note of “our Crystal Palace . . . for the reception and preservation of common ice,” noting it was funded by the “richer portion” of the people of Calcutta.51 He was not alone in intimating that the appearance of this “peculiar” building might confuse the local population. In October of 1835, the Bombay Gazette reported that certain plans for the design of the proposed building drawn by Messrs. Burn & Company “did look better adapted for a temple of the Muses than for an Ice-house.”52 The sedate character of the street scene presented in the photograph with only a few distant horses and carts reinforces the civic monumental character of the ice house, in marked contrast to lively contemporaneous views of the utilitarian commercial ice houses in the US (Figure 4.4). The ice house built in Madras (Chennai) in 1842 similarly endowed this utilitarian building with the status of a civic institution. A contemporary photograph captures the view looking northwards along the road next to Marina Beach, featuring a massive Neoclassical-styled building that resembles a “Palladian villa.”53 The building is composed of a main rectangular block with a Doric portico and a semicircular tower with Doric detailing topped with a pineapple finial. The interior was said to feature a domed “Syrian” roof designed by architect Major J.J. Underwood of the Madras Engineers.54 This ingenious element was constructed out of earthenware cylinders based on the vernacular technique in the Middle East – said to provide a more moisture and fire-resistant but spacious interior volume that could be easily ventilated. The photograph shows a group of locals posing proudly in the foreground as the building looms large in the background (Figure 4.5). A painting dated around the same time shows a more expansive view of the ice house dominating the water’s edge, now topped by a large unfurled American flag – driving home the role of the building as an emblem of foreign business. But as early as

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Figure 4.4 A hand-colored print of Ice House, Calcutta, from the Fiebig Collection: Views of Calcutta and Surrounding Districts, taken by Frederick Fiebig in 1851. Source: By permission of the British Library © British Library Board (Shelfmark: Photo 247/2(36); Item number: 247236.

the 1860s, British Indian newspapers recorded growing disillusionment over the diminishing ice supply and maintenance of the condition of these American-built ice houses. With new technologies for making artificial ice emerging in the 1880s, the ice house lost its original function and was adapted and converted, first into a home for Brahmin widows, then a hostel for a training college that is now known as Vivekanand House.55 “Thus, it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well… the pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”56 In 1854, Henry David Thoreau was inspired by the view from his window of the frozen surface of Walden Pond in Massachusetts to ruminate romantically over what Peter D. McDonald calls “the interconnectedness of things.”57 In his book Walden, or a Life in the Woods, he transports the reader through time and space through the crystal lens of frozen water, linking the local scenes of the labors of American industry to the rituals of ancient Hindu religions. He describes the “hundred men of Hyperborean extraction” who arrive at the site of the harvest “like a flock of arctic snow-birds,” “a merry race, full of jest and sport,” despite the hard labor and threat of serious injury. Armed with “many carloads of ungainly looking

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Figure 4.5 Photograph of the ice house at Madras (Chennai), Tamil Nadu, taken by Frederick Fiebig in c.1851. Source: By permission of the British Library © British Library Board (Shelfmark: Photo 248(34) Item Number 24834.

farming tools,” the army of workers hauls, grapples and hoists the heavy ice cakes to build “a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble”58 that forms the core of the ice house. From the Southern regions of the US to the seaport cities of India, local residents and foreign travelers alike delighted in the popular spectacle of the ice harvest, these “strange and incongruous scenes” of industry featuring the back-breaking labors of anonymous workers, usually immigrants, slaves and prisoners.59 Marc Herod observes that through the “gaze of the colonizer,” many of these accounts “do not fail to comment on the skin color and ethnicity of the workers.”60 The ice entrepreneurs and their supporters repeatedly claimed that their motives were altruistic rather than being driven by financial profit, noting that even “beggars could reap the bounty of the healing properties of ice.”61 Despite such claims, contemporary scholars have observed that in tropical places, imported natural ice was a luxury product “not procured mainly for the ‘Brahmins or their servants’” – but rather to satisfy “the cultivated tastes of the British elites in colonial seaport cities.”62 The rituals of this extractive industry were thus bound up in a legacy of conquest and exclusion and in a process of altering and destroying the

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environment.63 The architecture of the ice house drew upon the complex iconography of its cargo and the circumstances of its trade to present itself as a symbol of the triumphs of American capitalism and British colonialism – a monument to the commercial and technological powers of heroic entrepreneurs who conquered nature and deposited its bounty on distant shores. The construction of a fixed and permanent building as a repository and preserver of ice served as a highly visible marker at home and abroad of the spatiotemporal infrastructure of global trade. In its hybrid language of utility and monumentality, the architecture of the ice house provides a cross-section through the layers of the natural ice industry as a social and economic system in nineteenth-century Anglo-America. Mapping the rituals of the trade, this building type was a product of the materials, mechanisms and men of the ice trade, standing as a towering and yet temporal figure of myths of the technological conquest over time and space. Notes 1 For the history of the consumption of ice, see Sylvia P. Beamon and Susan Roaf, The Ice-Houses of Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 7–9 and Monica Ellis, Ice and Icehouses Through the Ages with a Gazetteer for Hampshire (Southampton: Southampton University Industrial Archaeology Group, 1982). 1. For its cultural meaning, see Klaus Dodds, Ice: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion, 2018) and Mariana Gosnell, Ice: The Nature, the History and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 2 The consumption of ice was both promoted and ridiculed in popular and travel accounts. See, e.g.: Thomas Shadwell and Anne Shadwell, The Volunteers, or the Stock-Jobbers: A Comedy, Etc. (London: James Knapton, 1693), 28; Gidion Pontier, &c., A New Survey of the Present State of Europe: Containing Remarks upon Several Sovereign and Republic States (London: W. Crooke, 1684), 69; and John Fryer, A New Account of India and Persia in Eight Letters (London: R1. Chiswell, 1698), 311. 3 “Patent to Sir Wm. Berkeley to Preserve Snow and Ice,” Domestic Entry Book 22 (22 December 1665): 40 reprinted in “Virginia in 1665–1666,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 19, no. 1 (January 1911): 28. 4 “Ice-House,” Moore’s Dublin Edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica; or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, vol. 9 (Dublin: James Moore, 1792), 82–85. 5 “American Ice-Closets and Houses,” Cambridge Chronicle and Journal (9 August 1822): 4. 6 “Of Ice and Icehouses,” The American Museum or Universal Magazine (September 1791): 175–180. 7 See. e.g.,“On Ice Houses,” The Raleigh Minerva (Virginia) (26 September 1803): 1; and “Ice and Ice Houses,” Knoxville Register (26 September 1823): 1. 8 James Young, “On Preparing Ice and Filling an Ice-House,” The American Farmer 1, no. 33 (8 January 1840): 261. 9 Joseph C. Jones, Jr., America’s Icemen: An Illustrative History of the United States Natural Ice Industry 1665–1925 (Humble, TX: Jobeco Books, 1984), 79–80. 10 Thomas Moore, An Essay on the Most Eligible Construction of Ice-Houses (Baltimore: Bonsal & Niles, 1803), 11–14. 11 Helen Tangires, “Icehouses in America: The History of a Vernacular Building Type,” New Jersey Folklife 16 (1997): 37. 12 Moore, An Essay on the Most Eligible, 15–16. 13 “Icehouse,” History of Early American Landscape Design (12 April 2021, 13:35 UTC. 31 January 2023, 05:38). https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php?title=Icehouse&o

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16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

Louisa Iarocci ldid=40827. “Ice House,” The New England Farmer, and Horticultural Register 13, no. 9 (10 September 1834): 70; “Ice Houses,” The Tennessean (25 October 1834): 2; and “Ice and Ice-Houses,” New England Farmer, and Gardener’s Journal 13, no. 45 (20 May 1835): 353–354. Maine Farmer, “Ice Houses,” Green-Mountain Freeman (29 November 1844): 1; “Ice Houses above Ground,” Maine Farmer and Journal of the Useful Arts 8, no. 34 (29 August 1840): 265. Keeping the ice chamber as dry as possible was of critical importance – so the floors were raised on wood slats or made of gravel with a drain for melting water. William Eassie, Healthy House: A Handbook to the History, Defects and Remedies of Drainage, Ventilation, Warming and Kindred Subjects (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1872): 214–218. “The Ice House and the Hot House,” The Horticulturalist and Journal of Rural Art and Taste 1, no. 8 (December 1846): 249. On Norway’s involvement in the ice trade to Great Britain, see Eyvind Bagle, “Ice from ‘Nature’s Factory,” International Journey of Maritime History 34, no. 1 (2022): 123–132. H. T. Cummings, “Ice; Its Collection, Storage and Distribution,” American Journal of Pharmacy (May 1868): 211. For the main locations of ice harvesting in the US, see “Ice Trade,” Dictionary of the English Language: A Gazetteer of the World, ed. Charles Smith Morris (Philadelphia: Syndicate Publishing Company, 1898): 1598. Only one mention of a large commercial ice house with walls of brick was found – the construction noted to be “costly [but] has the advantage of durability and safety from fire.” “The Ice Trade of the United States,” The Downpatrick Recorder (27 January 1849): np. “Philadelphia Ice Company,” Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania 13 (25 January 1834): 50. “The Ice Trade,” The Youth’s Companion (8 February 1866): 24. “Ice and the Ice Trade,” Hunt’s Merchants Magazine and Commercial Review 33, no. 11 (August 1855): 169–175. “The Mammoth Ice House,” Massachusetts’s Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture 3, no. 14 (6 January 1844): 1. “The Mammoth Ice House,” Massachusett’s Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, 3, no. 14 (6 January 1844), 1. For a detailed description, see Henry Hall, The Ice Industry in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888): 7–10. “American Ice Trade,” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal 2, no. 267 (10 February 1849): 49. Robert P. T. Coffin, Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 172. “Commercial Ice House,” Ice and Refrigeration (September 1892): 181. Tudor reportedly abandoned his efforts to build an ice house on the island of Martinique because of financial issues. Theodore Chase and Celeste Walker, “The Journal of James Savage and the Beginning of Frederic Tudor’s Career in the Ice Trade,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series 97 (1985): 107. Theron L. Hiles, The Ice Crop: How to Harvest, Store, Ship and Use Ice (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1893): 7. A. P. Putnam, “Wenham Lake and the Ice Trade,” Ice and Refrigeration 30, no. 1 (July 1892): 15. David G. Dickason, “The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic,” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 1 (February 1991): 54–55. See Richard O. Cummings, The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), 8–10. The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1854 (Boston and London: Phillips, Sampson, 1854), 169–170. “Ice-House Establishment,” Charleston Courier (South Carolina) (22 March 1817): 4. F. Holbrook, “The Ice Trade,” The Semi-Weekly Eagle (12 April 1852): 1.

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37 Chase and Walker, “The Journal of James Savage and the Beginning of Frederic Tudor’s Career,” 111. 38 “Importation of Ice from Boston,” Journal of the Asiatic Society 20 (August 1833): 491–492. 39 Hall, The Ice Industry in the United States, 2. 40 Tudor has been credited with building ice houses in St. Pierre and Martinique in the West Indies in 1805, in Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana between 1817 and 1820. Linda H. Kistler, Clairmont P. Carter and Brackston Hinchey, “Planning and Control in the Nineteenth Century Ice Trade,” The Accounting Historians Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 22. 41 John W. Damon, The Havana Ice-House Controversy, or Facts Versus Falsehood in Regard to Transactions between Frederic Tudor and John W. Damon (Boston: F. Tudor, 1846), 88–106; Gavin Weightman, The Frozen-Water Trade (New York: Hyperion, 2003), 63. 42 Henry Greenleaf Pearson, “November Meeting: Frederic Tudor, Ice King,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series 65 (October 1932–May 1936), 182. 43 Tudor was said to have blamed his losses in Havana on the improper construction of the ice house. Chase and Walker, “The Journal of James Savage,” 114. 44 Dickason, “The Nineteenth Century Indo-American Ice Trade,” 61. 45 “Importation of Ice from Boston,” Journal of the Asiatic Society 20 (August 1833): 492. John Knight, “The Ice Trade between America and India,” Mechanic’s Magazine 8 (1836): 98–99. 46 “The Ice-House of Georgetown,” The Anti-Slavery Reporter 3, no. 28 (April 1848): 58–59. 47 Henry H. Spry, Modern India (London: Whittaker & Co., 1837), 192. 48 “American Ice,” Calcutta Monthly Journal and General Register of Occurrence throughout the British Dominions in the East (Calcutta: Samuel Smith and Co., February 1837): 118. 49 Walker Graham Blackie, The Imperial Gazetteer: A General Dictionary of Geography, Physical, Political, Statistical and Descriptive, vol. 1 (London: Blackie & Son, 1855), 558. 50 J. R. McCulloch, A Dictionary Practical, Theoretical, and Historical of Commerce and Commercial Navigations (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852), 1464. 51 A sketch of the building can be found in An Artist in India (H. Cotton aka Colesworthy Grant), Anglo-Indian Domestic Life (Calcutta: Thacker, Spring & Co, 1862), 35. 52 “Ice Meeting,” Bombay Gazette (14 October 1835): 492. 53 Beamon and Roaf, The Ice-houses of Britain, 39. 54 First Number of the Corps Papers, and Memoirs on Military Subjects: Compiled from Contributions of the Officers of the Royal Engineers and the East India Company’s Engineers 1 (London: John Weale, 1848): 34. 55 The Calcutta Ice house was demolished in 1882 and the one in Bombay served as a warehouse until it was demolished in the 1920s. https://scroll.in/article/720912/ how-ice-shipped-all-the-way-from-america-became-a-luxury-item-in-colonial-india. 56 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854) (London: J.M. Dent and Company and New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1908), 263. 57 Peter D. McDonald, “Thoreau Bathes’ in the Gita,” Web. Artefacts of Writing. https:// artefactsofwriting.com/2021/06/22/thoreau-bathes-in-the-gita/. 58 Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, 260–261. 59 An American traveler describes a scene on the wharves of Havana where the workers loading imported ice into storehouses are noted to have “large and powerful . . . nude” bodies with “gloss(y) black skin.” F. H. Janes, “Havana,” Outing: An Illustrated Magazine of Recreation 1, no. 9 (January 1883), 2: see also Pearson, November Meeting.

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Louisa Iarocci Frederic Tudor, Ice King, 169 and Alfred in India, or Scenes in Hindoostan (Boston: Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1848), 150. Marc W. Herold, “Ice in the Tropics: The Export of ‘Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness’ to India and Brazil,” Revista Espaco Academico 142 (March 2012), 167. Knight, “The Ice Trade between America and India,” 98; Hiles, The Ice Crop, 7. Dickason, “The Nineteenth Century Indo-American Ice Trade,” 54–55; Herold, “Ice in the Tropics,” 162. Gavin Weightman states that the decline of the natural ice industry in the twentieth century was hastened by environmental pollution as well as technological advances in mechanical ice making. Weightman, The Frozen Water Trade, 10.

Reference List Bagle, Eyvind. “Ice from ‘Nature’s Factory.” International Journey of Maritime History 34, no. 1 (2022): 123–132. Beamon, Sylvia P., and Susan Roaf. The Ice-Houses of Britain. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Blackie, Walker Graham. The Imperial Gazetteer: A General Dictionary of Geography, Physical, Political, Statistical and Descriptive. Vol. 1. London: Blackie & Son, 1855. Chase, Theodore, and Celeste Walker. “The Journal of James Savage and the Beginning of Frederic Tudor’s Career in the Ice Trade.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series 97 (1985): 103–134. Coffin, Robert P.T. Kennebec: Cradle of Americans. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937. Cummings, Richard O. The American Ice Harvests: A Historical Study in Technology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949. Damon, John W. The Havana Ice-House Controversy, or Facts Versus Falsehood in Regard to Transactions between Frederic Tudor and John W. Damon. Boston: F. Tudor, 1846. Dickason, David G. “The Nineteenth-Century Indo-American Ice Trade: An Hyperborean Epic.” Modern Asian Studies 25, no. 1 (February 1991): 53–89. Dodds, Klaus. Ice: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion, 2018. Eassie, William. Healthy House: A Handbook to the History, Defects and Remedies of Drainage, Ventilation, Warming and Kindred Subjects. New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1872. Ellis, Monica. Ice and Icehouses Through the Ages with a Gazetteer for Hampshire. Southampton: Southampton University Industrial Archaeology Group, 1982. Fryer, John. A New Account of India and Persia in Eight Letters. London: R1. Chiswell, 1698. Gosnell, Mariana. Ice: The Nature, the History and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Henry, Hall. The Ice Industry in the United States. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888. Herold, Marc W. “Ice in the Tropics: The Export of ‘Crystal Blocks of Yankee Coldness’ to India and Brazil.” Revista Espaco Academico 142 (March 2012): 162–177. Hiles, Theron L. The Ice Crop: How to Harvest, Store, Ship and Use Ice. New York: Orange Judd Company, 1893. “Icehouse.” History of Early American Landscape Design, April 12, 2021, 13:35 UTC. January 31, 2023, 05:38. https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php?title=Icehouse&oldid=40827. Jones, Jr., Joseph C. America’s Icemen: An Illustrative History of the United States Natural Ice Industry 1665–1925. Humble, TX: Jobeco Books, 1984.

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Kistler, Linda H., Clairmont P. Carter, and Brackston Hinchey. “Planning and Control in the Nineteenth Century Ice Trade.” The Accounting Historians Journal 11, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 19–30. Knight, John. “The Ice Trade between America and India.” Mechanic’s Magazine 8 (1836): 98–99. McDonald, Peter D. “Thoreau Bathes’ in the Gita.” Web: Artefacts of Writing. https://artefactsofwriting.com/2021/06/22/thoreau-bathes-in-the-gita/. Pearson, Henry Greenleaf. “November Meeting: Frederic Tudor, Ice King.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series 65 (October 1932–May 1936): 182. Tangires, Helen. “Icehouses in America: The History of a Vernacular Building Type.” New Jersey Folklife 16 (1997): 37. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854). London: J.M. Dent and Company and New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1908. Weightman, Gavin. The Frozen-Water Trade. New York: Hyperion, 2003.

5

Contesting the Colonial Illu Sealing and Social Change in Kalaallit Architecture, 1750–1860 Kirstine Møller and Bart Pushaw

Introduction Throughout the 1600s, Kalaallit Inuit1 became accustomed to dangers like kidnapping and opportunities such as trade associated with European whalers and expeditioners sailing by Arctic coasts. In 1721, however, Dano-Norwegian missionaries arrived at the mouth of Nuup Kangerlua and built the Colony of Hope. Initially, missionization among Kalaallit was the primary goal. However, as the king of Denmark and Norway became more invested in the colonial effort from the 1730s, the focus shifted to the trade of whale oil or seal blubber harvested by Kalaallit hunters for an enormous profit in Europe, and the mission became a secondary project. Whale oil and baleen became essential energy resources in the rapid expansion of European and colonial American cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Seeking to monopolize on this lucrative market, the Danish Kingdom viewed the history of Inuit trade with Europeans as threatening their tenuous sovereignty over Kalaallit Nunaat, controlling and later criminalizing Inuit interactions with foreigners. As Danish law transformed Kalaallit Nunaat into a “closed” colony in 1776, this discursive tension between Inuit colonial consumption and demand for marine mammal extraction became crucial to the transformation of Indigenous architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From around 1600, many2 Kalaallit homes were communal, accommodating multiple families and space for preparing an umiaq or qajaq, vital hunting technology. As one Inuk writer reminisced in the nineteenth century, shared houses were where “all loved and assisted each other in procuring the chief necessities of life.”3 As European overhunting depleted bowhead populations in the Davis Strait, the Royal Greenlandic Trade (Den Kongelige Grønlandske Handel, henceforth KGH) shifted their priorities to sealing and, in doing so, dramatically increased their reliance on and exploitation of Inuit. In the 1840s, Danish Missions began publishing pictorial albums that dictated the “appropriate” house of the ideal Christian sealer, revealing how the colony’s dependence on individual hunters promoted singlefamily housing. By portraying single-family square homes as moral and chaste, the Danish Mission took a firm stance against the communal houses central to Inuit livelihood and supported by the Moravian Missions of Southwest Greenland. DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-7

Contesting the Colonial Illu 75 Whereas Kalaallit understood their home (illu in Kalaallisut, used subsequently) as a site of community and resilience, the Danish administration chastised communal housing as mired in “filth and rottenness of every description,” where “mephitic exhalations… render the air in such pestilential caverns poisonous to their inmates.”4 According to Danish officials, Kalaallit poverty resulted from an addiction to foreign commodities such as coffee. This addiction supposedly impeded successful sealing, threatening colonial economies of extraction and facilitating mass starvation. As Kalaallit circulated images of “rich” and “poor” houses, the built environment began to evince a discourse of dependency that would ensure inequities between the Kalaallit and colonizers. Haunted by the ahistorical and racialized specter of the “igloo,” Inuit architectural history is rarely granted the cultural complexity outlined previously. Combining approaches from Indigenous archaeology and art history, we argue that colonial Inuit housing underwent a dynamic transformation that reveals competing discourses as the colonial economy of extraction shifted from whaling to sealing in Kalaallit Nunaat. The main focus is on the winter house, and throughout the chapter, we use illu and home interchangeably, centering Inuit perspective on their lived experience and subtle resistance to colonial discourse. An Early Description and the Excavation of an Illu Their Winter Habitation is a low Hut built with Stone and Turf, two or three Yards high, with a flat Roof. In this Hut the Windows are on one Side, made of the Bowels of Seals, dressed and sewed together. . . . On the other Side their Beds are placed, which consists in Shelves or Benches made up of Deal-Boards, raised half a Yard from the Ground; their Bedding is made of Seals and Rain Deer [sic] Skins. Several Families live together in one of these Houses or Huts; each Family occupying a Room by itself separated from the rest by a Wooden Post, by which also the Roof is supported; before which is a Hearth or Fire-place, in which is placed a Great Lamp in the Form of Half a Moon seated on a Trevet; over this are hung their Kettles of Brass, Copper, or Marble, in which they boil their Victuals: under the Roof, just above the Lamp, they have a sort of Rack or Shelf, to put their wet Clothes upon to dry. The Fore-Door or Entry of the House is very low, so that they must stoop, and must creep in upon all Fours, to get in at it; which is so contrived to keep the cold Air out, as much as possible. The Inside of the Houses is covered or lined with old Skins, which before have served for the Covering of their Boats. Some of these Houses are so large, that they can harbour Seven or Eight Families.5

This is how Hans Egede, the first missionary to Greenland, described the winter homes of Kalaallit in the English version of his book Det Gamle Grønlands nye perlustration in 1745. His invocation of metal kitchenware might reveal an older tradition of Inuit trading with foreign whalers or emphasize that trading in the colony of Godthåb had been established. However, the winter houses (also called turf houses or sod houses) described here belong to a certain point in Kalaallit history. This specific type, where several families lived together, about 40 people, is

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generally referred to as communal houses by archaeologists and was in use from circa 1600 to the 1930s in the Eastern Arctic region.6 The illu, be it communal or a single-family unit, was built using turf, stones and whale bones in a double-walled structure, where the space between the double walls was insulated using soil and turf. During the colonial period, the entrance to the illu changed from a long subterranean passage that trapped the cold, preventing it from seeping into the interior, as Egede described, to a tall entryway that allowed for a door leading directly into the interior that still protected from the elements.7 Archaeological research regarding illuut (plural) in the colonial period has received little attention, partly because old homes were bulldozed during the modernization processes of the 1950s and 1960s (when they were not deemed historically significant) and partly because historical archaeology only recently gained traction in Kalaallit Nunaat. An excavation at the Narsannguaq area in Sisimiut in 2022 unearthed a communal house dating back to 1764, the establishment of the colony of Holsteinsborg.8 The structure was not completely excavated as it extended outside the boundaries of the building site, so the exact size of the communal house is unknown. However, the material record reveals subtle clues about life in the illu. The floor layers in the oldest phase of the illu counted as many as seven in a layer, only measuring six centimetres in thickness, suggesting thorough cleaning sessions with the spread of fresh sand on top. The layers were distinguishable due to the change in soil composition and colour. Yet, it is impossible to determine how often the cleaning occurred due to the layers containing no artefacts. In a later phase of the illu, where it was still a communal home, the floor had wooden floorboards. The floorboards were probably reused later, but the wooden spikes, which had supported the wooden boards, were still in situ. During the 1800s, the illu downsized significantly and stopped being a communal home. Yet, the size was too large to serve as a single-family home; we interpret it as either an extended family home or belonging to at least two families living together. By the 1920s, this smaller illu had undergone three phases, where some of the walls were rebuilt, and the floor at one point also had wooden floorboards, which were left in situ. These boards were in excellent condition when we excavated them, showing clear signs of being cared for by the people living in the illu. The last phase, before the illu was demolished, was the only phase where filth (fish bones, food scraps, and the like) was present. Although colonial archives suggest the constant filth of Inuit homes (as we explore in greater detail further on), our archaeological investigation suggests that the illu was unkempt only after it was abandoned. Throughout the time it functioned as a home, the layout of the illu was similar to Egede’s description. At the wall opposite the entrance was a long, wide platform that both functioned as the sleeping and activity area of the illu. The remains of the platform in the excavation consisted of crowberry branches used as insulation material and a sweet-smelling deodorant. On the side of the entrance was the kitchen area where the floor had wooden floorboards. The illu had not been in consecutive use since 1764, as the Kalaallit living there had spent the summers harvesting ammassat, sealing and whaling along the coast, meeting with friends and family at the

Contesting the Colonial Illu 77 aasivik and harvesting caribou inland in the early autumn. Due to the permanence of the colony, an illu was used and reused much more frequently than before colonization. Thus, the midden area outside the illu was easily accessible material for the insulation between the double-walled structure when needing to alter the layout of the building, e.g., for the different phases of the illu. While excavating these walls, we unearthed the material culture the inhabitants previously had used while living in the illu. Colonial Consumption and Daily Life The material culture excavated at the site tells us about change and continuity of Kalaallit life during the colonial period. The faunal remains consisted of caribou, different species of whales, seals, and birds, Arctic hare and fox, fishbones and mussel shells, a typical diet for all cultures living in the Arctic throughout time. Among the artefacts were typical Inuit tools: whalebone caps of their oars, arrowheads, soapstone vessels, bone needles, harpoon heads and ulus. The colonial component emerged through the imported goods unearthed in the excavation. The goods included fruit pits and whole coffee beans, clay pipe fragments from Scotland, England, Germany, Denmark and the Ottoman Empire, a Danish coin minted in 1771, folded knives, woven cloth, iron nails, gunflint, glass fragments from bottles and windows, glass beads, ceramics such as porcelain from the Royal Copenhagen factory, faiance, redware and stoneware. Most of the goods probably came from the colony’s trade; however, some of the ceramics and clay pipes are most likely from trading with British expeditioners. Clay pipes from the Ottoman Empire and ceramic fragments depicting Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort are unlikely to have been a staple in the colony’s trade. These probably arrived in Sisimiut with the expedition led by Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield, who visited the town in 1854 during his last Arctic expedition as a transport function, a supportive function, for the Franklin search party.9 The artefacts show a household that used the winter to prepare for hunting and harvesting during the warmer seasons. The sheer amount of colonial goods and faunal remains in this single home tells us that the people who lived in the illu were great hunters and loyal customers in the trade – and, therefore, good colonial subjects. Yet the architectural choices of the illu, especially its size, show a subtle resistance to the colonial discourse, as outlined in what follows. From Blubber to Coal: “European Forms” and the Energies of the Kalaallit Home As early as 1820, overhunting had depleted whaling stocks near Kalaallit Nunaat, the primary resource that had lured Europeans to the Arctic Americas since the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, the nineteenth-century world was weaning off of its consumption of whale oil as a technology of illumination.10 Sealing thus succeeded whaling as the primary focus of the colonial economy.11 As a result, the Danish mission and trade demanded that Inuit become “frugal” (sparsommelige)

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and almost eliminate their use of seal oil as fuel. Colonizers introduced coal as an alternative energy resource that required the transformation of the colonial illu. Transforming the illu was an attempt to colonize the domestic sphere, maintaining control in those intimate spaces beyond the walls of the mission, school, and church. Danish figures wishing to reform Inuit housing described working towards a goal of “order and cleanliness” (Orden og Reenlighed), in part because Wilhelm Graah, director of the KGH, had painted a dire picture of Inuit housing conditions: “Up to 30 to 40 people live together in a single, dark, restricted space, humid with urine and the stench of spoiled food, where health must suffer. This wretched nature of the Greenlandic house is at least partly the fault of the inhabitants themselves, who build their homes quite carelessly.”12 Two elements became essential structures to the European perception of improving Inuit homes: metal stoves and glass windows. These changes would cultivate “more sense for order and cleanliness among the Greenlanders” whose “economic conditions will benefit at the increase of the prices of the products of the country.”13 Improving the household was then paramount to improving the productivity of the colonial subject. What Europeans perceived as “restricted space” and “low ceilings” were actually an Indigenous architectural response to Inuit lighting technology, the soapstone lamp known as a qulleq. The hearth of the home, the qulleq provided light in the darkness and warmth in the cold. The qulleq’s low flames invited intimacy, fostering a sense of community and resilience. Since Inuit utilized the qulleq to heat soapstone cookware, the lamp was also vital to preparing food. Burning oil rendered from marine mammals, the qulleq created a distinct olfactory sensation, a comforting smell for those who grew up with it. However, outsiders described the odor as an indicator of negligence. Accordingly, the qulleq became a lynchpin in colonial debates about the future of Inuit housing at the Danish Missions in the 1830s and 1840s. Graah transformed how colonial administrators understood the qulleq, from the locus of communal care to an object of selfish waste that threatened potential profits. In 1838, Ludvig Fasting, a government official, penned an open letter to Inuit, claiming he had witnessed families “who had never even used Greenlandic lamps” – a claim as utterly preposterous as it was propagandistic.14 Instead, they burned coal, turf grasses and driftwood in their stoves.15 He continued, “With coal mining, which will be carried out on a large scale from now on, care has also been taken to provide you with the necessary fuel at a cheap cost, so you can thus heat your homes, cook your food, and dry your skins and clothing over the stoves as you would otherwise over lamps; but the most important advantage is that you can sell all of the blubber that had to burn in the past.”16 Soon, a royal decree would fund Danish ships to haul hundreds of barrels of coal across the Atlantic. Doing so forced a shift in energy resources from small-scale sustainability (families acquiring seal oil) into a new Indigenous dependence on the global expansion of the fossil fuel economy.17 Meanwhile, installing glass windows at the front of the house would supplement what the stove could not provide in the absence of the qulleq: a source of light. Glass replaced the customary material for windows, seal intestines, an ingenious

Contesting the Colonial Illu 79 technology that Inuit developed into textiles that were lightweight, waterproof and transparent, protecting the home from the elements. Though colonial administrators did not theorize the window to the same extent as the qulleq, we can infer that the mission’s promotion of glass instead of gut skin was a tactical strategy to decrease the Indigenous use of sealskin, retain more stock and profit for the trade and thereby increase dependence on imported commodities. Europeanizing the illu also transcended a shift from qulleq to stove and gut skin to glass. Some advocated the implementation of new prefabricated timber homes shipped across the Atlantic from Denmark to Kalaallit Nunaat. Reproducing European building practices on colonized Inuit lands maintained a future for Dano-Norwegian supremacy. First prioritized for European men who married into Inuit families, these new houses would serve, the mission hoped, as examples to encourage enterprising hunters.18 In 1836, a royal decree permitted the shipment of ten prefabricated timber houses and eighteen ovens alongside 200 barrels of coal as fuel to replace the use of blubber.19 Prefabricated houses were weapons in the mission’s ongoing aim to destabilize Kalaallit kinship patterns that sustained large communal houses. The mission was convinced that the illu, which accommodated multiple families, had permitted “the lazy and lethargic [to hide] among the best hunters,” who unfairly profiteered from the skills of a few. “The newer houses would counteract this and create a better distribution at the hunting sites, whereby production and health would increase.”20 Few Kalaallit were convinced. One merchant in Qaqortoq struggled to convince Inuit to purchase new houses when they saw their clothes could not dry properly.21 Others observed that cooking with stoves made the houses too humid. Metal heated as quickly as it cooled and did not retain the slow dispersion of heat as soapstone did.22 New homes were more popular in Aasiaat, yet the need for fuel in metal stoves depleted local turf landscapes quickly. Meanwhile, in Ilulissat, the new homes held no allure, and Kalaallit preferred to incorporate new stoves into their old homes, always alongside – and never in place of – their qulliit. For these reasons, Kalaallit resisted the wholesale adoption of prefabricated European homes. Instead, they selectively incorporated new elements carefully into their illuut. Some families embraced wooden floorboards, whereas others embraced the metal stove or glass windows. As the illu began to reflect the individual preferences of Inuit families, Danish administrators changed their focus from the materials that constructed the illu to the moral character of its inhabitants. Towards the Ideal Single-Family Home Colonial dependence on sealing impacted social relations within the illu. The Danish Mission and the KGH worked in tandem to map the economic future of the colony through meticulous record-keeping of individual hunters and their progeny. As Christina Petterson has made clear, the increasing valorization of the individual hunter reflected Lutheran ideals of the man as head of the household.23 This ideology occluded the manifold roles of Kalaallit women, imposing a foreign patriarchal hierarchy onto the colonial Inuit family. By the 1850s, the promotion of single-family

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square homes presented an architectural solution for the maintenance and reproduction of the morally chaste Inuit family, with the hunter-husband at its helm. Key insight into the single-family home appears in Aksillisæt Innuin Nunejnnit. Billeder fra Grønland (Images from Greenland), published in 1852 by the Danish doctor Christian Rudolph (Figure 5.1). “The goal of these pages,” Rudolph stated, “was to give Greenlanders a pictorial depiction of their own land and customs, and in a didactic way to awaken the interest of both young and old.”24 The book is crucial to our investigation because it frames the single-family home as the locus of change in the 1850s. In the text accompanying this image, Rudolph wrote, “Many houses could be much cleaner than they are now, and since cleanliness is so necessary to maintenance of health, many diseases, which haunt the inhabitants of dirty houses, could disappear altogether.”25 The evocation of “dirty houses” was a dog whistle about the extensive household networks nourished by Kalaallit kinship practices. Danish doctors described their shock at the fact that plank beds were shared sleeping spaces, where “they all lie, young and old, married and unmarried, strangers and dwellers among each other in a fashion that is just as harmful in respects to hygiene as well as morality.”26 Therefore, “order and cleanliness” only became possible through Christian single-family homes.

Figure 5.1 Christian Rudolph, Innuin nejugæt (Interior of a Kalaallit Home), created in 1847, printed in 1852, lithograph. Source: Royal Library of Denmark, Copenhagen.

Contesting the Colonial Illu 81 In Rudolph’s image, wooden planks comprise the floors, walls, and ceilings. He encouraged Kalaallit to “take advantage of the charity” of the KGH, which had “contributed extraordinary sums of cheap tiled stoves and wooden material for the improvement of houses.”27 One wooden pillar reinforces the building’s structural integrity and echoes the vertical smoke valve of the metal stove, an imported technology now the center of this home. By centering lumber and the stove, Rudolph emphasizes how the four Inuit are loyal subjects who have worked diligently to improve their lives, a transformation enabled by the supposed benevolence of the KGH. This idealized image depicts the Grætze family of Ilulissat. Peter Grætze, an accomplished sealer, is seated at left near his wife, Johanna Grætze, a respected midwife who swaddles an infant. At the center is Peter’s aunt, elder Constance Grætze. At the right, Constance the younger tends to a qulleq. In nineteenth-century Ilulissat, the Grætzes were renowned as “kalaallit piginnersaat,” or “the most wellto-do Kalaallit.” One author commended their home as “large, nicely decorated, and well-equipped.”28 The wealth of the Grætze family was partially indebted to their mixed lineage.29 The family descended from the 1760 marriage of Marianna, a Kalaaleq woman, to Michel Vilhelm Grætze, a Danish cooper. After Michel’s early death in 1766, Marianna married the Norwegian missionary Jørgen Sverdrup. Sverdrup intervened in the upbringing of his stepchildren as ideal colonial subjects, particularly his stepson Michel, whom he described as “quite a diligent sealer” and “extraordinarily gifted and reliable with the harpoon.”30 Shaped and promoted by the Danish Mission, Michel Grætze became a hunter worthy of emulation. The lithograph of the home of Michel’s adult son, Peter, therefore testifies to the results of a family lineage of hunting excellence as well as adherence to Lutheran patriarchal custom. Peter Grætze’s skill as a hunter assumes material form in the large sealskin draping along the back wall. The hide also materializes the expertise of the women, Johanna and Constance, who flensed and prepared the sealskin. Though families derived manifold purposes from sealskin, it is remarkable that only one sealskin is visible. The mission expected the hunter to give most of his catch to fulfill a quota. In return, he could purchase many of the goods on display in this home: a coffee pot, porcelain cups, printed images, beads, and new fabrics.31 Yet, an important if subtle pictorial detail creates dissonance between the colonizer ideal and Indigenous reality. Two of the figures, the man at the left and the elder at the center, are fully dressed indoors. Inuit architectural expertise guaranteed warm insulation, rendering most clothing unnecessary indoors in the wintertime. Bare skin was an obvious choice to stay comfortable in the heat. Missionaries, however, disavowed even this most practical custom, as they were unable to transcend Christianity’s condemnation of the naked body for its potential to provoke sin and corrupt morality. Rudolph’s representation of fullyclothed people indoors might express the pious morality of the Grætze family, but it also hampers the efficacy of promoting new single-family houses to Kalaallit audiences.

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Kalaallit Debate the Illu in Image and Text By the 1850s, the consequences of the Danish intervention into Inuit customary culture materialized. A sudden decline in seal populations coupled with harsh winters fomented widespread starvation among Kalaallit throughout the decade. Danish officials skirted responsibility, blaming two culprits instead: coffee consumption and the endurance of the communal illu. The juxtaposition between chaste and corrupted homes became the most explicit in Kalaallit assilialiait, a pictorial album printed by the bookmakers Rasmus Berthelsen and Lars Aqqaluk Møller in 1860. Two images visualized distinct possibilities of contemporary life in the colony: the wealthy single-family home and the starving multi-family home. These images offer insight into how Kalaallit envisioned the illu and participated in lively debates about housing. Carved by the artist Aalut Kangermiu, Wealthy Kalaallit (Kalaallit pigissut) (Figure 5.2) depicts a bustling home of abundance. This detailed interior communicates wealth through the conspicuous consumption of distinctive objects: images decorate wooden planks beside rifles, a violin, and a clock. The family has stored

Figure 5.2 Aalut Kangermiu (Kalaaleq), Kalaallit pigissut (Wealthy Kalaallit), 1860, ink on paper. Source: Wren Digital Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Contesting the Colonial Illu 83 ceramic wares and porcelain cups alongside books on a wooden shelf. One man smokes a tobacco pipe, while another plays with a child. To the right, one figure reads a book, while at the center of the home, a woman prepares coffee. Meanwhile, three women seated on sealskin mats are intensely focused on their respective tasks: sewing an annoraaq, stretching sealskin into the form of a kamik, and swaddling a child. The stove is no longer at the center of the home but instead far from where everyone gathers. Directly following Aalut’s Wealthy Kalaallit was Rasmus Berthelsen’s Starving Kalaallit (Kalaallit perlilersut) (Figure 5.3).32 In all-encompassing, inky darkness, white negative space reveals emaciated bodies huddled together and gnawed bones litter a dirty floor. In Aalut’s prosperous home, wooden planks enhance the illu’s order and the structural integrity of the building. By contrast, the few wooden pillars of Berthelsen’s print appear as gaunt and fragile as the home’s human inhabitants. At the top right, the ceiling appears to have collapsed. Berthelsen’s writings make his politics clear. He blamed fellow Inuit for their dire circumstances, alleging that coffee consumption “induce[d] wretchedness and misery,” leading families to “incur illnesses from the lack of the necessities of

Figure 5.3 Rasmus Berthelsen (Kalaaleq), Kalaallit perlilersut (Starving Kalaallit), 1860, ink on paper. Source: Wren Digital Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.

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life.” Elsewhere, he opined, “a badger’s den is ten times more comfortable than the homes and lodging [of most Kalaallit]. A skilled hunter’s house is worse than a pigsty – a great example for future generations.”33 His rhetoric and sarcasm seem to parrot the politics of the Danish mission (and an education in Denmark proper) that had shaped his colonial worldview. His opinion that even the families of good hunters struggle in squalor suggests that Starving Kalaallit makes a visual argument for the imminent misery of those Inuit who choose to remain in multi-family communal housing, an argument that was implicitly anti-Moravian. Moravians posed a veritable threat to the Danish mission in Kalaallit Nunaat in the mid-nineteenth century for two main reasons. The first was related to Moravian expansion, as the mission at Noorliit, near (and nowadays incorporated into) the administrative capital Nuuk, welcomed so many new members that the church established a new annex at Uummannaq along Nuup Kangerlua in 1861, and another at Illorpait in 1864. The second issue was the fact that most Moravian missionaries were German and received financial backing from the main Moravian settlement in Herrnhut. Nineteenth-century nationalisms had fomented two wars between Denmark and Germany over their borderlands, first between 1848 and 1852 and again in 1864. This animosity informed how the Danish administration framed the Moravian mission to other Kalaallit, eager to win over new converts and expand Danish influence. The most demeaning writing about the illu at Moravian missions was authored by Danish administrator Hinrich Rink. In a later text directed towards a broad international audience, Rink decried the “sad reality [at the] Moravian stations,” where there are “nothing like human dwellings,” but instead “dunghills scattered over the low rocks.”34 Rink’s racist discourse about Indigenous architecture functions to convince international readers of the superiority of Danish Mission Inuit over the eternal strife of Moravian Inuit. The Kalaallit who grew up at Moravian missions, however, rejected this international discourse circulating about their lives. In an 1864 editorial for the newspaper Atuagagdliutit, Hansêraq, a Moravian Inuk, penned a stirring defense of the communal illu.35 He argued that the Danish Mission’s demand for Kalaallit to adopt small, single-family homes was “the cause of [Indigenous] shortcoming.” Invoking classic Moravian rhetoric, he hoped that Kalaallit “may reflect well on again congregating together and mutually loving and assisting each other,” a collective practice already nourished by the customary structure of the illu. The decline of the Greenlanders is the result of their having given up their former mode of living together in big houses, [though others believed that when] they commenced to make use of European dainties and articles of clothing, the housemates did not like joint possession and mutual assistance as regards these things… [Bearing] witness [to] others leading a luxurious life, they would grow angry and take offence, and this is perhaps the reason why they separate [into smaller houses]. But this we disapprove of, because such people do not take into consideration what follows after rejoicing and what follows after need.36

Contesting the Colonial Illu 85 Hansêraq’s desire to locate a third space “after rejoicing [and] after need” rejects the binaries of the rich and poor illu as imagined by Aalut Kangermiu and Rasmus Berthelsen. He emphasizes community as the driving force for nourishing the potential of Inuit home. As shifting extractive regimes exploited material abundance, new conditions of scarcity forced the transformation of Inuit architecture and the “Europeanization” of the communal illu. The materiality of Inuit homes began to change, from whale to seal, blubber to coal, and gut skin to glass. So, too, colonizers hoped, would houses become smaller to reflect successful Indigenous conversion to Lutheranism and an adherence to patriarchal piety. But, the colonial illu was not solely a space that changed in lockstep with the empire’s addiction to racial capitalism. Hansêraq reminds us that there were always other possibilities for the illu. For Kalaallit families, the illu remained a locus of continuity and care, sustaining Indigenous priorities despite the dictates of colonialism. Notes 1 The Inuit Homelands consist of different peoples across the Arctic. By using Kalaallit Inuit, we are specifying the cultural group that lives on the west coast of Kalaallit Nunaat. Although illuut share similarities in the Eastern Arctic, their colonial histories are diverse and affected Inughuit, Iviit, Kalaallit and Inuit of Inuit Nunangat in distinct manners. In this chapter, the sources stem from present-day Sisimiut, Nuuk and Ilulissat and there may have been local variations elsewhere. 2 Here we mean winter homes, as smaller homes prevailed throughout history as well. 3 Henry Rink, Danish Greenland, Its People, and Its Products (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877), 264. 4 Ibid., 181. 5 Hans Egede, A Description of Greenland . . . (London: C. Hitch, 1745). 6 Peter Schledermann, “Thule Culture Communal Hoses in Labrador,” Arctic 27, no. 1 (1976): 27–37; Hans Christian Gulløv, From Middle Ages to Colonial Times: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Studies of the Thule Culture in South West Greenland 1300–1800 AD (Copenhagen: Kommissionen for Videnskabelige Undersøgelser i Grønland, 1997). 7 Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu, Lidt om Grønlands bygningskultur (Nuuk: Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu, 2016). 8 Kirstine Eiby Møller, Bygherrerapport KNK6016, NKAH 2982, Narsannguaq 2022, Unpublished report, Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagateqarfialu, 2022. 9 Ian Stone, “Edward Augustus Inglefield (1820–1894),” Arctic 40, no. 1 (1987): 80–81. 10 Jeremy Zallen, American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 53. 11 Karen Oslund, “Greenland in the Center: What Happened When the Danish-Norwegian Officials Met English and Dutch Whalers in Disko Bay, 1780–1820,” Acta Borealia 33, no. 1 (2016): 81–99. 12 Quoted in Poul Peter Sveinstrup and Sune Dalgaard, Det danske styre af Grønland, 1825–1850 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels førlag, 1945), 326. 13 Ibid. 14 Ludvig Fasting, Sendebrev til alle Grønlændere i Norden. Aglekkæt neksiutæt Kaladlinnut tamannut auangnarmiunnut (Copenhagen: Fabritius de Tengnagels Boktrykkeri, 1838), 8. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 4–6.

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17 We are thinking about this shift to fossil fuel resources alongside the growing literature on Native Energy Humanities. Kent Linthicum, Mikaela Relford and Julia C. Johnson, “Defining Energy in Nineteenth-Century Native American Literature,” Environmental Humanities 13, no. 2 (2021): 372–390. 18 Sveinstrup and Dalgaard, Det danske styre af Grønland, 328. 19 The Trade sent new buildings for schools in Qeqertarsuaq, Paamiut, Aasiaat, Ilulissat and Uummannaq, whereas the Danish Mission oversaw the shipment of school buildings to Maniitsoq, Sisimiut, Ilimanaq and Appat. 20 Sveinstrup and Dalgaard, Det danske styre af Grønland, 336. 21 Ibid., 337. 22 Ibid., 339. 23 Christina Petterson, The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter: Foucault, Protestantism and Colonialism (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 24 Christian Rudolph, Aksillisæt Innuin Nunejnnit. Billeder fra Grønland (Copenhagen: Bianco Luno, 1852), not paginated. The Norwegian missionary Knud Diderik Nøsted was responsible for the translation of Rudolph’s Danish text into Kalaallisut. 25 Ibid., not paginated. 26 Quoted in Petterson, The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter, 65–66. 27 Rudolph, Aksillisæt Innuin Nunejnnit, unpaginated. 28 Hosther Østermann, Den norske Grønlandsprest Provst Jørgen Sverdrup (Kristiania: Alb. Cammermeyers forlag, 1900), 186. 29 On interracial marriages in colonial Kalaallit Nunaat, see Inge Seiding, “‘Married to the Daughters of the Country’: Intermarriage and Intimacy in Northwest Greenland ca. 1750 to 1850,” PhD. diss, Ilisimatusarfik, Nuuk, 2013. 30 Østermann, Den norske Grønlandsprest, 116. 31 For one take on Kalaallit colonial consumption, see Peter A. Toft and Inge Seiding, “Circumventing Colonial Policies: Consumption and Family Life as Social Practices in the Early Nineteenth-Century Disko Bay,” in Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, ed. Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (New York: Springer, 2013), 105–129. 32 The attribution to Rasmus Berthelsen has been contested. A 1915 letter from Lars Aqqaluk Møller to the artist Ossian Elgström suggested it was the work of Aalut Kangermiu. However, we argue for attribution to Berthelsen based on the fact he traveled alongside H. J. Rink, who wrote on this famine. See Pia Rink, Grønland blev hans skæbne: om H.J. Rink og hans tid (Copenhagen: Det Grønlandske Selskab, 2019), especially chapter 18 “Bogtrykkeriet og de gamle sagn. Sulten ved Napasoq.” 33 Emil Bluhme, Fra et ophold i Grønland, 1863–1864 (Copenhagen: Fr. Woldikes ForlagsExpedition, 1865), 260. 34 Rink, Danish Greenland, 1877, 181–182. 35 Hansêraq, “Kalâtdlit igdlukitdlineránik avgordlutik,” Atuagagdliutit, no. 38 (21 December 1864). 36 Ibid.

Reference List Bluhme, Emil. Fra et ophold i Grønland, 1863–1864. Copenhagen: Fr. Woldikes ForlagsExpedition, 1865. Egede, Hans. A Description of Greenland. . . . London: C. Hitch, 1745. Fasting, Ludvig. Sendebrev til alle Grønlændere i Norden. Aglekkæt neksiutæt Kaladlinnut tamannut auangnarmiunnut. Copenhagen: Fabritius de Tengnagels Boktrykkeri, 1838. Gulløv, Hans Christian. From Middle Ages to Colonial Times: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Studies of the Thule Culture in South West Greenland 1300–1800 AD. Copenhagen: Kommissionen for Videnskabelige Undersøgelser i Grønland, 1997.

Contesting the Colonial Illu 87 Hansêraq. “Kalâtdlit igdlukitdlineránik avgordlutik.” Atuagagdliutit no. 38 (December 21, 1864). Linthicum, Kent, Mikaela Relford, and Julia C. Johnson. “Defining Energy in Nineteenth-Century Native American Literature.” Environmental Humanities 13, no. 2 (2021): 372–390. Møller, Kirstine Eiby. Bygherrerapport KNK6016, NKAH 2982, Narsannguaq 2022. Unpublished report, Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagateqarfialu, 2022. Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu. Lidt om Grønlands bygningskultur. Nuuk: Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu, 2016. Oslund, Karen. “Greenland in the Center: What Happened When the Danish-Norwegian Officials Met English and Dutch Whalers in Disko Bay, 1780–1820.” Acta Borealia 33, no. 1 (2016): 81–99. Østermann, Hosther. Den norske Grønlandsprest Provst Jørgen Sverdrup. Kristiania: Alb. Cammermeyers forlag, 1900. Petterson, Christina. The Missionary, the Catechist and the Hunter: Foucault, Protestantism and Colonialism. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Rink, Henry. Danish Greenland, Its People, and Its Products. London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877. Rink, Pia. Grønland blev hans skæbne: om H.J. Rink og hans tid. Copenhagen: Det Grønlandske Selskab, 2019. Rudolph, Christian. Aksillisæt Innuin Nunejnnit. Billeder fra Grønland. Copenhagen: Bianco Luno, 1852. Schledermann, Peter. “Thule Culture Communal Hoses in Labrador.” Arctic 27, no. 1 (1976): 27–37. Seiding, Inge. “‘Married to the Daughters of the Country’: Intermarriage and Intimacy in Northwest Greenland ca.1750 to 1850.” PhD diss., Ilisimatusarfik, Nuuk, 2013. Stone, Ian. “Edward Augustus Inglefield (1820–1894).” Arctic 40, no. 1 (1987): 80–81. Sveinstrup, Poul Peter, and Sune Dalgaard. Det danske styre af Grønland, 1825–1850. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels førlag, 1945. Toft, Peter A. and Inge Seiding. “Circumventing Colonial Policies: Consumption and Family Life as Social Practices in the Early Nineteenth-Century Disko Bay.” In Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, edited by Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin, 105–129. New York: Springer, 2013. Zallen, Jeremy. American Lucifers: The Dark History of Artificial Light, 1750–1865. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Part II

Cultivating Profit

6

From Ireland to Barbados Architecture of Extraction in British Colonies Lee Morrissey

In Cabin, Quarter, Plantation, Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg note that “we cannot fully understand the built environment of North America without taking slavery into account.”1 Racial, chattel slavery was central to the extractive New World economies of the British Caribbean and North American colonies and to the actual building of the architecture there. Similarly, though, we cannot fully understand slavery without the plantation: a built typology of subordination, subjugation, segregation, inequity, and the defensiveness of the landlords, all in the same process of taking land, dispossessing people, and facilitating selective immigration. From the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries, before any British New World colonies, English administrations pursued a process of development by dispossession, which they called “plantations,” in Ireland.2 Britain first developed an architecture of extraction in Ireland, with dispossession, ethnic differentiation, and privileging of the settler colonials. By the mid-seventeenth century, successive London administrations had decades of experience in Ireland developing a plantation framework of dispossession and displacement that enabled the taking of the land. Over just a few decades in Ireland, there was “a pattern established,” as Nicholas Canny describes the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland.3 Selective immigration, segregation, ethnic dispossession and privileging, and ethnicity-based land-use regulations were developed for Ireland and then transplanted to the British western Atlantic colonies. This early plantation system in Ireland initiated for British Atlantic New World colonies what Martinique-born Édouard Glissant calls the plantation “modes of Relation.”4 The plantation relation survives transatlantic transplantation and is ramified by it. When we zoom back in time and space from the later British colonies, a pattern repeats: migration, displacement, and demographically targeted disenfranchisement, met with resistance, subversion, and transgression. In Barbados, one of Britain’s earliest and most profitable New World colonies, plantations were built upon (civic) planning and architectural techniques of extraction developed initially in colonial Ireland plantations. Indeed, the first boat of settlers to leave England for Barbados went to Ireland first, in part to get Irish laborers, before heading to the Caribbean. When that boat arrived in Barbados, it contained not only Irish, but also ten enslaved Africans. The plantation of Barbados, then, signals its links to the plantations of Ireland and its difference from them, DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-9

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too – slavery arrives with the first ship of settlers. In Simon P. Newman’s powerful formulation, on Barbados, “the island’s planters had not so much discovered a New World as they had invented one.”5 The island’s planters combine features of the Irish plantations into something more extractive: chattel slavery pressed into semi-industrialized monoculture agricultural production for export. In a sense, an English legal and political vocabulary for race itself will be extracted from Barbados, a British colony with (sometimes forcibly) indentured Irish and enslaved Africans from the start. With particular attention to some of the remaining seventeenth-century buildings in Ulster and Barbados and to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), I trace in this chapter the development and transatlantic transplanting and transformation of early British colonial plantations from Ulster, Ireland to Barbados (and back). In Architecture and Empire, Louis P. Nelson uses the phrase “castles of fear” to describe eighteenth-century big houses in Jamaica.6 In Ulster a century earlier, a defensive architecture of expropriation converted actual castles into plantation homes behind capacious walls, indicating the fears of the new arrivals. Among the oldest plantation buildings (and one of only seven known to be from the seventeenth century still intact on Barbados), Drax Hall betrays archipelagic plantation origins in its massing, its form, and its apparent commitment to retaining heat.7 Through such buildings, we can see Barbados’s connections to colonial Ireland. This pre-history of plantations meant that settlers from the British Isles arrived with established expectations of how to implement, benefit from, and resist the strictures of plantation life. The resistance of Irish people (both indentured and forcibly transported there) led to new stipulations for Irish arrivals and eventually two different codes, one for White servants and one for enslaved Black people. In A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, Richard Ligon highlights the Irish background of the early colonial architecture in Barbados and proposed how it could be improved by a more sensitive architect (such as himself). An aesthete avant la lettre, Ligon, who lets readers know that he has “been much inclined unto painting, in which art, color, favor and shape, is exercised,” brings his heightened sensibility to bear on spending time in a luxurious, well-provisioned tropical island (on which the English have built homes better suited for Hibernia) (61). Unlike his close contemporary Father Antoine Biet, Ligon barely mentions violence exerted on the enslaved, preferring instead to focus on feasts, delicious tropical fruits (and wine derived therefrom), fresh breezes (blocked by the inappropriate architecture), attractive women, and well-fed and “content” enslaved Africans, arriving with fruit baskets on their head at plantation dinners (80, 94, 93). Ligon focuses on the sumptuous aspect of the new British colonial Caribbean. Despite acknowledging “there are great casualties,” Ligon casts pleasure as the “conduit of identification” for future English-language colonists (108).8 Ligon aestheticized plantations. What the English had set up in Ireland as fortified outposts for suppressing and reforming the local population does not suit, Ligon implies, the new climates – climatological and political – of a Caribbean island. Ligon extracts from his time in Barbados a new possibility – a pleasurable

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plantation. A prose non-fiction, History’s central flight of fancy depends on obscuring the labor on the island of indentured Europeans and enslaved Africans. Indeed, he converts it to a feature of the luxurious surroundings. On that level, Ligon’s portrait of Barbados is a fiction, a vision of delightful delicacies, starting, of course, with sugar (whose manufacture Ligon describes with architectural drawings for future sugar barons). Decades before the English neo-Palladian movement imitated the Mediterranean villa ideal, Ligon points the way toward an architecture of pleasure built on hidden extractions of labor. His depiction of Barbados contributes, then, to a new vision of plantation life; Ligon makes plantation life attractive and extractive. In Sugar and Slaves (1973), Richard S. Dunn posits that “the acid test of any slave system is the frequency and ferocity of resistance by slaves.”9 If resistance were the measure of all plantation systems, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English plantations in Ireland would be models of success, as each plantation was followed by rebellion (and then by English invasion and another plantation): Desmond’s Rebellions (1579–1583, 1589–1593, then the Munster Plantation); Tyrone’s Rebellion (1593–1603, then the Ulster Plantation), and the 1641 Rising (then the Cromwellian Conquest, 1649–1653, and subsequent land transfer). After a dozen years of the Munster plantation, Tyrone’s Rebellion (also known as the Nine Years War), to the north, affected the whole island, dispersing the former southern plantation. Although technically settled by the duplicitous Treaty of Mellifont (1603), the Nine Years War ultimately ended in September 1607 when the Ulster-Irish leadership of the rebellion headed to the Continent. After the so-called “Flight of the Earls,” thoughts in London quickly turned to a new plantation in Ulster. In September 1607, before the Earls had landed on the Continent, Sir Geoffrey Fenton “suggested to the English Secretary of State, ‘what a door is opened to the King not only to pull down forever these two proud houses of O’Neill and O’Donnell but also to bring in colonies of the English to plant both counties.’”10 In January 1609, King James declared the province of Ulster “escheated,” a medieval term for forfeited; although the province had a population estimated at 75,000 in 1600, James treated it as if it were vacant and, that year, unveiled a plan for an Ulster plantation. The official 1609 plan for Ulster plantation – Such Orders and Conditions as Are to be Observed by the . . . Plantation . . . in Ulster – redistributed Ulster according to three related “sociogenic” classes, distinguished by tax rates, ethnicity, and architectural requirements.11 All participants needed to be Protestant and to take an Oath of Supremacy for King James, Head of the Church of England, and they needed to “have ready in their houses at all times, a convenient store of arms,” presumably in anticipation of future Irish risings.12 Benefits flowed to the English, and penalties to the Irish, even those Irish who participated in the land redistribution scheme. It constituted a selective immigration system, displacing natives and establishing privileges for the new arrivals. The first category of Plantation allowed English or Scottish undertakers, who would endeavor to bring English or specifically inland Scots settlers onto land measured in at least 2000-acre units, with a rent due to the government of £5 6s 8d per 1000 acres (A4r). These prospectors were to build (or likely renovate) a “castle,

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with a strong Court or Bawn about it,” or an area inside a defensive wall (likely added in this process) (A4v). The land owned by this group was to remain in the hands of English and/or Scottish members of the established church in perpetuity; they were not allowed to “alien or demise their portions, or any part thereof to mere Irish,” nor to those who had not taken the Oath of Supremacy for King James, Head of the Church of England. This move would rule out Catholics and Presbyterians, i.e., most of the Irish, and probably most of the Scottish. At Doe Castle, in Co. Donegal, Ulster, the earliest of the Ulster plantation buildings under consideration here, walls were added around a pre-existing tower, creating a space behind which the settlers could remain safe if sieged by the indigenous Irish (Figure 6.1). Alastair Rowan notes that “it was taken and retaken so many times between 1600 and 1650.”13 According to the Office of Public Works plaque at the site, though, Doe Castle was purchased in 1614, five years into the Plantation, by Captain John Sandford, who built the bawn walls in accordance with the 1609 Orders. According to Office of Public Works signage at the site, records indicate that a visitor saw these walls in 1623, which would be consistent with the laws then in effect in Ulster for plantations. Because the plantation Orders required castles and walls for the first class of undertakers, those with the largest grants and the

Figure 6.1 Doe Castle, Sheephaven Bay, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Source: Photo by the author.

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lowest taxes, we can learn, from the architecture, what type of settler converted this old tower to a plantation: either English or inland Scot. In the second class, “servitors in Ireland” – distinguished from “mere Irish,” and thus likely referring to Old and New English already in Ireland – needed to build only a house and to have a defensive bawn space. This class would have land in at least 1500-acre units and were allowed to have Irish settlers, but their annual rent, of £8 per 1000 acres, would be reduced to the level of the first class if they had English and Scottish settlers instead (B3v). Cavanacor House, which has been in continuous occupation since the first third of the seventeenth century, meets the Order’s requirements for the second class of settler and architecture: a house and a defensive bawn space (Figure 6.2).14 As Ulster began to be settled, the plantation started to become a part of the landscape. Once an area is subdued, a wall is not needed; domestic architecture suffices. Under the Ulster plantation, most of the lands were to be moved into “civil,” i.e., largely English and Scottish, ownership. Only the third class was open to “the meer Irish,” who were made “freeholders” and offered the least land, 1000-acre units, and the highest rents, £10 13s 4d per 1000 acres (all of which would be forfeited

Figure 6.2 Cavanacor House, begun in the first decades of the seventeenth century, Ballindrait, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Source: Photo by the author.

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if the freeholder were ever involved in a rebellion against the interisland administration). For those two categories requiring buildings, the Orders also stipulate “Tenants to build houses for themselves & their families, near the principal Castle, House, or Bawn, for their mutual defense and strength,” reflecting lessons learned from the collapse of the Munster Plantation with the southern incursions of the Nine Years War: solitary farmhouses in the middle of reclaimed acres left the settlers exposed and vulnerable (A4v). In combination with self-conscious planning for new plantation towns, such as Derry, the farms of the Ulster plantation were intended to form their own protective plantation villages, defined by ethnicity and religion and armed throughout. When they first arrived on Barbados in 1625, the English were again in a position to claim, as they did in Ulster, that the land was vacant, that it was escheated. The colonizing of Barbados began in 1627, in what Barbadian historian Hilary McDonald Beckles calls “probably the least problematic of all the Caribbean settlements made by the English” (because there was no armed resistance from either Indigenous peoples or another occupier on the by-then largely abandoned island).15 Over the next few decades, the British Isles saw what Jack P. Greene called an “astonishing” outmigration, “a massive movement . . . without parallel” previously, as “Barbados and the Leeward Islands . . . became the destination for . . . perhaps as many as 110,000 to 135,000” people.16 According to Simon P. Newman, Barbados, in particular, “attracted more bound laborers, white and black, than any other seventeenth-century English colony.”17 In the earliest years of the Barbados colony, the 1630s and 1640s, “half the whites who came . . . were indentured servants” (18). During those first decades, “blacks remained a small minority” in Barbados because enslaved Africans were more expensive for the planters, and with sugar production not starting until the mid-1640s, planters could not afford labor more expensive than indentured British servitude (20). Eventually, “some 236,725 enslaved Africans disembarked onto” Barbados: there were twice as many enslaved Africans as indentured or involuntarily transported British Isles natives.18 Seventeenth-century arrivals from Ireland brought the plantation mode of relation with them (both in the built environment and more conceptual architectures of plantation). Barbados became, thereby, in Beckles resonant phrase, “a salient stage on which the drama of ethnic conflict and cohesion” is played out.19 Initial indications from Barbados point to conflict: “the Irish . . . were perceived by the English employers as a principal internal enemy – at times more dangerous and feared than the Africans.” In 1644, just as sugar production was commencing in Barbados, “English planters resorted to legislation in an effort to prevent Irish immigration,” a proposal doomed initially by the need for labor and then by the new, republican government sending war captives to Barbados. In the 1650s, thousands of Irish were involuntarily shipped to Barbados by Oliver Cromwell following military defeats in Ireland in 1649 and the early years of the new decade (Beckles, A History of Barbados, 41). Some of these new Irish continued their pre-existing battle with English planters and went into something like marronage.20 Faced with Irish insubordination, the Barbadian government adopted a set of policies for Irish servants in 1657. They needed a “‘pass,’ ‘ticket,’ or ‘testimonial’”

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in order to travel on the island, and if they were not able to produce one, they were to be whipped and returned to the plantation on which they worked (43). If an Irish person were found on the island claiming, even credibly claiming, to have no fixed abode, they were to be sent for one year to serve on a plantation, any plantation rather than vagrancy. It also became illegal to “sell any kind of arms or ammunition whatsoever to any of the said nation,” Ireland (43). If an Irish person were found with arms or ammunition, they “‘shall be whipped and jailed’” (43). When this policy failed to control those arriving from Ireland, the Barbados government instituted “the Master and Servant Code of 1661,” focused on the Irish as “‘a profligate race,’ ‘turbulent and dangerous spirits,’ who thought nothing of ‘joining themselves to runaway slaves’” (quoted in Beckles, A History of Barbados, 43). Stories about these years for the Irish in Barbados have had a long afterlife, revived recently by Sean O’Callaghan’s controversial 2001 book, To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland. Indentured servitude, however, is different than chattel slavery, as is even forced transportation to Barbados (such as happened in the 1650s after Irish losses to Cromwellian forces). Indeed, in 1661, the same year of the Master and Servant Code, Barbados passed an “Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.” Where the Master and Servant Act threatened extended service for offenses, this latter law threatened branding, whipping, amputation, and death. A later Code, in 1688, pulled the Irish more fully into the plantation relation, making all Whites “liable to fines for improper policing of the enslaved, assisting them to escape, murdering them or exposing them to seditious doctrines” (Beckles, A History of Barbados, 45). In Barbados, arrivals from Ireland again existed in an ambiguous position – transported, indentured, and often unskilled. But whiteness absorbed at least some of them, albeit through a flattening of the diversity of identity (e.g., Old English, New English, and meer Irish) from which they had arrived. A matching submersion of a greater range of identities occurred with the enslaved, “fetched from several parts of Africa, who speak several languages,” but became “Negroes” in the colonial setting of Barbados (Ligon, A True and Exact History, 97, 96). The difference between these two populations can be seen in the eventual departure of many descending from the British Isles: they could leave (repeating a pattern of emigration). According to Greene, “from a high of about 30,000 in 1650, the number of whites fell to about 20,000 in 1680 and 15,500 in 1700.”21 That change represented a racially-differentiated mobility, part of a plantation mode of relation that would be extracted from Barbados to other British colonies. On both sides of the Atlantic, Irish people revealed themselves to be skilled negotiators of the social relations and hierarchies of plantation life. In Ireland, they played both sides, serving, for example, in the occupying army left by Cromwell (when a 30% attrition rate left the invaders desperate for manpower).22 In colonial Barbados, Irish-born people arrived as voluntary indentured servants, as forcibly transported captives, and also as plantation owners and managers. The plantation mode of relation made possible new categories of demarcation, control, abuse, degradation, resistance, subversion, and opportunity in Ireland and in the New World. While colonial Ireland saw the first English plantations (including

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dispossession, burned-earth starvation policies, and a formal, legal expectation that the Irish would work the lands of the new plantations), the Irish were not treated as chattel, property to be bought and sold. Indeed, as Lee Wilson has shown, at this time, chattel itself is a category newly applied to humans.23 Plantation shapes and frames the operations of the relation. In Ireland, those hierarchies were narrower for the Irish than they would be in the New World being created in Barbados. In Barbados, the Irish of the archipelagic colonies became the Whites of the Caribbean colony. The initial British settlement of Barbados may have been peaceful, but “no poets sang of Barbados, Jamaica or the Leeward Islands in the seventeenth century,” notes Dunn in Sugar and Slaves.24 When sugar production began in 1644, slaverybased monocultural production – the semi-industrial production of an addictive crop, sugar, for export – quickly developed in Barbados. The deadly work of early modern sugar production resisted aestheticization, fortunately, some might add. With an extraordinary mortality rate among the enslaved, there is no reshaping the labor of a sugar plantation into pastoral form. As a result, the British initially lacked a representation through which they could see and consider how sugar got to the table. Early colonial Barbados, though, has Richard Ligon’s 1657 book about his stay there during the late 1640s. Languishing in debtor’s prison, Ligon aestheticized plantation life, languidly recalling the wine, food, produce, flora, and entertainments of Barbados. Moreover, Ligon not only provided information on plantation relations in colonial Barbados; he also brought back to England stories and terms that persisted long after his History initially circulated. Finally, Ligon, self-consciously signaling his familiarity with architecture, also proposed improved plantation architecture and provided future prospective sugar plantations with detailed architectural drawings for organizing an integrated sugar farm and factory. Ligon visited Drax Hall, which is still the Barbadian plantation home of the England-based Drax family, who have owned it since not long after their family’s arrival on the island in the 1620s. As a building, Drax Hall represents a relatively modest, early version of the type Stephen Hague calls a “Gentleman’s House”: “small classical houses provid[ing] a setting for transatlantic elite identity formation.”25 While it does have a clear symmetry, Drax Hall does not have the scale of eighteenth-century English country houses, nor is it especially classicist. It is a comparatively modest home. But it is strikingly familiar from the Irish plantation context. As can be seen in side-by-side photos, Drax Hall bears an uncanny resemblance to Cavanacor House in Ulster (Figure 6.3). Painted white, Drax would look nearly identical to Cavanacor (and also reflect the Caribbean sun, cooling the interior). Both have a double gable roof. The few exterior differences relate to climate. Cavanacor in Ulster needed heat and has no awnings. Heating is unnecessary in Barbados, although shade is, and awnings provide it. Otherwise, we are addressing the same basic house structure in the two locales. Indeed, Ligon complains “that in the afternoons, when the Sun came to the West, those little low roofed rooms were like

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Figure 6.3 Drax Hall, 1638–1647, Barbados. Source: Photo by the author.

Stoves, or heated Ovens,” even with awnings over the windows.26 Ulster architecture was meant to contain heat, not dissipate it. Ligon noted that James Drax “lives like a Prince,” and Ligon devoted a lengthy paragraph to detailing the feasts that characterized wealthy Barbadian planter life (82). Ligon also reviews the nutritional gustatory hierarchy outside the plantation home. Sometimes, in addition to the minimal amount provided to the enslaved (two mackerels for each male per week, one for each female, and an allowance of plantains), if one of the plantation animals died, it would be shared unevenly between “the servants and the Negroes,” between the White indentured and the Black enslaved. “The servants eat the bodies, and the Negroes the skins, head and entrails” of dead cattle (86). If a horse died, “the whole bodies of them were distributed amongst the Negroes” (86). Servants could drink “Mobbie,” but “the Negroes nothing but fair water” (86). In the plantation home, by contrast, Ligon reported a cornucopia of often imported foods, including three different types of wine, plus “Sherry, Canary, Red Sack . . . with all Spirits that come from England” (87). The meals were clearly costly and stately, but the home itself was much less so. Ligon was bothered by Barbadian buildings, which are merely transatlantic, too closely built on the model with which British settlers were familiar: “timber houses, with low roofs,” and “stopping, or barring out the wind,” when they could instead “let in the cool breeze” (89, 90). He explained what caused this limit on an

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otherwise luxurious tropical lifestyle: “their poverty and indigence” (90). “Planters,” he reported, want better houses, but when they considered the need for labor in sugar production, “they fall back, and put on their considering caps” (92). Ligon claimed he “drew out at least twenty plots,” or plans for homes in Barbados, with only two being built (2). Having celebrated what he saw as the pleasures of a Caribbean plantation home, Ligon proposed architectural modifications to enhance them for the future settler: site the buildings to create shade, cross-ventilate to accommodate breeze, and elevate three feet off the ground to reduce moisture. In that crawlspace, Ligon proposed “Ventiducts,” which would direct the wind upward into the house, “and by that means you shall feel the cool breeze all the day” (92–3). In Architecture and Empire in Jamaica, Louis P. Nelson notes that “those few architectural histories that attend to the Atlantic typically do so by presuming a unidirectional flow of people and ideas from east to west.”27 Barbados seems to be a case of architectural ideas and stories circulating from west to east. For example, while in Barbados, Ligon met a Native American, Yarico, who told Ligon the story of an Englishman whom she had helped escape to his ship and who repaid the profound debt he owed her by selling her into slavery. Richard Steele retold this story decades later in The Spectator, through which it informed emerging Enlightenment discussions of sympathy. As Ligon summarized: “so poor Yarico for her love, lost her liberty” (107). Ligon also was the first author to use the word “pickaninny,” which, descending from a Spanish or Portuguese phrase, pique’nonino, became a derogatory word in English language colonies (98). Finally, Ligon, who cited Vitruvius and alluded to Sir Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture to establish his bona fides as an architect, devoted pages to architectural drawings for a sugar mill: in plan and section, with a detailed index to the drawings, and lengthy discussion of the sugar making processes (136, 149–155). In other words, his document mixes British, Indigenous American, African, and architectural information in an actual blueprint for future architectures of extraction in the Atlantic. There may also be formal and stylistic influences after the aestheticization of the plantation. Consider, for example, St. Nicholas Abbey, Barbados (completed in 1658 or 1659) and Springhill, Ulster, Ireland (completed in the early 1680s) (Figures 6.4–6.5).28 The latter was made possible by the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland and the island-altering land transfers that followed. “The founder of the family in Ulster, an earlier William Conyngham (d. 1666), was one of Oliver Cromwell’s Commissions in county Armagh.”29 With some of the elements of Springhill (e.g., the symmetry and the curved cornices), a northward Atlantic current seems to have been working in Ulster since the retrofitting of Doe Castle and the subsequent completion of Cavanacor House decades earlier. The recognizable plantation home – the white house, the symmetrical building, the allées of trees, the green lawn – emerged between the 1620s and the 1680s in Ulster, and that arrangement became part of the mode of relation – the big house at the center of the lawn. Pleasure has become part of the plantation ideal, even in cold, often gray and green Ireland.

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Figure 6.4 St. Nicholas Abbey, Barbados (completed in 1658 or 1659). Source: Photo by the author.

In 1984, Gary A. Puckrein invoked a Barbadian expression, “Little England,” to describe seventeenth-century Barbados. Puckrein argues that “structurally the plantation had no equivalent in English or African society.”30 Especially with the dramatic growth in the number of enslaved and, later, Creolized Africans, of course, there is no exact equivalent in either of the two other main points of the Atlantic triangle. With Englishmen Transplanted (2003), Larry Gragg takes up the challenge and argues implicitly in response that “the planters of Barbados had sought to create a little England,” having “sought to replicate other important English ways.”31 The recent historiography of early colonial Barbados offers a stark choice, then: the island is either without precedent and little like England or it represents a self-conscious recreation of the planters’ native and ancestral home counties. There is another possibility which combines elements of both, though: colonial Ireland. Ostensibly a place legally required to replicate English ways, early modern Ireland had patrician landlords and the imposing presence of often new and/or newly-renovated big houses, as one could find in England. However, in colonial Ireland, as in Barbados, many of the plantation workers had no legal or customary rights to estate lands, and, as in Barbados, caring reciprocity, assuming such existed in England between lord and tenants, lost its meaning. Puckrein notes that “Planter fears and black dissatisfaction were written in the architecture

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Figure 6.5 Springhill House, c. 1658 with modifications in 1680 and 1780, Magherafelt, Co. Derry, Ulster, Northern Ireland. Source: Photo by the author.

of plantation society.”32 The transatlantic point is that mutual fear is built into the structure of the plantation relation, including in the British Isles. Early colonial Barbados, that is, involved a little colonial Ireland, itself a new hybrid of English customs and new plantation regulations. Barbados, Newman argued, “played a foundational role in defining how plantation labor developed throughout British America.”33 Structurally, Barbados bridged Ireland and the British colonies on mainland North America. The effect can be seen not only in the labor-intensive, large-scale monoculture and export-driven tillage agriculture but also in how it created the impression before the spread of English Palladianism that plantations could be pleasurable. Notes 1 Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, “Introduction,” in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery, ed. Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1–15: 2. 2 Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd and Brian Jordan Jefferson, “Development by dispossession,” in Colonial Racial Capitalism, eds. Susan Koshy, Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd and Brian Jordan Jefferson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).

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3 Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established (Hassocks Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976). 4 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 65. 5 Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1. 6 Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 36. 7 Henry Fraser and Ronnie Hughes, Historic Houses of Barbados (Edgehill, Barbados: Wordsmith International, 2009), 28. 8 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20. 9 Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713, For. Gary B. Nash (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 256. 10 Liam Swords, The Flight of the Earls: A Popular History (Dublin: Columba, 2007), 95. 11 Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race. Volume I: Racial Oppression and Social Control, 2nd ed., Intro. Jeffrey B. Perry (New York: Verso, 2012), 23. 12 England and Wales, A Collection of Such Orders and Conditions, as Are to Be Obserued by the Vndertakers, Vpon the Distribution and Plantation of the Eschaeted Lands in Vlster London, By Robert Barker, printer to the Kings most excellent Maiestie, 1608, AB1r. http:// libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.clemson.edu/docv iew/2240887957?accountid=6167, accessed 25 July 2020. All quotations from the 1609 Ulster Plantation Orders come from this edition, and are cited parenthetically in the text. 13 Alistair Rowan, North West Ulster: The Counties of Londonderry, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 220. 14 According to the Monreagh Ulster Scots Heritage Center, the four times greatgrandmother of 11th US president Polk was born at Cavanacor in 1634 (www.monreaghulsterscotscentre.com/project/cavanacor-house/). 15 Hilary McD. Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9. All quotations from Beckles comes from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 16 Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 7, 8. 17 Newman, A New World of Labor, 7. 18 Ibid., 1. 19 Hilary Beckles, “Foreword,” in Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan (Kingston: The University of West Indies Press, 2015), ix–xi. 20 According to Beckles, “in 1655… Governor Searle learned that there were ‘several Irish servants and negroes out in rebellion in the Thickets and thereabout’” (A History of Barbados, 42). 21 Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 44. 22 Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 209, 210. 23 In her 2021 book, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783, Lee Wilson noted, “English colonists chose a different path. They made a conscious decision to treat slaves not just as property at law, but as chattel property” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 31. 24 Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 14. 25 Stephen Hague, The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1780 (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 5.

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26 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, ed with an Intro. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011), 90. All quotations from Ligon’s History come from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. 27 Nelson, Architecture and Empire, 3. 28 On St. Nicholas Abbey, see Fraser and Hughes, Historic Houses of Barbados, 31. According to Mina Lenox-Conyngham, author of An Old Ulster House: Springhill and the People Who Lived in It, “The marriage of William [Conyngham] and Ann was solemnized in May, 1680. It is clear that some rebuilding was done at this time” (Belfast: Ulster historical Foundation, 2005). epub. 29 Angélique Day, “Introduction,” in Mina Lenox-Conyngham, An Old Ulster House, epub. 30 Gary A. Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627–1700 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 27. 31 Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627– 1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 182, 11. 32 Puckrein, Little England, 78. 33 Newman, A New World of Labor, 6.

Reference List Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race. Volume I: Racial Oppression and Social Control. 2nd ed. Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry. New York: Verso, 2012. Anon. Great Newes from the Barbadoes, Or: A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy of the Negroes against the English and the Happy Discovery of the Same with the Number of Those That Were Burned Alive, Beheaded, and Otherwise Executed for Their Horrid Crimes: With a Short Discription [sic] of That Plantation. London: Printed for L. Curtis, 1676. http://libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=www.proquest.com/ books/great-newes-barbadoes-true-faithful-account-grand/docview/2248501411/ se-2?accountid=6167. Beckles, Hilary McD. “Foreword.” In Caribbean Irish Connections: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Alison Donnell, Maria McGarrity, and Evelyn O’Callaghan. Kingston: The University of West Indies Press, 2015. ———. A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Canny, Nicholas. The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established. Hassocks: Harvester International, 1976. Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Foreword by Gary B. Nash. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Ellis, Clifton, and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. England, and Wales. A Collection of Such Orders and Conditions, as Are to Be Obserued by the Vndertakers, Vpon the Distribution and Plantation of the Eschaeted Lands in Vlster. London. By Robert Barker, printer to the Kings most excellent Maiestie, 1608, AB1r. http://libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy.clemson. edu/docview/2240887957?accountid=6167 (Accessed July 25, 2020). Fraser, Henry, and Ronnie Hughes. Historic Houses of Barbados. Edgehill, Barbados: Wordsmith International, 2009. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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Gragg, Larry. Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627– 1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Hague, Stephen. The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1780. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Koshy, Susan Lisa Marie Cacho, Jodi A. Byrd, and Brian Jordan Jefferson, eds. Colonial Racial Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022. Lenox-Conyngham, Mina. An Old Ulster House: Springhill and the People Who Lived in It. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2005. Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Edited with an Introduction by Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011. Monreagh Ulster Scots Heritage Center. www.monreaghulsterscotscentre.com/project/ cavanacor-house/. Nelson, Louis P. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Newman, Simon P. A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Puckrein, Gary A. Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627– 1700. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Rowan, Alistair. North West Ulster: The Counties of Londonderry, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979. Siochrú, Micheál Ó. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Swords, Liam. The Flight of the Earls: A Popular History. Dublin: Columba, 2007. Wilson, Lee. Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic World Extraction Sites A Comparative Study of the Indigenous Diamond Hill and Black Melrose Plantations Barry L. Stiefel

After 1600, the plantation defined the English, French, and Dutch colonial Atlantic World as the paradigm of social progress and economic success. By 1800, the iconic symbol of the plantation-built environment and system in southeastern North America was typified by a central house that overlooked associated outbuildings and cultivated fields for the processing of cash-crops, such as sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, rice, or indigo. Leading up to the central house and immediately surrounding it would often be an alley of trees along the main access road and other ornamental gardens with exotic plants that were manicured according to a planned planting scheme. Within and sprawling from the central house was a vast landscape tended to by enslaved Black and Brown bodies, often African but also Indigenous. This style of land development, architectural design, aesthetics, and stratification of labor were considered high culture by the European colonizers. The previous Indigenous inhabitants of these colonized lands were often either displaced, killed, or enslaved to make room for the cash-crop plantation economic system. At the structural and social pinnacle of this system were the European/EuropeanCreole taskmasters, enslavers, and financiers, among others. However, a striking contrast between Diamond Hill plantation near Chatsworth, Georgia, and Melrose plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, is that they were initially developed, owned, and operated by free Indigenous and Black individuals, respectively. These were Cherokee Chief James Vann of Diamond Hill and Louis Metoyer, the gens de couleur libres (free person of color) of Melrose, and in many ways, exemplified the model set by white patriarchs with enslaved people forced to work for their benefit. This is significant because, as Jason Richards has found, cross-racial social imitation between people of color and whites was central to the creation of American culture(s) during the nineteenth century.1 In American history, whiteness has sometimes been idealized by those who were not white. Using these extraordinary, seemingly paradoxical examples of Indigenous and Black people owning and operating a conventional plantation, where resources were extracted, and other people of color were enslaved, this chapter will revisit the questions of inquiry using the unique perspectives of these landed, DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-10

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 107 non-white people to critically understand a socially-constructed architecture of extraction from cultural perceptions of race. This chapter will explore how Diamond Hill and Melrose can facilitate critical questioning of the meaning of alternative voices, experiences, and agencies regarding the physical and aesthetical architectures of extraction in the Atlantic World. For example, can people of mixed ancestry emanate more than one façade in the social and architectural sense, one white and the other color? Both the Vanns and Metoyers had a significant component of European ancestry besides their Cherokee and African origins. Why is it that multiracialized people are expected to operate exclusively in the culture of color, or otherwise, they are characterized as disingenuous? Understanding people with mixed racial-ethnic identities on their own terms can reveal new perspectives on the meaning of architecture and place. Because of Diamond Hill and Melrose’s association with Indigenous and Black peoples, they provide a unique perspective for understanding the value of a transethnic (and transnational) approach in the study of Atlantic World architectural history in new ways through social networks not traditionally taken into consideration. While there were other plantations with gens de couleur libres owners, such as Laura plantation, which is near Melrose, in these other instances where the historic plantation survives, the buildings were built by white Creoles who either later sold or bequeathed the property to free people of color. Likewise, the Major Ridge House in Rome, Georgia, began as a vernacular Cherokee residence in 1792. It was the later additions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Euromerican owners that gave the building its Georgian (Revival) style.2 Therefore, Diamond Hill and Melrose plantations are also exceptional regarding the circumstances when they were developed directly under the ownership of gens de couleur libres and Cherokee peoples. Previous Visits to Diamond Hill and Melrose Plantations: A Literature Review Because of the exceptional circumstances surrounding the ownership of Diamond Hill and Melrose, these sites have received scholarly attention in the past, though the present chapter is the first study to bring these two historic plantations together. The oldest of the plantations is Diamond Hill, built in 1804. The site attracted an amateur (Euromerican) historical interest in the early twentieth century, with the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution championing its architectural importance. In 1958, the Chief Van House at Diamond Hill was opened as a historic house museum by the Georgia Historical Commission, but presently, it is part of the Georgia State Park system.3 Over the twentieth century, occasional research on James Vann and his family was conducted by local historians; however, not until 2010 was a full book devoted to the significance of the plantation, namely The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, by Tiya Miles. As Miles describes, Diamond Hill, one of the first and most prosperous Cherokee plantations, American Indians, enslaved people of African descent, and Euro-American

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missionaries, draftsman, and laborers lived incredible, intersecting lives. Their experiences, set against the backdrop of American colonization of the Cherokee Nation, the spread of Black chattel slavery across the South, and a premarket revolution set in motion by the American War of Independence, reveals the gradations of everyday life across multiple color lines, the brutal injustices of race-based systems of slavery and land seizure, and the creative ability of human beings to adapt and survive against the odds.4 Miles’ research on Diamond Hill remains the definitive source on this historic property. In the following year, Jennifer Elliott did a comparison study article on the Vann House with the Ridge House in northwest Georgia.5 A book exclusive to Melrose has not yet been written. Instead, several journal articles and chapters within larger edited volumes have been published. At the plantation, there are smaller buildings that date from the 1810s, though the main house was completed in 1833. Amateur historical interest in Melrose emerged in the early twentieth century with then-owner Cammie Henry and the Association of Natchitoches Women for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches.6 Melrose is the focus of multiple articles on heritage interpretation and tourism by David Morgan, Kevin MacDonald, Fiona Handley, Aubra Lee, and Emma Morley.7 Elizabeth Mills has also investigated the inhabitants of Melrose, most significantly Marie-Thérèse Coincoin.8 Mills has observed that as “a historical site, Melrose illustrates a littleknown aspect of the African-American experience, and the placement of Coincoin at its head provides an icon of black female self-determination for a culture that had done little to preserve its black heritage.”9 At Melrose, the inability to preserve the site’s original Black heritage was because gens de couleur libres had been displaced as the owners by the mid-nineteenth century. Art Shiver and Tom Whitehead have also published a biography on AfricanAmerican artist Clementine Hunter, who lived at Melrose during the twentieth century.10 Later, another biography on Cammie Henry was written by Patricia Becker, who hosted the artist colony at Melrose and championed preservation of the property during the early twentieth century.11 The biographies of Hunter and Henry focus on a far later time than the period of significance of this study comparing the two plantations but demonstrate that Melrose has significance for multiple intersectional reasons. Summarized Development Histories of Diamond Hill and Melrose Plantations Appreciating the significance of Diamond Hill and its Georgian architectural style begins with understanding traditional pre-contact Indigenous southeastern woodland people and their architecture. Tribes, such as the Cherokee, built large houses with local materials, which included a wooden, basket-woven framework that was constructed and covered with earth. The roofs were often gabled or hipped and made with thatch. Indigenous architectural design was influenced by climate and cultural reliance upon sedentary subsistence agriculture. However, by the early nineteenth century, Cherokee architecture had changed from two centuries

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 109 of interactions with settler colonialism.12 Cherokee places that pre-date European contact reflect a different living pattern (Figure 7.1).13 The Indigenous-built environments made and remade following the wake of the American Revolution were a mixture of Indigenous vernacular and European-influenced vernacular architecture, depending upon the social and economic relationships that a particular tribe, band, or village had with European and Euromerican colonial neighbors. This material complexity and transitioning came from many tribes having lost their homes and villages during the conflicts of the eighteenth century through violence and relocation. Reconstructed examples were made at the outdoor living history museum of Oconaluftee Village, North Carolina, where the typical Cherokee house before the Trail of Tears is similar to a European-derived log cabin in contrast to the mideighteenth-century Cherokee house.14 The Cherokee borrowing of Euromerican building traditions, whether vernacular for the common people in their towns and villages or formally at Diamond Hill, was not a thoughtless reflection of assimilation into Western culture. The Cherokee, among several Indigenous peoples, collectively called by Euromericans and Europeans the “Five Civilized Tribes” (including the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole), had been utilizing material acculturation as a political tactic for maintaining sovereignty and opposing further loss of traditional lands by engaging the United States government and the Euromerican people on their own sociopolitical terms. For these five tribes, this process entailed wide acceptance of Christianity, centralized government with a written legal code, literacy, capitalism, intermarriage with Euromericans, and using Black people for chattel slavery. In 1825, the Cherokee took the ambitious step of re-creating themselves as a formal nation-state based on the Western model, with an official capital at the new town of New Echota in present-day Georgia. Purposely-sited buildings included the Council House (i.e., capitol building) for the legislature, Court House, and printing press, along with taverns, shops, and houses – all built with Euromericaninfluenced vernacular building traditions.15 While Cherokees likely built their own vernacular buildings in New Echota, the only known carpenter-contractor was J. S. White, a Euromerican from New York who advertised in the bilingual English-Cherokee newspaper Cherokee Phoenix.16 Therefore, the Euromerican frontier architectural vernacular was clearly present in New Echota and even in the Cherokee government’s most esteemed buildings. Benjamin Gold, a Congregationalist deacon from Cornwall, Connecticut, visited New Echota in 1828, and recorded it as: an interesting and pleasant place. The ground is level and smooth as a floor; the center of the Nation, a new place, laid out in city form: a hundred lots of an acre each. A spring, called the public spring about twice as large as our sawmill, near the center, with other springs on the plat; six new framed houses in sight, besides a Council House, Court House, printing office and four stores.17 Therefore, when Chief James Vann had the main house at Diamond Hill built in 1804 with a late formal Georgian style of architecture, it must be understood as

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Figure 7.1 Reconstructed Cherokee architecture at Oconaluftee Village, North Carolina. Bottom: An example of the typical Cherokee house before the Trail of Tears (1820s) is similar to a vernacular European-derived log cabin. Top: This is in contrast to the Cherokee house style of the mid-eighteenth century. Source: Photographs by the author.

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 111 a link within a much longer chain of Appalachian-based Cherokee architectural evolution (Figure 7.2). The main house of Diamond Hill is exceptional in that it was one of the first, if not the first, large building constructed by the Cherokee using brick. The architect-contractor was “Mr. Vogt” (first name unrecorded), who was likely of Euromerican origins. Many of the laborers who made the bricks and constructed the main house were enslaved Black people.18 By Euromerican standards, the Vann family were among the wealthiest (materially) in the Cherokee Nation, having extensive landholdings, enslaved Black ownership, and trade connections. The surviving illustrations of Joseph Vann, James Vann’s son and heir to the property after his death, depict a refined young man wearing the latest Euromerican fashion who also became a Cherokee Chief (Figure 7.3). The main house at Diamond Hill was the affluent showplace of acculturated Cherokee society prior to the Trail of Tears. In 1819, on a tour of southern states, US President James Monroe stayed one night at Diamond Hill as a distinguished guest. The Vann family lost Diamond Hill in 1834 during the Trail of Tears-associated eviction and successfully sued the United States government for $19,605 in compensation ($635,575 today), which included the main house, 800 acres of land, forty-two cabins, six barns, five smokehouses, eight corn cribs, a grist mill, a blacksmith shop, a foundry, a trading post, a peach kiln, a still, and orchards of

Figure 7.2 The main house of Diamond Hill near Chatsworth, Georgia. Source: Photograph by the author.

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Figure 7.3 Chief Joseph Vann as depicted in an oil painting from before the Trail of Tears, dressed in the latest Euroamerican fashion of the day. Source: Courtesy of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and the Chief Vann House Historic Site.

1,133 peach and 147 apple trees. What the Vann family received for Diamond Hill from government eminent domain was likely under fair market value and less than what they would have received if they had been Euromerican.19 In comparison to Diamond Hill, Melrose arose under far different circumstances. Louis Metoyer’s mother, Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a free woman of color,

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 113 began purchasing land near what is now Melrose in 1796.20 Coincoin’s land acquisition occurred when Louisiana was under Spanish dominion, which is significant because the Spanish initiated a policy of coartación that enabled enslaved Blacks to set a price for purchasing their freedom and make a down payment, as well as for family members. Within this process, a coartado had some legal protections above a regular enslaved status, such as prohibitions from being resold to another enslaver, a higher level of provisions and care, protections from some forms of abuse, a percentage of rental revenue if their enslaver leased them out to work for others, and the right to prosecute their enslaver in court for failing to follow the coartado regulations. While coartación was discontinued in 1807 by the Orleans Territorial government after the American purchase of Louisiana, its creation in 1769 was a major part of what enabled an affluent gens de couleur libres class to come about in the nineteenth century. Until 1804, the gens de couleur libres of Louisiana also modeled themselves off the gens de couleur libres of Saint-Domingue.21 The land that became Melrose was acquired during the 1810s. Smaller buildings were developed first, including those called the Yucca House, African House, Ghana House, a barn, and other outbuildings. The “Africanness” of the Yucca, African, and Ghana houses will be revisited, though there has been controversy regarding the design inspirations of these buildings. Not until 1832 did Louis Metoyer begin construction on the main house, though completed by his son and heir Jean Baptiste Louis Metoyer, due to Metoyer’s passing. The architectural style of the main house at Melrose has been described as French Colonial with Greek Revival details (Figure 7.4).22 No architect or contractor is recorded, though there are suspicions that it was Seraphin Llorens, a gens de couleur libres carpenter who married into the Metoyer family.23 Business management was challenging for Theophile Louis Metoyer, Jean Baptiste Louis Metoyer’s son and heir, who had to sell Melrose in 1847 to the Euromericans, Henry and Hypolite Hertzog, for $8,340 ($283,565 today) to pay outstanding debts.24 Architectural historian Tara Dudley has studied the contributions of gens de couleur libres to architectural design and the building trades in antebellum urban New Orleans. Her observations are significant in highlighting that the contributions made to architecture and construction by gens de couleur libres were in the way they brought regional Creole forms together with popular American styles and climatic adaptations. This process of cultural synthesis has relevance to the study of rural Melrose and the many craftsmen of African descent who constructed plantation houses for Euromerican owners across the South, where Euromerican stylistic influences were beautifully combined.25 This architectural combination is exactly what is found at Melrose’s main house, with its French Colonial style and Greek Revival details. Further corroborating Dudley’s findings and its applications to the Natchitoches, Louisiana region and the Metoyer family is the original St. Augustine Catholic Church. The first church was built on the site in 1829 (the current one dates from 1917) approximately three years before Melrose by Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, who was a brother to Louis Metoyer. Nicolas describes in his will that: The Church of St. Augustine of Natchitoches was built there by me and my family, principally for our usage, except that I desire, and such is my wish

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Figure 7.4 Melrose near Natchitoches, Louisiana, with the main house (bottom) and African House (top). Source: Both photographs from the Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington.

that outsiders professing our holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman religion will have the right to assist at the divine office in the said chapel and shall enjoy, moreover, all the rights and privileges which I and my family are able to have there.26 Nicolas funded the construction of the first St. Augustine church in 1829, but his reference to it being “built there by me and my family” may imply that others, such as Louis, Seraphin Llorens, or himself, were actually involved in additional ways besides financing, such as through construction management or even physical

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 115 labor. It is also not a far stretch to assume that Louis wanted Melrose to have a large main house so that it would be his own pride and joy, like St. Augustine Church was for Nicolas. Through Melrose and St. Augustine Church, the Metoyers expressed the material wealth and status that they had accumulated as gens de couleur libres. Indeed, from the nineteenth century until 1970, an oil painting of Papa [Nicolas] Augustin Metoyer hung at Melrose, depicting Nicolas wearing a formal frock coat with a rendering of the St. Augustin Church he patronised, portraying that he was an accomplished gens de couleur libres who had built something novel (Figure 7.5).27 The vernacular style of St. Augustine Church of Natchitoches, as reflected in the oil painting alongside the main house at Melrose, mirrors Dudley’s findings on gens de couleur libres vernacular architecture and its stages of development in form during the nineteenth century.28 According to MacDonald, Morgan, Handley, Lee, and Morley, the Yucca, African, and Ghana houses and other outbuildings that pre-date the main house at Melrose also reflect Dudley’s findings on combining regional Creole forms with American building conventions, but in this case agriculturally-associated outbuildings and vernacular houses.29 Therefore, the Yucca, African, and Ghana houses actually represent earlier gens de couleur libres vernacular construction in a rural setting that was not as economically developed as it would rise to be in the 1830s. When Melrose was nominated as a National Historic Landmark in 1974, part of the rationale was because these outbuildings were falsely believed to be “of African style and design which are perhaps the only extant structures of this kind in the Nation.”30 The origins of these claims can be traced to Francois Mignon, born under the name Frank Mineah, a Euromerican originally from Cortland, New York. As a storyteller, Mignon was enthralled by French Louisiana Creole culture and subsequently lived at the artist colony of Melrose between 1939 and 1970, where he worked for Henry in maintaining the property.31 Morgan, Shiver, and Whitehead found great discrepancies in Mignon’s early folktales, for it was not until later drafts that the stories on the “Africanness” of Melrose became standardized. Euromerican fiction writer Lyle Saxon’s tenure at Melrose also occurred at this time. While residing at the Yucca House, Saxon wrote the novel Children of Strangers, which further popularized Mignon’s stories.32 Tara Observing Whiteness Through the Golden Haze of the Euromerican Lookingglass Tara, the mythologized antebellum Southern plantation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind story, influenced the way Diamond Hill and Melrose have been considered from the 1930s to the 2000s.33 At Melrose, Henry has been described as the living embodiment of the Lost Cause movement, which was a Southern-originated pseudohistorical-negationist-heroic mythology that advocated the Confederate States’ ambition of maintaining slavery and independence through violence as honorable. The work of Mignon and Saxon, along with Mitchell, were all part of the Southern Literary Renaissance of the interWorld War period, which also favored the Lost Cause.34 These literary works

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Figure 7.5 Nicolas Augustin Metoyer in an oil painting from 1836 at the new St. Augustine Catholic Church, Natchitoches, Louisiana. Source: Photograph by Laura E. Blokker, with permission.

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 117 also influenced the nascent historic preservation movement, resulting in very robust efforts in the American South, in cities like Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah, as well as historic sites like Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the Hermitage. This phenomenon was also the case for the Euromerican communities near Chatsworth, Georgia, and Natchitoches, Louisiana, where Diamond Hill and Melrose are respectively located. However, for Euromerican Southerners, the antebellum-era nostalgia of the Lost Cause did not fit as it should have at these sites compared to the other sites of extraction common throughout the region because of who the original property developers were. The unusual instance of Blacks enslaving Blacks at Melrose was not missed and occurred at other places across the South. Therefore, Melrose was literarily made into a “little Africa” that fit Mignon’s and his contemporaries Lost Cause worldview where slavery was acceptable – especially since some French creoles of color also participated as enslavers. Through his storytelling, Mignon portrayed an exoticness of Blackon-Black enslavement that worked for Henry and other Southern Euromericans. He believed that the gens de couleur libres of yore were unlike contemporary African Americans within their midst. Therefore, the gens de couleur libres heritage of Melrose was revised by early twentieth-century Euromericans to meet their expectations of what Black people could or could not be.35 Stories are how most people understand historic sites, especially architectures of extraction, because they are the medium for how meaning is conveyed about a place. African Americans were largely denied the ability to share, research, reflect, or otherwise have their history valued by Euromerican society through Jim Crow oppression, as well as deprived of access to formal education and economic opportunity. Mignon’s fictional stories about the Metoyer family at Melrose eventually became accepted truths by the local African-American community, too, despite some members of the Creole community maintaining differing historical accounts. The African-American folk artist Hunter, who was also resident at Melrose, believed and depicted Yucca and Africa house and other buildings as African through the stories she learned from Mignon and others.36 Mills has also found that descendants of the Coincoin and Metoyer families continued to tell the myths they learned about Melrose, their ancestress Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, and the site’s Africanness even after learning of Morgan, Shiver, and Whitehead’s historical corrections because they found a sense of pride in the stories that connected their ancestors to a romanticized Africannesque heritage.37 A similar pattern also emerges at Diamond Hill. The honoring of Indigenous history by Euromerican Southerners during the early twentieth century was popular because they saw the inevitable defeat of the Five Civilized Tribes, like the Cherokee, as analogous to the Lost Cause.38 Some Southerners also perceived that claiming a drop of Cherokee heritage through intermarriage enabled them to claim that they were “Native Southerners,” even when they knew nothing of Cherokee culture. The Euromerican preservationists, historians, and journalists involved with the restoration of the main house at Diamond Hill perceived it as an “Indian” place, though they also appropriated the heritage of the site. For example, in March 1952, a parade was organized in nearby Dalton, Georgia, to boost interest in the

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restoration of the main house at Diamond Hill. The local high school band, Boy Scouts, and other dignitaries, as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Principal Chief Osley B. Saunooke and his assistants, all participated.39 However, a lack of cultural sensitivity became very apparent when the adult Boy Scout leader joined in the parade with a “Cherokee chief’s regalia,” whereas Saunooke, “reluctant to ‘show off,’ wore a pin-striped business suit.”40 Thus, Saunooke chose not to “play Indian” for the gawking crowd even though he was authentically Indigenous. The regalia worn by the “admired” adult Boy Scout leader was actually not Cherokee but appropriated from Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains because this is what Euromericans assumed all Native American chiefs wore. Therefore, to be Indigenous in the eyes of Euromericans, even a Cherokee had to “play Indian” in order to be accepted as authentic. Later, journalistic coverage reported on how “Georgia’s Vann House was built by a Cherokee Indian Chief, James Clement Vann, in the Cohutta mountains far removed from any sophisticated white man’s civilization”41 and that the landscape would also be restored “with Cherokee roses and red berries and with an herb garden in the rear of the house.”42 Cherokee roses were specifically promoted in order to imbue the landscape with an element of Indianness because of the name association. Euromericans could only visualize Diamond Hill as a romanticized Indian anomaly with a bucolic flower and herb garden in the rolling mountains of north Georgia, where chiefs wore Great Plains-style Eagle feather headdresses. Twentieth-century Euromericans could not appreciate Diamond Hill as a site of extraction par excellence with any other developed in the region and by Indigenous people who saw themselves as equal to any Euromerican with their own nation-state, where enslaved Blacks toiled to produce cash crops – more real than any mythologized Tara from Gone with the Wind, as depicted in motion pictures.43 Indeed, the cultural appropriation that occurred at Diamond Hill and Melrose by these preservationists was another instance of extraction. Conclusion In comparing the illustrations of Joseph Vann with Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, both were equally interested in Euromerican fashion. The surviving images of these men indicate that neither was interested in “playing Indian” or “playing African.” The Vanns and Metoyers dressed white because nineteenth-century socioeconomic norms of Euromerican settler society dictated that this was the only way one could succeed. The architectural and archival evidence also supports that Diamond Hill and Melrose were developed by Indigenous and gens de couleur libres families who were focused more on Euromerican concepts of wealth and prosperity than Cherokee or African expressions of cultural exceptionalism. In comparison, the Metoyers were further removed from their African heritage, literally by geography, as well as immersed in a European colonial society that both erased traditional African identities and encouraged Western assimilation. This is in contrast to the Vanns, who, while of European ancestry also, were enmeshed in the actual culture of their Cherokee matrilineal line and were recognized as chiefs within the sovereign Cherokee Nation, thus technically making this a bi-national study. Therefore, racial and

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 119 social construction within these spaces of extraction were complex because gens de couleur libres and Cherokee identities were also valued in their respective social and political circles. The Vanns and Metoyers were both people of color and white, and these components influenced their identities that Euromerican outsiders could not fully comprehend. It was in the twentieth century when Euromerican historians and preservationists began taking an interest in these plantations and where they oversimplified the respective cultural histories of the original owners. Mid-twentieth-century racism and white supremacy could not accept how the Vanns and Metoyers perceived themselves, and this had lasting adverse impacts on the truthful understanding of present-day Indigenous and Black peoples. According to the laws of Georgia and Louisiana, a person could only have a singular racial identity, and one drop of anything not European made you an “Other.” It has been found that Euromericans often engage history in a way that makes them distrustful of those who are different from them, such as by race or ethnicity.44 So, there are social-structural issues for contemporary preservationists to be mindful of, especially considering how few minority preservationists there are. While separated by time and geography, by appearing in the role of the white aristocratic planter, the Vanns and Metoyers had more in common with each other despite their different Cherokee and African ethnic origins. But we also must not forget that the Vanns and Metoyers wore their respective Cherokee and gens de couleur libres heritages within these social circles. Together, the post-nineteenth-century preservation of plantations like Diamond Hill and Melrose can facilitate critical questioning on the meaning of alternative voices, experiences, and agencies as they resonate for generations in the present and future to dwell on. Notes 1 See Jason Richards, Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum U.S. Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017). 2 Benjamin Levy, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Major Ridge House,” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1973. 3 Site visit by the author in June 2020. 4 Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3–4. 5 Jennifer Elliot, “Ga-ne-tli-yv-s-di (Change) in the Cherokee Nation: The Vann and Ridge Houses in Northwest Georgia,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 43–63. 6 Gary Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 278. 7 David Morgan, Kevin MacDonald and Fiona Handley, “Economics and Authenticity: A Collision of Interpretations in the Cane River National Heritage Area, Louisiana,” The George Wright Forum 23, no. 1 (2006): 44–61; and David Morgan, Kevin MacDonald, Fiona Handley, Aubra Lee and Emma Morley, “The Archaeology of Local Myths and Heritage Tourism: The Case of Cane River’s Melrose Plantation,” in A Future for Archaeology (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2007), 127–142. 8 Elizabeth Mills, “Documenting a Slave’s Birth, Parentage, and Origins (Marie Therese Coincoin, 1742–1816): A Test of ‘Oral History’,” in National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2008): 245–266.

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9 Elizabeth Mills, “Demythicizing History: Marie Therese Coincoin, Tourism, and the National Historical Landmarks Program,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Society 53, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 402–437. 10 See Art Shiver and Tom Whitehead, Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). 11 See Patricia Becker, Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and Her Circle at Melrose Plantation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018). 12 Virginia McAlester, A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2018), 107–116. 13 Christopher Rodning, Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and Landscape in the Southern Appalachians (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015). 14 Site visit by the author in June 2021. 15 Site visit by the author in June 2020. 16 Henry Malone, Cherokees of the Old South: A People in Transition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956), 120. Map by Thomas Little at New Echota State Historic Site, Calhoun, Georgia. 17 Correspondence by Benjamin Gold quoted by Henry Malone, “A Report to the Georgia Historical Commission,” University of Georgia, 18 October 1953, at New Echota State Historic Site, Calhoun, Georgia. 18 Miles, The House on Diamond Hill, 72–73. 19 Ibid., 164–170; and William Mitchell, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Vann House,” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1969. 20 Mills, “Documenting a Slave’s Birth, Parentage, and Origins,” 245–266. 21 Kenneth Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 59–62. 22 Samuel Wilson, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Melrose Plantation,” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1972. 23 Mills, The Forgotten People, 159. 24 Philip Gould, Richard Seale, Robert DeBlieux and Harlan Guidry, Natchitoches and Louisiana’s Timeless Cane River (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 81–108. 25 See Tara Dudley, Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021). 26 Last Will and testament of Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, in Natchitoches Notary Book 25:77–80, NCCO. A copy written in French is at the St. Augustine’s Catholic Church annex. Quoted in Laura E. Blokker, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: St. Augustine Catholic Church and Cemetery,” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2014. 27 Blokker, “Nomination Form: St. Augustine Catholic Church and Cemetery.” 28 See Dudley, Building Antebellum New Orleans. 29 Morgan, MacDonald, Handley, Lee, and Morley, “The Archaeology of Local Myths and Heritage Tourism,” 127–142. 30 Wilson, “Nomination Form: Melrose Plantation,” 6. 31 Lisa Tolbert and Roslyn Holdzkom, “Francois Mignon Papers, 1853–1980 1939–1980,” Collection Number: 03889, University of North Carolina Libraries (Encoded 2001), https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/03889/, (9 February 2022). 32 Shiver and Whitehead, Clementine Hunter, 40–41. 33 Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 73–81. 34 Stephanie E. Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 126. 35 Shiver and Whitehead, Clementine Hunter, 40–41. 36 Ibid., 75.

Whiteness Among People of Color at Atlantic Extraction Sites 121 37 Mills, “Demythicizing History,” 402–437. 38 Harilaos Stecopoulos, “Empire,” in Keywords for Southern Studies, ed. Scott Romine and Jennifer Greeson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 38–47. 39 Felicia Mann, “Indians Join Parade Here to Boost Interest in Project for Purchasing Vann House,” The Dalton [Georgia] Citizen (20 March 1952): 1. 40 Ibid. 41 “Mrs. B. J. Bandy Gives Interesting Facts of Indians and Vann House at Spring Place,” The Dalton [Georgia] Citizen, n.d. Newspaper clipping at Chief Vann State Historic Site library-storage room, Chatsworth, Georgia. 42 Andrew Sparks, “Indians Built This Amazing Georgia House,” Atlanta [Georgia] Journal and Constitution Magazine (1962): np and month missing, clipping at Chief Vann State Historic Site, Chatsworth, Georgia. 43 Miles, The House on Diamond Hill, 11. 44 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 187.

Reference List Adams, Jessica. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Aslakson, Kenneth. Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Becker, Patricia. Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and Her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Blokker, Laura E. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: St. Augustine Catholic Church and Cemetery.” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2014. Dudley, Tara. Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Elliot, Jennifer. “Ga-ne-tli-yv-s-di (Change) in the Cherokee Nation: The Vann and Ridge Houses in Northwest Georgia.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 43–63. Gould, Philip, Richard Seale, Robert DeBlieux, and Harlan Guidry. Natchitoches and Louisiana’s Timeless Cane River. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Levy, Benjamin. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Major Ridge House.” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1973. Malone, Henry. Cherokees of the Old South: A People in Transition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956. Mann, Felicia. “Indians Join Parade Here to Boost Interest in Project for Purchasing Vann House.” The Dalton [Georgia] Citizen (Accessed March 20, 1952). McAlester, Virginia. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2018. Miles, Tiya. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Mills, Elizabeth. “Documenting a Slave’s Birth, Parentage, and Origins (Marie Therese Coincoin, 1742–1816): A Test of ‘Oral History.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2008): 245–266. Mills, Elizabeth. “Demythicizing History: Marie Therese Coincoin, Tourism, and the National Historical Landmarks Program.” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Society 53, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 402–437.

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Mills, Gary. The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Mitchell, William. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Vann House.” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1969. Morgan, David, Kevin MacDonald, and Fiona Handley. “Economics and Authenticity: A Collision of Interpretations in the Cane River National Heritage Area, Louisiana.” The George Wright Forum 23, no. 1 (2006): 44–61. Morgan, David, Kevin MacDonald, Fiona Handley, Aubra Lee, and Emma Morley. “The Archaeology of Local Myths and Heritage Tourism: The Case of Cane River’s Melrose Plantation.” In A Future for Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, Inc., 2007. “Mrs. B. J. Bandy Gives Interesting Facts of Indians and Vann House at Spring Place.” The Dalton [Georgia] Citizen (n.d.). Newspaper clipping at Chief Vann State Historic Site library-storage room, Chatsworth, Georgia. Richards, Jason. Imitation Nation: Red, White, and Blackface in Early and Antebellum U.S. Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Rodning, Christopher. Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and Landscape in the Southern Appalachians. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Shiver, Art, and Tom Whitehead. Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Sparks, Andrew. “Indians Built This Amazing Georgia House.” Atlanta [Georgia] Journal and Constitution Magazine (1962), np and month missing, clipping at Chief Vann State Historic Site, Chatsworth, Georgia. Stecopoulos, Harilaos. “Empire.” In Keywords for Southern Studies, edited by Scott Romine and Jennifer Greeson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Tolbert, Lisa, and Roslyn Holdzkom. “Francois Mignon Papers, 1853–1980 1939–1980.” Collection Number: 03889, University of North Carolina Libraries (Encoded 2001). https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/03889/ (Accessed February 9, 2022). Wilson, Samuel. “National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form: Melrose Plantation.” Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1972. Yuhl, Stephanie E. A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

8

Absentee Architecture Remote Building Across the British Atlantic, c. 1800 Jonah Rowen

Early in 1769, the ship Golden Grove, carrying a valuable amount of sugar, was lost at sea. Investors in the shipment included Simon Taylor, the “attorney” or manager of the Golden Grove Estate, near Jamaica’s eastern coast, and the estate’s owner, Chaloner Arcedeckne. Hearing no news of the ship well after its expected arrival, Taylor wrote Arcedeckne, “I hope that your Eighth of the Ship was insured. I relyd so much on her goodness that did not Insure mine.”1 Taylor, confident about the voyage’s profitability, had added several dozen more hogsheads of sugar to the initial amount of eighty, and he regretted not having taken out a policy. In the months following, however, he wrote to “sincerely congratulate” Arcedeckne on receiving £1600 in compensation.2 Although this was less than Arcedeckne expected, Taylor offered consolation: Arcedeckne had “mett with much bad success in your first concern in Shipping,” declaring that he would not load any single ship with more than fifty hogsheads of Golden Grove sugar on future cargoes. Subsequent correspondences include detailed accounts of insurance policies on other ships, indicating that Arcedeckne’s disappointment did not discourage him. All of this wealth, exchanged and indemnified in the form of sugar by white profiteers, was derived from the labor of enslaved Black people who planted, cut, ground, boiled, and packaged the sugar for refinement in Britain. The insurance policyholder Arcedeckne was secure in expecting financial returns even if his ventures foundered, just as the absentee enslaver counted on his estate running smoothly while geographically removed from it. Conversely, enslavers routinely held people they claimed as property liable for their inability to build houses in anticipation of the unpredictable, often harsh Caribbean climate in their construction practices, even as they extolled those houses’ contribution to the “picturesque appearance” of the Jamaican landscape.3 Meanwhile, a Director of the London-based Phoenix Fire Office – which insured Arcedeckne properties – on a trip to the Americas recommended to the company’s board that “Insurances on Sugar Works, if they could be more encouraged, would prove extremely beneficial to the Office.”4 While “The Negro Huts,” he reported, were “liable . . . to considerably more danger than any other part of the planter’s establishment,” they were “never in the risk of the Works,” and, in any event, “they are seldom of value.” Both of these scales for assessing architectural valuation – aesthetic-picturesque and economic-insurable – were mediations, DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-11

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transmuting buildings into, respectively, consumable images or quantifiable accounting. Each, that is, presumed a vantage point removed from the site of labor. Both picturesque and actuarial appraisals reflected security in the knowledge that operations were in order. Insurance and imageability, each technologies of distance, inspired confidence in England-based proprietors like Arcedeckne of profitable returns. Born in Jamaica, Arcedeckne left early in life and never returned.5 Migrating to England for his education at Eton and Oxford, he rose to positions in Parliament and acceded to High Sheriff of Suffolk. From wealth derived from enslaved Black people in the Golden Grove labor camp, Arcedeckne commissioned both a new house in Jamaica, which he never saw, and a house and grounds in Suffolk, in England, called Glevering (Figures 8.1, 8.2). The two estates form a transatlantic dyad, embodying the principle of extracting every bit of value from the transoceanic economy of racial oppression possible.6 Capital traversed the gap between Jamaica and England, as occasionally did “attorney” Simon Taylor, so that Arcedeckne did not have to. Both Golden Grove and Glevering featured a mansion situated on grounds designed to match. The outbuildings of the English property included an orangery – a greenhouse for

Figure 8.1 Adolphe Duperly, “Golden Grove Estate, St. Thomas in the East,” Daguerian Excursions in Jamaica (Kingston, 1844). Source: British Library.

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Figure 8.2 Henry Davy, Glevering Hall, Hacheston, Suffolk, the Seat of Andrew Arcedeckne Esqr., from Davy, Views of the Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen in Suffolk (Southwold, Suffolk, U.K., 1827).

transplanting a tropical climate to the Northern Atlantic – designed by architect Decimus Burton in the 1830s. On the Jamaican estate, meanwhile, agriculture was diffused across the entire landscape. Glevering had attached stables, as well as a church. Golden Grove, on the other hand, had detached enslaved people’s houses, as well as sugar processing facilities. Humphry Repton designed Glevering’s landscape, with a main house by architect John White. This contrasts against Golden Grove, whose designers – let alone builders – remain anonymous. By the end of the eighteenth century, British enslavers recognized that the high expenses and risks attending the Caribbean economy rendered its future uncertain.7 Some withdrew altogether. Others, like Arcedeckne, sought to wring as much profit as possible from their depreciated holdings, all while physically detaching themselves from the people and sites that produced that wealth. Anticipating continued profitability, Arcedeckne’s will directed remaining funds toward purchasing and enslaving more people at Golden Grove.8 In doing so, he entrusted a future for his son, Andrew, to live securely off of capital, land, and stolen labor far away from, and consequently invisible to, the places where the Arcedecknes lived.

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Thus, each comparative fulcrum – grounds, ancillary buildings, mansions, and inhabitants – underscores unbridgeable divides between the two sites while illuminating how wealth extracted from Caribbean landscapes transmuted into cultural capital in England. To analyze these two estates comparatively, I pose the following questions: Where might delineations between these landscapes – one ostensibly productive, the other aestheticized – break down? How were economic factors, like quantifiable output or the workers who rendered each productive, translated into aesthetic terms? And conversely, how did aesthetic predilections affect, or even direct, each site’s economic and technical management? Wealth, Enslavement, and Building Absentee enslavers commonly diverted profits into architecture.9 In Capitalism & Slavery, Eric Williams invokes Fonthill, Lord Mayor of London William Beckford’s neoclassical Wiltshire mansion built from the 1760s onward, whose very siting between two prominent sugar ports, London and Bristol, expresses capitalistimperialist interests.10 If some architects admired the house enough to warrant admission into Vitruvius Britannicus, others found its design outmoded.11 Beckford’s son, also William, used his inheritance to hire architect James Wyatt to supplant his father’s house with Fonthill Abbey, a prodigious Gothic folly for which, at one point, he employed the town’s entire workforce, including agricultural laborers.12 In a hedge to consolidate power, the nouveau riche Beckfords and Arcedecknes intermarried. Translating wealth into social status could be tenuous, and not only due to the vagaries of bad crops, hurricanes, or maritime transport. The forced labor regime itself posed risks. Chaloner Arcedeckne inherited Golden Grove from his father in 1763, soon after which Taylor began encouraging new building projects. “In reguard [sic] to Tradesmen on the Estate,” Taylor wrote, “they will be able [to] build you a House . . . according to your own liking for you can gett Carpenter and Mason Negroes to hire just as well as the Tradesmen can and if they can make money still it certainly will be worth your while.”13 Taylor interspersed such advice with accounts of enslaved people who “sat fire to the Trash Houses” and “endeavoured to sett fire to the House” in a 1765 uprising quashed with substantial carnage.14 This, conjecturally, might explain Arcedeckne’s insistence on building in brick despite Taylor’s dissuasion.15 By 1769, Taylor reassured Arcedeckne (then in Venice) that “the most considerable Buildings are now done,” that they would produce yet greater profits, and that “They are now built in a manner for ever provided no Accident of Fire etc, which God forbid should ever happen.”16 Closer to home for Taylor – though still geographically remote from Arcedeckne – in November 1791, an enslaved man, Quashie, received four months’ detention in the Kingston workhouse for setting fires at Golden Grove, followed by sale to another coerced labor camp.17 Quashie’s father, the blacksmith Guy, reported that he had rebuffed his son’s requests for money to buy rum. Quashie attempted arson in retaliation. M. J. Steel encapsulates such tensions in a paradigmatic enslaved figure “outwardly docile but inwardly vengeful,

Absentee Architecture 127 seemingly childishly incompetent but able to turn industrial sabotage into a fine art.”18 Fires set by an enslaved man meant more than property damage. Just three months before the incident at Golden Grove, some thousand enslaved people burned the plantations and buildings of St. Domingue to initiate the Haitian Revolution. As Julius Scott documented, the enslaved, free Black, and mixedrace populations of the Caribbean quickly learned the news, frequently before whites did.19 The St. Domingue uprising emboldened Blacks, terrified whites, and invigorated the campaign to abolish the British slave trade.20 Prior insurrectionary actions involving deliberate fires, including Tacky’s Revolt in 1760–1761 near Golden Grove, stoked property owners’ fears of more widespread uprisings.21 Among genteel society, tolerance for enslavement was waning well before the 1807 Abolition Act.22 Anti-slavery advocates used plans and sections of the Brooks, purportedly a typical slave ship, overpacked with human bodies. Led by Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp, abolitionists likewise brought the notorious Zong massacre to public attention. In 1781, the slave ship’s captain ordered enslaved people to be thrown overboard on a miscalculation, resulting in investors filing insurance claims for lost capital. Though the plaintiffs were not awarded damages, many understood the event as murder for money: dehumanization by way of commodification, and vice versa.23 Moreover, a 1772 court decision ruled that any person who set foot on English soil would be free.24 Though narrowly worded not to proscribe slavery, rumors about universal emancipation nevertheless spread across the British globe, precipitating backlash from enslavers fearful of losing their “property.”25 Lord Mansfield, the case’s magistrate, would be the namesake for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. (Mansfield presided over the Zong case as well.) Edward Said’s seminal analysis demonstrates that enslaved labor undergirds the entire plot.26 Analogously, enslaved people’s labor made aristocratic construction activity possible. In a telling passage, Austen’s protagonist asks her enslaver uncle about his Antiguan labor camp, to which he demurs: “there was such a dead silence!”27 Establishing England as a territory that forbade slavery but upheld it in the colonies, Mansfield’s ruling cleaved distinctions to compound geographic and political distances. Thus, owners in England could detach, normatively, legally, and physically, from their colonial holdings. Intellectuals condemned slavery for its economic inefficiency. Adam Smith noted “that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.”28 Economist Arthur Young affirmed that slavery drove up the cost of sugar.29 Edward Trelawny, Jamaica’s generally pro-slavery colonial Governor, wrote in 1746 that the expenditures for “managing” the “Too Great Number of Slaves” was not worth “the Danger Jamaica Is Expos’d to from [them].”30 Abolitionist James Stephen put it even more succinctly in a pamphlet titled England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies.31 Anticipating Utilitarian calculations, slavery’s benefits did not outweigh its risks. Taylor’s policies toward the people Arcedeckne enslaved convey that calculative mindset. His management practices were pragmatic, making certain that enslaved people were housed and well-fed since failing to do so would diminish productivity.32 He counseled, for example, “nothing encourages Negroes more than

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great plenty of provisions and it is an utter impossibility for negroes to work without a Belly full.”33 Taylor recurrently urged Arcedeckne to purchase and enslave more people to reduce the load of those already working on the estate. After a 1781 hurricane caused shortages, Taylor warned of “imprudence” of purchasing new people because “a person must be afraid to risque any part of his capital but what he cannot help in the West Indies.” He explained that, to “season” newly enslaved people, they needed to be given food and “allowed to make grounds and build houses.”34 Architecture provided security to white people not just in case of insurrection but also to their profits. It was only the looming prospect of scarcity, due to hazards of the Caribbean climate and colonial politics, that suppressed Taylor and Arcedeckne’s compulsion to escalate Golden Grove’s sugar operations. Risk, that is, was a limiting factor. Golden Grove and Glevering Grounds

The enslaved people’s provision grounds at Golden Grove sat within an environment designed for sugar production, and the respective landscapes offer a starting point for comparison. Deriving from the Taino Xaymaca, approximately “land of wood and water,” the toponym Jamaica lost some of its resonance as colonists clear-cut forests for monoculture plantations, generally sugarcane and, on hillsides, coffee. William Clark’s 1823 view, “Planting the Sugar Cane,” recorded in Antigua, displays a sense of prescribed order, a grid likely more regular than any actual field (Figure 8.3). The image’s aspirational geometry indicates a landscape as tightly controlled as the labor it would facilitate, drawing industrial efficiency together with the idylls of landed estates. In the middle background, the windmill manifests the working landscape’s power and productivity amid palms and other small buildings contributing to a picturesque effect. In the far background, the fortified promontory embodies the principle of authoritative discipline that underlaid the entire Atlantic economy. The rigid grid of the agronomic landscape paralleled the disciplinary order that governed the workers’ lives. Humphry Repton’s rustic-picturesque design for Glevering in Hacheston, Suffolk, conveys a counterpoint to that order (Figure 8.4). In 1791, the same year as Quashie’s arson threats at Golden Grove and the St. Domingue uprisings, across the Atlantic Ocean, Arcedeckne hired the fashionable landscape architect to renovate the grounds of his eastern English village estate. How much of Repton’s design was realized is unclear from the historical records, although its intentions come across in a plan showing scattered copses of trees surrounding the house among other landscape features and meandering paths.35 An 1827 description lists the ruins of the prior house on the site, as well as archaeological finds of Roman potsherds by workers clearing the ground for plantings.36 Such details of the “old hall” and local classical heritage recall Repton’s explication of “Association,” inspired “by the remains of antiquity, as the ruin of a cloister or a castle.”37 Together with the drawing’s assortment of straight and winding pathways, pits, and variegated

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Figure 8.3 William Clark, “Planting the Sugar Cane,” Ten Views on the Island of Antigua (London, 1823).

tree coverage, these elements constitute the curated haphazardness characteristic of the picturesque. While Repton worked exclusively in the British Isles, travelers in Jamaica readily found scenery and objects in the Caribbean to accord with emerging European aesthetic discourses. William Beckford of Somerley (cousin of the Fonthill Beckfords), for instance, identified the sublime not only in foreboding clouds and stormy weather but also in building fires, especially trash houses of sugar labor camps, and cane fields themselves. Yet if a hallmark of the Kantian sublime is for the perceiver to experience terror at a sufficient remove from actual threat, Beckford did not stipulate that same level of detachment. In a fire, the umbered appearance of the negroes, that in a certain manner help to darken the shade, are seen to double, as it were, the dreadful landscape, and to add the picturesque of horror to the destruction that is blazing round.38 Black people were objects of the landscape who increased its aesthetic appeal. Indeed, under the heading “Appropriation,” Repton theorizes that proprietors’ pleasure in landscapes comes from conspicuous displays of ownership: “every individual who possesses any thing, whether it be mental endowments, or power, or property, obtains respect in proportion as his possessions are known.”39 Though not precisely accounting for chattel slavery, reading Repton alongside Beckford suggests that agricultural workers, especially enslaved people, were regarded as both

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Figure 8.4 Humphry Repton, Glevering Hall, Hacheston, Suffolk, U.K., c. 1791. Detail from “Suffolk Sheet LIX.SW,” Ordnance Survey Engraved Six Inch Maps of Great Britain (London: Ordnance Survey, 1884). Source: National Library of Scotland.

property and adjuncts to the scenery whose presence added a “picturesque effect” to an estate. Ancillary Buildings

The ancillary buildings of Golden Grove and Glevering offer another site of comparison. Glevering included a stable attached to the main house and a medieval church with an Arcedeckne family mausoleum. In the 1830s, Chaloner Arcedeckene’s son, Andrew, would hire Decimus Burton, later architect of Kew Gardens, among other built receptacles of exotica, to design an orangery for Glevering (Figure 8.5).40 In 1814, Andrew had received a shipment of four baskets of thirty variants of pineapples from all across the Caribbean, from Havana to Jamaica to St. Vincent to Antigua.41 Where the Glevering orangery transplanted a tropical climate for growing fruit otherwise unsuited to the Northern Atlantic, on the Jamaican estate, agriculture was diffused across the entire landscape. The negligible areas of Golden Grove not devoted to sugarcane were left for enslaved people to grow food. Taylor preferred

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Figure 8.5 Decimus Burton, Orangery, Glevering, Hacheston, Suffolk, U.K., 1834–1835. “The Orangery, Glevering Hall, Easton Road, Hacheston,” Buildings at Risk Register (Suffolk: East Suffolk Council, 2017). Source: East Suffolk Council.

cassava as a subsistence crop since it was hurricane-resilient.42 (He allowed coconut trees and was intrigued by breadfruit but expressed reservations in case of storms.) Outbuildings included sugar production facilities: a crushing mill, a boiling house, a trash house, and a distillery. Meanwhile, a travelogue by Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey from 1837, immediately following emancipation, described “The most interesting building” at Golden Grove: “a handsome, little, brick church, built by the proprietor, with materials supplied from his estate, and with the labor of his own slaves.”43 The long timeline of these building projects from the 1760s to 1830s tracks the arc of the enslavement economy. The orangery, devised to transplant atmospheres, was an architectural marker of English self-sufficiency, theoretically allowing detachment from colonies – at least for growing tropical fruit. The Caribbean was no longer essential to the British economy, and enslavers owed formerly enslaved people nothing. Greenhouses represented global hegemony without the requisite expenses of, for example, provisioning human capital. Enslaved people’s houses were integral to the Jamaican estate. Where abolitionist reports of Golden Grove emphasized the houses’ spareness, pro-slavery authors derided Golden Grove’s enslaved population as “improvident” (i.e., lacking in foresight) for building poorly, using nondurable materials like plantain leaves, and failing to anticipate destructive weather events.44 Enslaved people were culpable

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for their incapacity to think ahead, whereas Arcedeckne distinguished himself by, and profited from, leveraging risk in the form of insurance. Thus, architecture, landscapes, and agricultural yield became grounds for justifying racial enslavement.45 Enslaved people’s houses represented the inability to plan for future contingencies, while mechanisms of insurance and credit demonstrated white capitalists’ forward-thinking ingenuity and, in turn, moral superiority. Mansions

Another point of contrast appears in the two owner’s houses. Arcedeckne hired prestigious architect John White, erstwhile Surveyor to the Duke of Portland, to design Glevering Hall.46 The decorous, sturdy brick English country house is fronted with a Serlian window and Ionic pilasters. Mahogany, a signature byproduct of lands cleared for sugarcane, constituted interior fittings.47 By the late eighteenth century, with the Jamaican mahogany supply all but depleted, its prominent place in the house’s window and door frames signals the sources of wealth underlying the building’s construction. We know little about the Jamaican house apart from Taylor’s letters. Visiting Golden Grove in 1802, Lady Maria Nugent described it as “an excellent house, surrounded by sugar works, cocoa-nut trees, &c.”48 Arcedeckne insisted that the house – which, again, he never saw – be built of brick. For whites in Jamaica, brick communicated colonial refinement, making Jamaica more like England. Arcedeckne shipped plans and building materials, including brick and wooden window and door frames, from England.49 (Arcedeckne’s mother and aunt, resident in Jamaica, objected to the design’s omission of covered porches.)50 Taylor advised against a brick building due to cost and because transporting the materials might overtax the livestock, potentially to death.51 Taylor, notably, did not mention human labor in his calculations of expenditures and exertion. The manager objected to Arcedeckne’s plans for other reasons, writing, “we have no workmen in this Country that can build with stone to the dimensions that the plan requires, that is to make the Cornishes [sic] and raised work about the Doors & windows.”52 Taylor concluded with an aesthetic recommendation, motivated by economy: “If we build it a plain front we can do it well enough.” Both houses were thus built from bricks made in England. The house in Jamaica had woodwork made in England, and wood in the English house came from Jamaica. What a “plain front” meant in Jamaica versus in England, we can only speculate. Such exchanges of materials and plans demonstrate the multi-directional possession and subjugation that typified absenteeism. Inhabitants

While Taylor worried that stone carvers around Golden Grove were inadequately skilled to realize Arcedeckne’s intended design, the work of the Black artisan James Cruickshank from around 1838 displays the competence of enslaved craftspeople at Golden Grove. According to Wayne Modest, a lock that Cruickshank made from

Absentee Architecture 133 native Caribbean woods bears similarities to Northern African craft traditions.53 Taylor was attuned to skill levels, instituting a policy to train Black people to replace more costly white labor.54 Among the skilled workers listed at Golden Grove in 1790, for example, were: Carpenters, enumerated 92–97, Mul[atto] Peter, Cudjoe, Conydon, Adam, Mul[atto] Morris, and Buttler; Masons, 104–109, Old Oxford, Old Neptune, Jamey, Orange, Will, and Dublin; and Blacksmiths, 110. Guy John, 111. Quashie (possibly Guy John’s son), and 112. Pompey.55 These people would have built the “excellent house” at Golden Grove. The Black people at Golden Grove were barred from taking communion from the same cup as the local whites, so in 1830, they had a silver chalice made for their own use, inscribed with a dedication.56 Upon emancipation, Chaloner Arcedeckne’s heir, Andrew, received over £8,000 (over $1 million in 2023) in compensation.57 Conversely, some 316 previously enslaved people had to plead to remain in their homes, provided that they pay rent from whatever meager profits they could coax from their small plots. Security and Distance Intimidation was an essential instrument in racial subjugation, predicated on principles perversely comparable to those of insurance. Leverage the motivating power of fear, both intimidation and insurance produce security from a distance, figured in social, spatial, and temporal terms. Both intimidation and insurance use threats in the present as mechanisms, alternatively, to induce behavioral compliance or (from the insurer’s point of view) to profit from the relative unlikelihood of an undesirable occurrence. Historian Jonathan Levy argues, “white southerners, with their paternalist insistence on mutual obligations, rights, and responsibilities – in tandem with the violence of the lash – spoke of a noncommercial hedge” to instill discipline among Black enslaved people.58 In the Caribbean, Vincent Brown describes enslavers’ schemes to profit from the people they claimed as possessions by leasing them to the state for dangerous infrastructure construction.59 The rewards were worth the risk. The similarities between intimidation and insurance are shallow. Although dependent on threat, insurance is an agreement between sellers and purchasers, not nonconsensual subjection. The power of the fear of property loss is incommensurate with the fears that the coerced laborers at Golden Grove would have experienced unceasingly. Based on fears of fire, Chaloner Arcedeckne invested in the security of buildings against threats like Quashie’s erratic behavior. Fear surely motivated Guy, Quashie’s father, to report on his son.60 When Andrew Arcedeckne thought about selling portions of the estate, he, too, was acting out of fear. The forms of security that enslavers and the people they enslaved were likewise incommensurable. After the Golden Grove was lost at sea in 1769, Chaloner Arcedeckne supplied funds for a small, shallow-water sailboat. That vessel, too, wrecked in 1773, returning from delivering sugar to the larger Friendship off Port Morant. The Arcedecknes’ persistency, despite losses, to vertically integrate maritime portage with sugar and rum production conveys the power of security.

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Even when risks failed to yield profits, they received insurance payouts and had the financial cushion to try again. In contrast, after emancipation in 1838, Golden Grove’s Black inhabitants now owed rent to Arcedeckne to sharecrop on the estate. Visitors in 1837 remarked on technological innovations that would “not only save the labor of many hands, but abolish altogether those kinds of labor, which were the most painful and destructive of life,” i.e., enslavement.61 Where Glevering continues to generate revenue today, Golden Grove no longer does. The two, ironically, have swapped relative positions in their respective profit-yielding potentials. Scant tangible vestiges of enslavement exist on the onceproductive Golden Grove, which sputtered as one of Jamaica’s last sugar mills until 2019.62 Meanwhile, Glevering, advertised as “The Secret Corner of Suffolk,” hosts weddings, events, and camping trips.63 If the offenses of racial subjugation include archival gaps that leave so many details of enslaved people’s lives unknowable, the loss of the architectural evidence on these estates indicates a further injustice: preserving such buildings is the lasting legacy of the security enjoyed by the white and wealthy, distant in so many ways from the permanent Black underclass. Notes 1 Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 27 January 1769, Cambridge University Library, Arcedeckne of Glevering Papers, 1744–1848 (CUL), GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/ 1769/1. 2 Taylor to Arcedeckne, 14 April 1769, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1769/4. 3 See William Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, vol. 1 (London, 1790), 33, 96–97, 106, and 232. 4 Phoenix insurance policy No. 173655, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/2A/108; Jenkin Jones, CUL Phoenix Company Archives, PX1277, “Mr. Jones’s Correspondence from the West Indies & America,” 24ff. 5 Nick Kingsley, “(162) Arcedeckne of Glevering Hall,” Landed Families of Britain and Ireland (1 April 2015). https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2015/04/162-arcedeckneof-glevering-hall.html, accessed 2 November 2020. 6 See Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763– 1833: A Study in Social and Economic History (New York and London: The Century Co., 1928); and Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010 [1977]). 7 See Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 4, 34–77; and Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 115ff. 8 “Chaloner Arcedeckne,” Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database. www.ucl. ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146640845. 9 For general treatments of the phenomenon, see Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann, eds., Slavery and the British Country House (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013); Elizabeth McKellar, “Transatlantic Architecture: Classicism, Colonialism, and Race,” in Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, ed. Emma Barker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 153–184; and Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016). 10 Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 87–88. On the buildings themselves, see Philip Hewat-Jaboor,

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

“Fonthill House: ‘One of the Most Princely Edifices in the Kingdom’,” in William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, ed. Derek E. Ostergard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 50–71; and Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 257–261. This William Beckford is not to be confused with William Beckford of Somerley, quoted in n. 3. See Amy Frost, “The Beckford Era,” in Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, ed. Caroline Dakers (London: UCL Press, 2018), 65. John Wilton-Ely, “The Genesis and Evolution of Fonthill Abbey,” Architectural History 23 (1980): 40–51. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 2 September 1765, quoted in The Letters of Simon Taylor of Jamaica to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 1765–1775, ed. Betty Wood with the assistance of T. R. Clayton and W. A. Speck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 25. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 9 December 1765, quoted in The Letters of Simon Taylor, 29–30. Taylor to Benjamin Cowell, 24 March 1768, CULGBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/5; and Taylor to Arcedeckne, 25 March 1768, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/2. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 27 January 1769, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1769/1. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 6 November 1791, CULGBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1792/21. See also Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 100. M. J. Steel, “A Philosophy of Fear: The World View of the Jamaican Plantocracy in a Comparative Perspective,” The Journal of Caribbean History 27 (1993): 14–15. Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018). See Trevor Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), esp. 147–149. On Tacky’s Revolt, see Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). See Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), esp. 40–41; and Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, esp. 229–230ff. See Granville Sharp’s letter to Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, published as Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre, ed. Michelle Faubert (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 123–154. William Murray Mansfield (1st Earl of), “The Case of James Sommersett [sic], a Negro, on Habeas Corpus, King’s Bench: 12 George III A.D. 1771–1772,” in Howell’s State Trials, vol. 20 (London, 1816). www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/ rights/docs/state_trials.htm. Scott, The Common Wind, 79. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 59. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998 [1814]), 136. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (London: Methuen, 1904 [1776]), 118. Arthur Young, Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire (London, 1772), 279. Edward Trelawny, An Essay Concerning Slavery (London, 1746). James Stephen, England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies (London, 1826). See Christer Petley, White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 49. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 2 September 1765, quoted in The Letters of Simon Taylor, 22. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 28 August 1781, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1781/21; Taylor to Arcedeckne, 26 November 1781, CULGBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1781/28.

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See also Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 51. See Humphry Repton, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London, 1794), xi; little other documentation survives, and the whereabouts of the Glevering “Red Book” are unknown. Henry Davy, “Glevering Hall, the Seat of Andrew Arcedeckne, Esq.,” in Views of the Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen in Suffolk (Southwold, Suffolk, UK, 1827). Repton, Sketches and Hints, 80. Beckford, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, esp. 69. Repton, Sketches and Hints, 80. See Edward J. Diestelkamp, “Fairyland in London: The Conservatories of Decimus Burton,” Country Life 173 (May 1983): 1343; and Stephanie Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 84. Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire, 171. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 14 December 1786, CULGBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1786/23; Taylor to Arcedeckne, 29 May 1788, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1788/10. Joseph Sturge and Thomas Harvey, The West Indies in 1837 (London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1838), 317. Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies (London, 1826), 241–242; and George Pinckard, Notes on the West Indies, vol. 2 (London, 1806), 114. See, e.g., Sturge and Harvey, The West Indies in 1837, 173. On John White, see James Anderson, “John White Senior and James Wyatt: An Early Scheme for Marylebone Park and the New Street to Carlton House,” Architectural History 44 (2001): 106–114. “Glevering Hall,” Historic England. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/listentry/1283334, accessed 14 August 2020. Lady Nugent Maria, Lady Nugent’s Journal, ed. Frank Cundall (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1907), 92. B. W. Higman, Plantation Jamaica 1750–1850 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2005), 190–226. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 25 March 1768, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/2; Taylor to Arcedeckne, 25 July 1768, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/9. See Taylor to Arcedeckne, 2 September 1765, quoted in The Letters of Simon Taylor, 34; and Taylor to Arcedeckne, 3 October 1767, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1767/19. Taylor to Cowell, 24 March 1768, CULGBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/5; Taylor to Arcedeckne, 25 July 1768, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/9; Taylor to Arcedeckne, 2 September 1768, CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1768/11. Wayne Modest, “The Cruickshank Lock, circa 1838,” in Victorian Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 55–57. Taylor to Arcedeckne, 2 September 1765, quoted in The Letters of Simon Taylor, 25. “List of Original Negroes on Golden Grove Estate, Living this 30th June 1790,” CUL GBR/0012/MS Vanneck-Arc/3A/1790/41. Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer, “Introduction,” in Victorian Jamaica, 7–10. “Jamaica St Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey 118 (Golden Grove)”; “Jamaica St Thomas-inthe-East, Surrey 142 (Bachelor’s Hall Pen),” Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database, www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/24517; www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/24499. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 90; see also p. 40. Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 76. See Byrd, Captives and Voyagers, 100. Sturge and Harvey, The West Indies in 1837, 317.

Absentee Architecture 137 62 Paul Clarke and Karyl Walker, “Sugar’s Slow Death Sucking Life Out of St Thomas,” The Gleaner (4 November 2019), https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20191104/ sugars-slow-death-sucking-life-out-st-thomas. 63 “Glevering Estate,” www.gleveringhall.com/, accessed 18 November 2021. Attempting to visit, I was informed by an employee, “I’m afraid, as previous email, Glevering is primarily a private home for the family who object to seeing people coming ‘to view’and photographing wandering round the grounds/private gardens.” Private correspondence, 5 March 2023.

Reference List Anderson, James. “John White Senior and James Wyatt: An Early Scheme for Marylebone Park and the New Street to Carlton House.” Architectural History 44 (2001): 106–114. Arcedeckne, Chaloner, Andrew Arcedeckne, Simon Taylor, et al. Arcedeckne of Glevering Papers, 1744–1848. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Library. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998 [1814]. Barclay, Alexander. A Practical View of the Present State of Slavery in the West Indies. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1826. Barczewski, Stephanie. Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017. Barringer, Tim, and Wayne Modest, eds. Victorian Jamaica. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Beckford, William. A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica. London: T. and J. Egerton, 1790. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Brown, Vincent. Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Burnard, Trevor. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010. Clarke, Paul and Walker, Karyl, “Sugar’s Slow Death Sucking Life Out of St Thomas,” The Gleaner (4 November 2019), https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/lead-stories/20191104/ sugars-slow-death-sucking-life-out-st-thomas. Davy, Henry. Views of the Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen in Suffolk. Southwold, Suffolk, 1827. Diestelkamp, Edward J. “Fairyland in London: The Conservatories of Decimus Burton.” Country Life 173 (May 1983): 1343. Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010 [1977]. Dresser, Madge, and Andrew Hann, eds. Slavery and the British Country House. Swindon: English Heritage, 2013. Elizabeth, McKellar. “Transatlantic Architecture: Classicism, Colonialism, and Race.” In Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, edited by Emma Barker, 153–184. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.

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Frost, Amy. “The Beckford Era.” In Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, edited by Caroline Dakers, 59–92. London: UCL Press, 2018. Glevering Hall. “Glevering Estate.” (Accessed November 18, 2021). www.gleveringhall. com/. Hall, Catherine, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang. Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Hewat-Jaboor, Philip. “Fonthill House: ‘One of the Most Princely Edifices in the Kingdom’.” In William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, edited by Derek E. Ostergard, 50–71. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Higman, Barry W. Plantation Jamaica 1750–1850. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2005. Historic England. “Glevering Hall.” https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1283334 (Accessed August 14, 2020). Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Jones, Jenkin. Letterbook: Phoenix Company Archives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Library. Kingsley, Nick. “(162) Arcedeckne of Glevering Hall.” Landed Families of Britain and Ireland. https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2015/04/162-arcedeckne-of-glevering-hall. html (Accessed April 1, 2015). Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database. www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Mansfield, William Murray (1st Earl of). “The Case of James Sommersett [sic], a Negro, on Habeas Corpus, King’s Bench: 12 George III A.D. 1771–1772.” In Howell’s State Trials. Vol. 20. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown; J.M. Richardson; Black, Parbury, and Allen; Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; E. Jeffery; J. Hatchard; R.H. Evans; J. Booker; E. Lloyd; J. Booth; Budd and Calkin; T.C. Hansard, 1816. Nelson, Louis P. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Nugent, Maria. Lady Nugent’s Journal. Edited by Frank Cundall. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1907 [1839, published privately and in part]. Petley, Christer. White Fury: A Jamaican Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pinckard, George. Vol. II of Notes on the West Indies. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806. Ragatz, Lowell J. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833: A Study in Social and Economic History. New York and London: The Century Co., 1928. Repton, Humphry. Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening. London: William Bulmer & Co.; J. & J. Boydell; G. Nicol, 1794. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Scott, Julius S. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution. New York: Verso, 2018. Sharp, Granville. Granville Sharp’s Uncovered Letter and the Zong Massacre. Edited by Michelle Faubert, 123–154. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Edwin Cannan. London: Methuen, 1904 [1776].

Absentee Architecture 139 Steel, M. J. “A Philosophy of Fear: The World View of the Jamaican Plantocracy in a Comparative Perspective.” The Journal of Caribbean History 27 (1993): 1–20. Stephen, James. England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies. London: Richard Taylor; J. Hatchard and Son Publisher; J. and A. Arch, 1826. Sturge, Joseph, and Thomas Harvey. The West Indies in 1837. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1838. Taylor, Simon. The Letters of Simon Taylor of Jamaica to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 1765–1775. Edited by Betty Wood with the assistance of T.R. Clayton and W.A. Speck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Trelawny, Edward. An Essay Concerning Slavery. London: Charles Corbett, 1746. Williams, Eric. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Wilton-Ely, John. “The Genesis and Evolution of Fonthill Abbey.” Architectural History 23 (1980): 40–51. Young, Arthur. Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1772.

9

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden Lee Sessions

Introduction In 1796, a botanist living in Cuba wrote to the head of the Real Jardín Botánico in Madrid about the need for a botanical garden in Havana. What can be attested of this island, the unexpected thing about it, is the variety and exuberant tenacity of its vegetation . . . as well as the ability of its diverse terrains, the fertility of its waters, and the suitability of its temperate climate to support not only the growth of exotic plants, but also increase the vitality of Indigenous ones.1 In this quote, Cuba is represented as a fertile, botanically rich island with the correct climate to grow not just its own biodiverse flora but also to cultivate plants from elsewhere, “exotic plants.” In the decades to come, the botanical garden of Havana would become a built environment that, I argue, was used to think through in spatial terms the potential for imperial profit from these geographical and climatic advantages of Cuba. Scholars in the history of science have long noted how botanical gardens around the world, beginning in the late eighteenth century, served as nodes in exchange networks and as tools to extend imperial power.2 At the same time, studies of landscape architecture have uncovered details about how garden designs changed over time.3 There has been little scholarship, however, on how different garden designs themselves reflected the socio-political roles these spaces played. In this article, I focus on a plan for Havana’s botanical garden developed in 1822, whose primary visual characteristic is the series of forked, intersecting paths at its center. This plan accompanied a response to a proposal from Madrid to reinvigorate the neglected botanical exchange networks of the Spanish empire. These forking garden paths, then, might be understood to represent these global networks on a small scale. This case study of Havana’s botanical garden reveals how these botanical gardens rendered visible the spatial logics of botanical extraction along with the extraction of labor from enslaved people that made this science possible in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I will also argue that the design of Havana’s botanical garden revealed and produced early DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-12

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden 141 moments of white Cuban identity formation. Finally, I will test the possibilities of reading this garden plan for evidence of the oppositional geographies that it would have contained. Imperial Botany in Cuba Botany was used extensively during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to strengthen Spanish power in Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas. The reign of Carlos III from 1759 to 1788 saw the establishment of the Real Jardín Botánico and the Gabinete Real de Historia Natural of Madrid. These institutions, in turn, funded expeditions to fill their flowerbeds and storerooms and reinforced colonial power in the sites that these expeditions reached.4 As part of this wider interest, Cuba hosted its own share of Spanish botanical expeditions and imperial scientific interest at the end of the eighteenth century. As early as 1793, the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid was paying a correspondent in Havana, Mariano Espinosa, to send the institution sets of Cuban flora specimens every year.5 In August of 1796, Joaquín de Santa Cruz y Cárdenas, the Conde de Mopox y Jaruco, received a commission from the King of Spain for an expedition to explore Cuba. The island was also visited by peninsular Martín Sessé y Lacasta as part of his Expedición Botánica al Virreinato de Nueva España, which had begun in present-day Mexico City in 1787. One of the key goals of Sessé’s expedition was to assemble a collection of plants and seeds, which would, in turn, form the basis for a new botanical garden in Mexico City, which was to be in close contact with the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid.6 Together, the Sessé and the Mopox expeditions constituted the most complete early botanical pictures of the island of Cuba and placed the flora and fauna squarely in the purview of the Madrid garden. Sessé left a set of his collection of plants and seeds in Havana when he visited, and this would form the core of the city’s botanical garden collection in the decades to come. It was Sessé who had written the quote that opened this chapter, celebrating the “variety and exuberant tenacity” of Cuba’s vegetation and the gains to be achieved by cultivating and distributing this vegetation. Sessé also wrote to the Real Consulado in Madrid, stating that Cuba “should create a commission to form a botanical garden where young people studying medicine could learn, and to form a course on Botany based on what was taught in Mexico and Madrid, with examples of Cuban flora and formation of herbaria.”7 This first proposal for a garden in Havana, then, already imagined transatlantic exchange as central to the project. Furthermore, an article from 1818 calling for a botanical garden in Havana imagined the space focused on Indigenous flora (“the most precious plants that are produced in Cuba”), which could be used for botanical study.8 Despite this cacophony of praise for the idea of Cuban flora flowing through global botanical networks, at least one Spanish official expressed suspicion of these networks. When Sessé first wrote to Madrid in 1796 to propose the idea of a botanical garden in Havana, an official report about his activity cast aspersions on the project. The unnamed official who wrote the report stated that if people like Sessé had their way, the Crown would have not only a botanical garden in Mexico,

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in Havana, in the Canary Islands, and in Madrid but that “soon there will be a project to establish one in Cádiz, el Puerto de Santa María, Sevilla, Ecija, Córdoba and other towns until there is one in the Court, in order to place in them and give salaries to many useless persons.”9 This unnamed agent imagines an endlessly proliferating series of botanical gardens across the territories of the empire whose tendrils eventually grow so long and entangled that they reach back into the court itself. The horror of botanical threats reaching from the periphery back to the center is palpable. In part because of this rising official distrust of investment in botany during this period of increasing imperial disorder, Crown investment and interest in Cuban botany waned slightly in the years after the expeditions. Cuba hosted no more expeditions, and no more mention was made of a garden in Havana until Intendente Alejandro Ramírez arrived in the city in 1816. Ramírez had a long history of personal interest in botany as a way to increase the profitability of a colony. He had previously been stationed in Guatemala, where he introduced a range of species, including cinnamon, pepper, and some Tahitian sugar cane that he had personally brought back from a voyage to Jamaica.10 Upon his arrival, Ramírez set about modernizing Cuban society, especially in the fields of technology, education, and science. He took leadership of the education committee of the Sociedad Patriótica, which had previously been a small band of gentlemen amateur scientists and public intellectuals, and from this position, he used the Sociedad to drive investment in Cuban science. Just a few months after Ramírez’s arrival, and likely due to his influence, the Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana, the periodical overseen by the group, published an article calling for a botanical garden in Havana. The article imagined a garden focused on Indigenous flora, “the most precious plants that are produced in Cuba,” which could be used for botanical study.11 In May of 1817, the Sociedad acquired a plot of land on which to build the proposed garden.12 By December of 1817, an article in Memorias reported that the Spanish Crown had granted royal approval for the garden, the construction of the main building had begun, and commissions had been established to collect local flora for the garden. Thus, from its very beginning, the garden arose in the wake of extensive imperial investment in exploration and exchange and was drawn into existence by one of the highest-ranking imperial officers in the city. In 1821, Agustín Argüelles, a Madrid-based official in the Ministerio de la Gobernación de la Península, Sección de Fomento, in coordination with the Secretario del Despacho de la Gobernación de la Península, proposed a set of improvements to Havana’s botanical garden space. Argüelles hoped that Havana’s central location would enable the garden to serve as a key node in a global botanical exchange network. In his proposal, plants were to be transferred from Spanish overseas territories to the botanical garden of Havana for cultivation and propagation and, from there, sent on to Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid.13 Argüelles’ plan was “that by putting Mexico, Manila and other provinces in correspondence, they could exchange the plants and trees of those countries that were useful to the arts, industry trade and food of the people, and procure their propagation.”14 His proposal is quite vague in

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden 143 its detail – it is unclear how he intended, for example, to account for climatic and topographic variation across the Spanish empire. The proposal was meant, though, to counteract the frequent losses that marked the shipment of delicate specimens from New Spain, Peru, or the Philippines to Europe at this time. The year 1821 was a moment, of course, when the Spanish Empire was undergoing massive changes across the globe. A crisis of sovereignty had followed Napoleon’s deposition of Ferdinand VII in 1808, and the Regency Council that came into power established a representative government and wrote the liberal Constitution of Cádiz in 1812 to try to shore up support. This constitution suspended press censorship and established narrow paths to citizenship for people of African descent across the empire, including in Cuba, for the first time.15 However, this constitution was reversed and new forms of rigid political and racial control were put into place when Ferdinand VII returned to the throne in 1814. At the same time, and in part because of this upheaval, wars of independence raged across North and South America beginning in 1809. The Spanish Crown urgently required additional sources of funds to fight these wars and also sought to assert control over Cuba so that the island did not follow its neighbors in calling for independence. This proposal was intended to help to assert this control. Argüelles imagined not just a revitalized network of botanical gardens, with Cuba at its center, but a network and a colony that was firmly under the governance of the Spanish Crown and whose profits flowed back to the Crown. The 1821 Proposal as Proof of Imperial Loyalty The recently appointed director of the botanical garden, José Antonio de la Ossa, responded to the Crown’s request by submitting a report that focused largely on the challenges that the garden had faced and expressed hope for additional funds from the Crown. These funds, he argued, would allow for more “effective and continuous communication” between Havana and Madrid.16 Ossa, then, was acceding to the Spanish government’s request and was promising smooth circulation of extracted plant specimens within the imperial transatlantic network. The design that Ossa produced in response to the proposal from Madrid was one of the first semi-public statements about the importance of science in Cuban life. Ossa was writing at a time when many people in Cuba were acutely aware of the changes to Spain’s imperial reach and were consciously positioning the island as the only truly faithful colony in the Americas in order to access additional political power or dispensation. As David Sartorius points out, Cuban loyalty was considered a defining characteristic of the island for these loyalists, the “siempre fiel isla,” as described in the title officially bestowed by Fernando VII in 1824 (Figure 9.1).17 This pledge of loyalty was rendered visible in the plan that accompanied Ossa’s report, painted by the French engineer Francisco Lemaur and now held by the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.18 This plan, accompanied by a detailed key, shows the rectangular shape of the garden in its location at the time within the walled city of Havana. The entrance to the garden is at the bottom of the page, and a wide central path leads away from this entrance. On either side of this central

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Figure 9.1 Francisco Lemaur, “Plan y distribución del jardín de la Habana,” 1821. Ink and watercolor, size unknown. Source: Archivo General de Indias, Seville.

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden 145 corridor, a series of straight paths fork and intersect, dividing the rectangle of the garden in half vertically, horizontally into squares, and then into cross and star shapes. This careful symmetry would have immediately called to viewers’ minds the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid, which had been redesigned by Italian architect Francisco Sabatini in 1781 (Figure 9.2).19 Sabatini’s garden included a prominent central axis with symmetrical spaces on each side that were divided by additional diagonal paths, just like Lemaur’s plan for Havana’s botanical garden. Furthermore, in both the Madrid garden and the Havana garden, the plants that filled these beds to either side of the central path generally increased in height toward the back of the garden.20 Both botanical gardens, then, seem to have been designed to provide visual access to as much of the space as possible as a visitor enters. This visitor’s eye was meant to move straight back into the space upon entry, with orderly symmetric beds stretching to either side, proceeding from low-lying plants to tall trees. The long, wide central path of Lemaur’s design was not unique to the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid, of course. Such central axes had been present in European garden designs since at least the end of the sixteenth century. Almost all of these, however, lacked the strong diagonal lines intersecting at regular intervals that defined the botanical garden of Havana and the Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid. Lemaur’s plan, then, appears to have deliberately echoed the relatively recently built botanical garden at the center of the Spanish empire. This design should, I

Figure 9.2 Madrid de Migas Calientes, “Plano del Jardín Botánico de Madrid en 1781,” 1875. Engraving. Page 445 of Anales de la Sociedad Española de Historia Natural (Madrid, 1875). Source: Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid.

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argue, be understood as a visual pledge of Cuban loyalty at a time when independence movements raged across many Spanish territories. Lemaur’s plan for Havana’s botanical garden responded to the Spanish Crown’s proposal with a visual statement of Cuban loyalty through botany, a statement that would have been particularly welcome at this moment of changing outlines of the Spanish empire. This seems to have been how Spanish officials understood Ossa’s report and Lemaur’s accompanying plan. Replies to Ossa’s report argued that Ossa’s request for additional funds should be fulfilled in order to “have an effective and continuous communication between the Garden of Havana and those [botanical gardens] that are established in the peninsula” and discussed a royal order presented to Ossa to research a specific type of grass.21 Lemaur’s garden plan was also an early statement about the importance of the Cuban ecology and native Cuban flora. In his report, Ossa discussed “all of the Indigenous plants that had been acquired… with preference to those of the most interest to commerce, the arts, and sustenance.”22 The garden under Ossa, as indicated by this quote, did, in fact, contain a wide variety of plant specimens. These were arranged on Lemaur’s plan to draw attention to their diversity and to reference contemporary botanical practices and research around the world. The garden sections presented by Lemaur included everything from grass, planted beds, vineyards, aquatic plants, shrubs, and beds of fruit plants. Ossa made several additional lists of the plants that he had successfully cultivated in the garden, together totaling nearly one hundred species.23 This would not have been an especially impressive selection for a botanical garden of the early nineteenth century, but it was still respectable, especially considering the fact that the garden had been founded only in 1817. Mercedes Valero González and Armando Garcia González also mention that during these early years of the garden, Ossa published an early Cuban Flora, a type of compendium text naming and giving a scientific description of all plant species known from a specific region. This book was titled Flora Havanensis and is now unfortunately lost.24 Ossa’s garden and Lemaur’s plan, then, made a series of arguments for the Spanish officials reviewing their report about the unique qualities of Cuban Indigenous flora, what Sessé had called “the variety and exuberant tenacity of its vegetation.” We should understand Lemaur’s plan as having spatialized this logic of extraction of local plants for imperial use in his symmetrical grid, which showcased the diversity of Cuban flora. However, there was one plant in particular that played the most important role in shaping Havana’s botanical garden. This was, of course, sugarcane. The number of sugar plantations in Cuba nearly doubled from 529 in 1792 to 1,000 in 1827, and sugar production nearly quadrupled during the same period.25 Much of the funding for Havana’s botanical garden came from the expanding sugar industry – the Sociedad Patriótica oversaw the space, and most of the membership of this organization at the time was made up of sugar plantation owners. It is quite possible, in fact, that Lemaur took the pleasure gardens around the main residences of some Cuban sugar plantation owners as another model for the central axis in his

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Figure 9.3 Detail, Eduard Laplante, “Ingenio San José de la Angosta,” 1855–1857. Lithograph, 21.3 in. wide. Plate 24 of J. G. Cantero, Los Ingenios: Coleccion de Vistas de Los Principales Ingenios de Azucar de La Isla de Cuba (Habana: Impreso en la litografia de Luis Marquier, 1857). Source: Beinecke Library, Yale University.

garden design. See, for instance, a print published in 1857, which shows a garden surrounding the primary residence of Ingenio San José de la Angosta (Figure 9.3). This garden bears a striking resemblance to Lemaur’s plan, with a wide central path leading to a large statue intersected by a series of diagonal paths. The wide central path of the garden also echoed the wide path that often led up to a plantation’s main entrance, which is also visible on the left of this detail. The visual access that this path provided to the visitor to the garden might further remind us of the panoptic plantation model first proposed by Barry Higman.26 Under this understanding of plantation space, clear sight lines to the fields where enslaved laborers worked were crucial for enslavers enforcing their power over these laborers. In fact, panoptic logic may have informed one additional detail of Lemaur’s design. Ossa had insisted in his report to Madrid on the need for additional personnel, including twelve enslaved laborers, to complete his vision for the garden. Immediately behind the educational buildings on either side of the central axis, Lemaur depicted a symmetrical pair of living quarters for these enslaved workers. These buildings can be read not just as quotidian requirements but also as architectural forms celebrating the extraction of labor from enslaved people through their placement at the heart of the garden. Free black and brown Cubans were building their political and economic power at the time of the garden’s construction, especially in Havana, even as increasing numbers of enslaved Afro-Cubans were being brought to the island by the expanding sugar industry. Because of these shifts, race was increasingly a subject of

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intense anxiety on the part of white elite Cubans. This was true of both criollos, white Cubans born on the island, and peninsulares, those born in Spain who had access to increased political power because of this. During the 1810s and 1820s, both sets of white elite Cubans sought to reinforce their own racial identity and privilege through a range of cultural, legal, and social initiatives. They created white-only arts academies and other cultural spaces, they placed legal restrictions on the professional organizations of brown Cubans, and they passed many laws to try to encourage white immigration to the island.27 I believe that the botanical garden of Havana was intended to be one of these spaces that served to define and perform white Cuban identity. While no records survive of visitors being specifically restricted based on race, many public spaces were increasingly segregated at the time, as Guadalupe García discusses at length in her excellent study Beyond the Walled City. The new paseos of the city, for instance, were tightly regulated in terms of conduct and race, especially at night, to ensure social control.28 Ana Amigo notes the performative potential of the garden for these white elite visitors, especially for criolla women, calling it a space of “rehabilitation and leisure within an urban space that was restricted in terms of public life and socialization.”29 Lemaur’s plan for Havana’s botanical garden was also filled with neoclassical sculptures. This form would become an important marker of white elite identity in Havana in the decades to come, as Paul Niell has discussed.30 Another hint of this use of the garden as a site for racial formation is the frequent use of the term “buen gusto” in the written archives connected with the garden. For instance, an early description of the founding of the garden from the Memorias de la Sociedad describes Ramírez presiding with “buen gusto” over the choice of the land on which the garden would be located.31 Niell reminds us this term was used by white elite Cubans at this time to create a narrative of cultural superiority and to distance themselves from the artistic production of free Cuban artisans of color.32 It is quite likely, then, that the garden was intended only, or at least primarily, for white visitors. If this was the case, white visitors to the garden would have passed through the living quarters of enslaved people on either side of the central axis to enter the decorative grounds beyond. These decorative grounds would also have been populated by the enslaved gardeners working on the site. The white visitors, then, would have been encouraged to contrast themselves with these black workers. Collective looking at the plants of the garden and leisure in this public space, then, would have generated white, especially criollo, solidarity, and identity. Oppositional Geographies I have argued, then, that the organization of space in Havana’s botanical garden functioned to reify the power and logics of extraction on several levels and that the neat geometric paths and the symmetry of Lemaur’s garden plan would have helped to make these political and racial authorities appear static, stable, and free of struggle. This stability and reification of power was not the only way of understanding the space of Havana’s botanical garden, however. We might also examine

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden 149 what Katherine McKittrick calls its oppositional geography or what Teresa Singleton calls its negotiated dialectics.33 Little information exists in the archives about the enslaved individuals who worked at the garden, not even their names, but the plan itself hints at their experiences there. At the top of Lemaur’s plan, past the geometric beds, fountains, statues, and a small forest, lies a set of provision gardens, labeled by Lemaur as being “for the maintenance of blacks.” This would, then, have been where the garden’s enslaved workers grew food to supplement the rations that were provided. The inclusion of this space on the grounds of the Havana botanical garden was a stark acknowledgment of Judith Carney’s claim that provision gardens, as well as house yard gardens, served as “botanical gardens of the dispossessed” in terms of the knowledge they contained.34 This knowledge was held by enslaved people and was used for sustenance, profit, and experimentation. Of course, many botanical gardens, especially those in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the Southern United States, depended on the labor and expertise of enslaved people as long as slavery remained legal in these places. Lemaur’s deliberate inclusion of these provision gardens in this official plan of the garden, however, remains highly unusual. The central path that served as a promenade for the garden’s visitors also would have led the ten enslaved workers of the garden from their quarters back to their plots behind the forest. This path through the garden, in fact, may even have served as a path to freedom for these workers. In Cuba, as was the case elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved people were often able to sell surplus crops from their gardens for cash, which could, in turn, be used to buy their own freedom or the freedom of loved ones. The formerly enslaved man Esteban Montejo described these gardens in his autobiography thus: But it was the small gardens that saved many slaves. They provided them with real nourishment. Almost all of the slaves had their conucos. They were little strips of dirt for gardening. They were real close to the barracoons, almost right in back. They grew everything there: sweet. potato, squash, okra, corn, peas, horse beans, beans like limas, limes, yuca and peanuts. They also raised piglets. And so those products were sold to the guajiros who came straight from town.35 A set of letters from 1865 refers to eight free black workers in the garden.36 This is despite the fact that slavery remained legal in Cuba through 1886. Is it possible that some of the workers at the garden in 1821 spent the next forty years there and were able, during that time, to save enough money for their own manumission or for that of their children? Possibly even by selling the crops they grew at the provision garden? Not enough information survives in the archival record to confirm or deny this account, but the rows and columns of provision garden crops depicted in Lemaur’s plan should remind us of the stakes of these spaces, especially at times of rising racial tensions.

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Conclusion Havana’s botanical garden, as seen in Francisco Lemaur’s plan, can be understood as a spatial matrix that was used, especially by white elites in the city, to model and think through the relationships between scientific knowledge, imperial loyalty, and criollo identity. This plan was a response to a proposal from Madrid to make Havana a center of exchange for a newly revitalized network of imperial botanical exchange. The plan made visual statements of Cuban loyalty, and the accompanying letter celebrated local biodiversity and the many plants that could be cultivated for the benefit of the Spanish empire. Lemaur’s diagrams should also remind us of the enslaved workers who transplanted botanical specimens, maintained their quarters, and tended their own provision gardens in the matrix of the botanical garden. Havana’s garden was both a botanical network itself and a plantation, writ small. Lemaur’s plan was never executed as fully as Ossa had hoped, and the garden continued to face funding shortfalls for decades to come, but it remained an important cultural, scientific, and political space. This was in part because the structure of a botanical garden proved so successful at rendering stable and aesthetic the logics of extraction that governed imperial plantocracies. This was especially true as racial politics and discourses of independence and loyalty became more fraught in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. During these decades, the illusion of stability and the celebration of white Cuban identity represented by the garden’s forking paths remained central to the scientific and social life of white Havana. Notes 1 “Informe de M. Espinosa Dirigido al Intendente Del Real Jardín Botánico Sobre El Jardín Botánico de La Habana,” 11 September 1796, I.9.4.1, Archivos Fondos Real Jardín Botánico. 2 On the botanical garden of Havana, see especially José González de la Peña Puerta, Antonio Ramos Carrillo, and Esteban Moreno Toral, “El Jardín Botánico y La Botánica Farmacéutica En La Habana Del Siglo XIX,” Ars Pharmaceutica 53, no. 3 (2012): 34–39; and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper and Mercedes Valero, Historia del Jardín Botánico de La Habana, Theatrum naturae (Aranjuez; Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000). On botanical gardens across the world, see especially Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Donal McCracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Eugenia W. Herbert, Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Londa L. Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 3 William Howard Adams, Nature Perfected: Gardens through History (New York, London, and Paris: Abbeville Press, 1991); Patrick Taylor, The Oxford Companion to the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Linda A. Chisholm and Michael D. Garber, The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens (Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 2018). 4 For more on science and Spanish imperial power, see especially Iris Wilson Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature,

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Antonio Barrera Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Daniela Bleichmar et al., eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Helen Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011). Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana, vol. 1 (Havana: Oficina del Gobierno y de la Real Sociedad Patriótica, 1817), 2. Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World, 14. Higueras and Guio y Sánchez, Cuba Ilustrada, 2:16. Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana, vol. 5 (Havana: Oficina del Gobierno y de la Real Sociedad Patriótica P. S. M., 1818), 294–302, cited in PuigSamper and Valero, Historia del Jardín Botánico de La Habana, 78. Comunicaciones del Virrey sobre la expedición de Nueva España, Flora Española – 1785–98, AMCN, cited in Engstrand, Spanish Scientists in the New World, 165. Puig-Samper and Valero, Historia del Jardín Botánico de La Habana, 73. Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana, vol. 5 (Havana: Oficina del Gobierno y de la Real Sociedad Patriótica P. S. M., 1818), 294–302, cited in PuigSamper and Valero, Historia del Jardín Botánico de La Habana, 78. Memorias, vol. 1 (1817), 420. Archivo General de Indias, Ultramar, leg. 107, num. 35. Ibid. For more on the legal frameworks of this era, see especially Adriana Chira, Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), chap. 3. Archivo General de Indias, Ultramar, leg. 108, December 29, 1821 letter. David A. Sartorius, Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 1. The plan can also be seen in more detail and full color at http://pares.mcu.es/ ParesBusquedas20/catalogo/description/25235. “Jardín Botanico Madrid de Migas Calientes 1781” from Anales de la Sociedad Española de Historia Natural, vol. 4 (Madrid: Don S. de Uhagon, tesorero, 1875), 445. For more, see especially Ricardo R. Austrich, “El Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid and the Glorious History of Botany in Spain,” Arnoldia 47, no. 3 (1987): 1–19. Archivo General de Indias, Ultramar, leg. 108, notas, Gobernación de Ultramar, Sección de Fomento, Negociado de Industria. Archivo General de Indias, Ultramar, leg. 108, December 29, 1821 letter. These lists are reproduced in full in Paloma Blanco et al., “Plantas Cubanas Y Documentos De La Ossa En El Real Jardín Botánico De Madrid,” Fontqueria 36 (1993): 117–146. Mercedes Valero González and Armando García González, “Ciencia y Coleccionismo En Cuba En El Siglo XIX,” Asclepio 51, no. 1 (1999): 210. Louis A. Pérez, Slaves, Sugar and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba 1801– 1899 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1992), xv. For more on the rise of Cuban sugar, see especially Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio: El Complejo Económico Cubano Del Azucar (La Havana: Comision Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964). Barry W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976). For the racial politics of the Academy, see especially Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), chap. 2.

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28 Guadalupe Garcia, Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015), 112–113. 29 Ana Amigo, “Identidad, Modernidad, Ocio: Jardines Urbanos de La Habana En El Siglo XIX,” Cuban Studies 46 (2018): 98. 30 Paul B. Niell, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). 31 Real Sociedad Económica de la Habana. Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana, vol. 26. (Havana: Oficina del Gobierno y de la Real Sociedad Patriótica, 1819), 23. 32 Niell, Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba; Paul B. Niell, “Rhetorics of Place and Empire in the Fountain Sculpture of 1830s Havana,” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (1 September 2013): 440–464. 33 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Theresa A. Singleton, Slavery behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015). 34 Judith Ann Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 123. 35 Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave, ed. Miguel Barnet, trans. W. Nick Hill (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994), 25–26. 36 Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Ultramar, Leg. 226, exp. 7, letters from 27 August 1865 and 18 December 1865.

Reference List Adams, William Howard. Nature Perfected: Gardens through History. New York, London, and Paris: Abbeville Press, 1991. Amigo, Ana. “Identidad, Modernidad, Ocio: Jardines Urbanos de La Habana En El Siglo XIX.” Cuban Studies 46 (2018): 87–112. Austrich, Ricardo R. “El Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid and the Glorious History of Botany in Spain.” Arnoldia 47, no. 3 (1987): 1–19. Barrera Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. Blanco, Paloma, Ramón Morales, Ramona Oviedo, and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper. “Plantas Cubanas Y Documentos De La Ossa En El Real Jardín Botánico De Madrid.” Fontqueria 36 (1993): 117–146. Bleichmar, Daniela, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Brockway, Lucile. Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Carney, Judith Ann, and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Chira, Adriana. Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Chisholm, Linda A., and Michael D. Garber. The History of Landscape Design in 100 Gardens. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2018.

Space, Science, and Slavery in Havana’s Botanical Garden 153 Cowie, Helen. Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011. Engstrand, Iris Wilson. Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981. Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004. Garcia, Guadalupe. Beyond the Walled City: Colonial Exclusion in Havana. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2015. González de la Peña Puerta, José, Antonio Ramos Carrillo, and Esteban Moreno Toral. “El Jardín Botánico y La Botánica Farmacéutica En La Habana Del Siglo XIX.” Ars Pharmaceutica 53, no. 3 (2012): 34–39. Herbert, Eugenia W. Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India. 1st ed. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Higman, Barry W. Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Higueras, María Dolores, and José Guío y Sánchez, eds. Cuba Ilustrada: La Real Comisión de Guantánamo, 1796–1802. Vol. 2. Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 1991. McCracken, Donal. Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire. London: Leicester University Press, 1997. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Montejo, Esteban. Biography of a Runaway Slave, ed. Miguel Barnet, trans. W. Nick Hill. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1994. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. El Ingenio: El Complejo Económico Cubano Del Azucar. La Habana: Comision Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964. Niell, Paul B. “Rhetorics of Place and Empire in the Fountain Sculpture of 1830s Havana.” The Art Bulletin 95, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 440–464. Niell, Paul B. Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba: Classicism and Dissonance on the Plaza de Armas of Havana, 1754–1828. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pérez, Louis A. Slaves, Sugar and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba 1801–1899. Wilmington: Scholarly resources, 1992. Puig-Samper, Miguel Angel, and Mercedes Valero. Historia del Jardín Botánico de La Habana. Theatrum naturae. Aranjuez and Madrid: Ediciones Doce Calles; Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000. Safier, Neil. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sartorius, David A. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Singleton, Theresa A. Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015. http://muse.jhu.edu/book/40052. Taylor, Patrick. The Oxford Companion to the Garden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Valero González, Mercedes, and Armando García González. “Ciencia y Coleccionismo En Cuba En El Siglo XIX.” Asclepio 51, no. 1 (1999): 205–226.

Part III

Circulating Commodities: Networks and Infrastructures

10 The World’s Greatest Depot West India Docks, Warehouses and Flexibility Georgios Eftaxiopoulos

On December 14, 1793, nine months after the declaration of war on Great Britain by France and nine years before the opening of the warehouses of the West India Docks, William Vaughan, a leading West India merchant, naval architect and director of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, published the pamphlet On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses, for the Port of London. Intended to be “circulate[d] in private channels,” the twenty-seven-page document had as its main objective “to remove prejudices, to quiet claimants, and to unite great leading and commercial interests in an application to Parliament for the creation of Docks.”1 It outlined all the benefits of such an endeavor, emphasizing its urgency, and concentrated not on the proposal of a specific plan but rather on the presentation of the “general principles applicable to any plan.”2 The description included an enclosed environment, eastward of the present facilities, which would substitute transshipment processes subject to any delays due to congestion, tidal conditions or winds of the Thames with an atmosphere of continuous work within a confined and controlled setting. According to Vaughan, however, “no scheme on this subject can be good, that does not comprehend new quays as well as new warehouses.”3 As stated in his pamphlet, “if the [present] legal quays are inadequate, their warehouses connected with them are far more so.”4 Precisely, this twofold problematic would be responded to with the development of the West India Docks and their gigantic warehouses: a reservoir for the safe deposit of colonial goods that would not only render the island’s power and scale of accumulation but also contribute to establishing a new type of economy. The World’s Entrepôt By the end of the eighteenth century, merchants’ vessels packed the River Thames throughout the year.5 Britain’s imperial project had for a long time exited its experimental phase, and London’s trade was booming. According to Adam Smith, the country’s large investment in the empire had started to pay its rewards. It was a ‘project’ that had already begun since the fifteenth century, following the reorientation of commerce from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the replacement of sporadic voyages across the basin by regular navigation crossings, when England dauntlessly claimed its share. Even if by the time the Atlantic was demarcated through a series of papal bulls, such as the papal bull of 1493 and its finalization DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-14

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with the Treaty of Tordesillas a year later that divided the sea and colonial possessions between Portugal and Spain, the island challenged the Iberian axis and, as early as 1497, responded with the Italian navigator and explorer John Cabot and his voyage to North America. During the second half of the sixteenth century, more and more privateers – the ‘Elizabethan sea dogs’ – began their voyages and explorations across the Atlantic. They took advantage of the profitable slave trade between West Africa and the ‘New World’ and, under the blessings of the Crown – granted exclusive permissions and patents–and the financial backing of an array of London investors – covered the costs and became shareholders to these operations – bypassed any ‘abstract’ restriction and cultivated the ground for the first English settlements in North America and the fertile islands of the Caribbean.6 The successful establishment of settlements on the islands of St. Kitts, Barbados and Nevis within a period of four years in the first quarter of the seventeenth century and the ‘sugar revolution’ of the 1640s and 1650s would ratify this venture and form the beginnings for a period of enormous extraction. Across these territories, small parcels of land and farms would be dispossessed and replaced by large plantations (Figure 10.1). The newly formed tropical agriculture schema, at first supported by local and ‘delicate’ white labor, would soon excel and intensify its production with the inexhaustible supply of ‘robust’ labor arriving from Africa.7 Not by chance, this large-scale cultivation model of sugar, together with other staple articles such as tobacco and cotton, would spread across the colonial network. Caribbean and North American English colonies would transform into gigantic extractive terrains, while the Atlantic Ocean would emerge into a highway of commerce. Circulation would significantly rise, and so would the fierce triangular trade of slaves, goods and provisions between the three continents: Northern Europe, West Africa, and the West Indies (the Caribbean) and North America. At the same time, this process would come hand-in-hand with a radical restructuring of the sea and colonial dominion. It would not be the Iberian powers any more but England, which, by the second half of the seventeenth century, would progressively come to the fore and significantly benefit from the privileges and colonial acquisition of wealth. To maximize its returns and consolidate its power, the ‘motherland’ would secure the exclusivity of such relations through a set of restrictions, all products of a deliberate economic policy consciously pursued by successive monarchs and governments. Whether through a number of legislative acts, such as the Navigation Act of 1651 which mandated the importation of plantation commodities into England before their re-exportation to foreign markets, or military campaigns, such as the three Anglo-Dutch wars in the late seventeenth century, the island, between the end of the mid-seventeenth century’s political, social and economic upheavals and the end of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), would establish an artificially constructed dominance on a world scale, something that, since the first decades of the eighteenth century, would be directly reflected in the continuously increasing returns in the volumes of goods arriving in the country.8 As Whig MP Edmund Burke would state in 1767, when comparing Britain’s colonial trade values with those in 1704: “the whole of our plantations was but a few thousand pounds more in the export article, and a third less in the import, than that which we now carry on with the single island of Jamaica.”9 Through an increasingly coherent mercantilist strategy,

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Figure 10.1 Originally produced by the island of Barbados’ land surveyor, John Swan, the map shows 285 plantations across the island’s coast in the 1650s. “A Topologicall Description and Admeasurement of the Yland of Barbados in the West Indyaes. With the Mrs Names of the Seuerall plantacons (sic)” in Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657). Source: © British Library, London.

Britain instrumentalized commerce, undermined any other commercial hegemony and was facing an unprecedented growth in the accumulation of colonial goods. Geographically, this system of accumulation was predominantly manifested at the ends of the bulk transport routes. As points of cargo entry and transshipment, the British ports were the epicenters of this aggressive expansionist approach. Cities such as Bristol and Liverpool shined across the country’s landscape. Yet, the port that eliminated all its rivals was London. With a strong mercantile culture and several storage spaces, the British capital took advantage of the River Thames’ deep access into the country’s interior and proximity to both local and continental ports and markets. At the same time, as the locus of central government and political decision-making, it possessed “the whole panoply of economic power including shipping, finance [and] commercial strength.”10 Thus, its pivotal location and role in local and global finance, goods and merchandise developed London as the hub in a growing network of exchange. Specifically, over the course of the eighteenth century, the attraction of the most successful merchants and the re-direction of the vast majority of colonial goods to the city’s port would establish London as the central reservoir not only for Britain but for the whole of world trade.

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Such a rise in colonial trade, however, could not be catered to by the present legal quays and sufferance wharves of the Pool of London. No substantial new structures had been added or existing ones updated in the very restricted river frontage after the modifications that had taken place 130 years ago, following the Great Fire of 1666. The 1,400 feet of legal quays, built between London Bridge and the Tower of London on the north side of the river, and any addition, like the Howland Dock built in 1700 that was too far away to meet the merchants’ needs, were insufficient to support the radical increase in commerce.11 In fact, the loading and unloading of cargo was so slow that it could take up to three months for the ships to discharge their freight. Accidents and severe losses by plunderage during the process were also frequent. But, the problems for the merchants extended beyond the small and outdated legal quays. London’s public warehouses were also too crowded. Unable to accommodate more than one-quarter of the annual quantity of goods arriving in the port, there were years that the problem was so considerable that the few warehouses were insufficient to store even the imports of sugar alone.12 At the same time, their scattered organization and poor safety measures made them further inadequate to house any valuable importation.13 Goods such as sugar, rum and coffee were regularly kept outdoors and exposed to bad weather conditions. Essentially, the limited spaces for storage were not only generating additional losses to the merchants but contributed to the risky discharging and storing process devoid of any degree of control and security. Owners of the most voluminous and most valuable cargoes, the West India merchants, were the most affected by this general atmosphere of insecurity. They had their vessels in the busy river only for a quarter of each year and, since the mid1780s, had already seen a dramatic increase in the amount of goods arriving from the West Indies to the British capital.14 This need for an immediate solution was accentuated following the declaration of war on Britain by France on February 1, 1793.15 For them, the construction of new larger and commodious spaces of accumulation for the convenient and safe repository of their precious and perishable goods was a prerequisite in the maintenance of their trade in the Thames. Either via petitions to Parliament, meetings or lobbying by the newly formed West India merchants’ committee, their demands were expressed across all possible channels.16 They were communicating precisely what Vaughan had advocated in his 1793 brochure: the development of a system of docks and extension of the present warehouse room “as one of the best securities and encouragements to our commerce, and prosperity to [the] country.”17 Only such a response could facilitate the growth of the West India trade. Only a big facility, as opposed to the previously modest warehouse spaces, could cater to all the bulk merchandise. Only a new distinctive architectural landscape would allow the abundant supply of goods extracted from the colonies and brought back to be unloaded and stored with minimal risk. A Secure Place After almost a decade of pressure on Parliament from the West India merchants’ lobby, counter-petitions by conflicting vested interests and a number of design modifications to the preliminary plans, the West India Docks, built on the Isle of Dogs and

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opened on August 27, 1802, became London’s largest wet dock and first public-private joint venture for a dockside space.18 Unprecedented in scale, the proposal, constructed in two phases, was a complex with gated entrances, surrounded by a thick, almost thirty feet high brick perimeter wall and a deep boundary ditch at its northern side.19 It covered about 295 acres and had at its heart two rectangular basins, one assigned for imports and one for exports, that communicated with the Thames via a set of six locks and two smaller basins. The Import Dock, located at the north of the site, covered an area of nearly thirty acres and was able to hold in its basin 204 vessels of 300 tons each, while the Export Dock, positioned on the south, was slightly smaller, covering twenty-four acres and with the capacity to hold in up to 195 vessels.20 Yet, the structures that truly dominated the landscape of the West India Docks, responding to West India merchants’ pressing demands and manifesting Britain’s commercial power, were the gigantic warehouses for the interim storage of goods. Designed by architects George Gwilt, the father, and George Gwilt, the son, the warehouses of the West India Docks formed upon their completion a continuous half-mile uniform building strip that expanded across the unprecedented openness of the site (Figure 10.2). Their imposing perspective predominantly encircled the Import Dock and extended from two to six stories high, with both ‘low’ and ‘high’ warehouses expressing a perfect balance between a not-too-costly and complex construction and convenience in the movement and storage of goods.21 In fact, they all followed the same principles “in everything except [their] height.”22 It was a “bulky monotony,” as historian Hermione Hobhouse described, which internally was “appropriated to the different descriptions of produce at the West India Docks,” with

Figure 10.2 A view across the Import Dock and its gigantic warehouses. Samuel Owen, Hood & Sharpe Vernor, West India Docks, 1811. Source: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

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any goods from the West Indies being able to get immediately warehoused upon arrival.23 Their open plans proved able to host infinite possible subdivisions and reorganizations that would emerge through attempts in favor of optimizing every cubic meter. In essence, each warehouse level, complemented upon need by the storing capacities of its neighboring floors, could be abstracted and perceived as a mere flexible volume. This way, beyond “put[ting] a total stop to embezzlement of every kind,” as Robert Milligan, another leading West India merchant, stated, and free from fire, dump or any other dangerous condition for the goods, the largest wet-dock system seen until then was a controlled and spatially flexible architecture servant to merchandising that was based on the simple nine-time repetition of a basic unit. Each unit had an originally planned capacity of 8,000 hogsheads. Its general length reached approximately 222 feet and was connected to the next via a ‘low’ five-bay wide ‘link block’ on either side (Figure 10.3). In particular, Nos. 1–9 warehouses had a central space of seventy-four feet long by 125 feet wide, flanked by two smaller ones of seventy-four feet long by 116 feet wide. Their five-by-seven bay rhythm plan was organized by a grid of timber columns – a 13–14 inch square post and beam structural system that was thinning towards the top and whose simplicity permitted its constant update – and was devoid of any partitions. The only interruption was two vertical semi-cylindrical brick shell circulation cores that signified the features of optimization par excellence. Attached to the internal side of the interior facade of the warehouses, they occupied as little floor area as possible, maximizing the usable storage surface. At the same time, they strategically linked the different levels by separating the floor accesses and stored goods.24 They connected a homogenous section where each floor was positioned at about seven feet high intervals dictated by both the heaviest good intended to be stored – the sugar hogsheads were “too heavy to be stacked higher than 8ft” – and a man’s reach – any space beyond this point would be incommodious.25 This vertical repetition was broken by the attic, which not only varied in floor height, but its kingpost trusses shaped a large

Figure 10.3 Ground floor plan, south elevation and cross section. George Gwilt & Son, No. 1 & No. 2 Warehouses, North Quay, Import Dock, West India Docks, 1800–3. Source: Drawing by the author.

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clear column-free floor plan: a structural principle and organizational logic that also informed the significantly bigger floor plan of warehouse No. 10. Warehouse No. 11 at the West Quay of the Import Dock became the exception to this uniformity. Planned in 1804 to house about 10,000 sugar hogsheads and completed in 1807, it emerged as the most radical and sophisticated spatial manifestation of storage in the complex. No higher than three stories, its floor plan – irregular and continuous, informed by the site’s perimeter wall – occupied a huge area of 400 feet long by 122 feet wide (Figure 10.4).26 Internally, it created an open field devoid of any divisions and fire-proofing walls that capitalized on its construction logic to establish a highly flexible context. Punctuated by 309 circular-section cast-iron columns on the ground and first floors and by 103 columns on the second floor, out of which twentyfour also acted as downpipes, it formed two different unobstructed horizontal fields. The former was defined by columns spaced at ten feet and twelve feet apart across one axis – depending on whether the span was intended for circulation or storage – and up to twelve feet apart on the perpendicular axis. These numbers were dramatically increased on the latter – upper floor – in which the columns spanned at a unique distance that allowed the creation of uninterrupted spaces of more than thirty-six feet. It presented an advanced and spatially flexible architecture which, rather than being confined to specific layouts and cargoes, became a convenient and secure environment for property: a space of a “more extensive use and more general resort.”27 Therefore, in the warehouses of the West India Docks, security was neither provided by the twelve-million-brick perimeter wall and its fortress appearance nor by the guardsmen and armed security forces that were present on site.28 Instead, it was the spatial flexibility of the warehouses, generated by their previously unforeseen openness and unprecedented spans, that granted the West India merchants, investors and tax office inspectors a risk-free context. The West India Docks’ closed system was capable of responding to the constantly changing context of the early nineteenth century and beyond by adapting to the different changes in the format of goods as well as to the arrival of new goods. Answering any future uncertainty,

Figure 10.4 Second floor plan. George Gwilt & Son and Thomas Morris, No. 11 Warehouse, West Quay, Import Dock, West India Docks, 1807. Source: Drawing by the author.

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they maintained a full, regularly overloading image and booming business that extended beyond the first years, accommodating any trade unpredictability or legal change, such as the ending of the West India Dock Company’s monopoly in 1823 and exposure to general trade.29 Even if their initial planning was originally intended to accommodate specific West India produce, such as sugar, rum and coffee, their apparent floor plan simplicity and structural capacity, coupled with the combination of high and low structures, allowed the optimal stock of any general goods for any time period, long and short.30 The system was “brought to a state of perfection scarcely to be surpassed,” making the warehouses of the West India Docks the world’s great depot and, potentially, its greatest supplier.31 Fulcrums of Extractions It was precisely the spatial flexibility of warehouses Nos. 1–11 and their capacity to store securely large amounts of diverse products which, supported by a number of Parliamentary Acts, allowed the merchants to expand their activities beyond traditional trade and boundaries of mercantile enterprise. Specifically, the Warehousing Act of 1803 – passed the year following the opening of West India Docks – granted the secure warehouses of the West India Docks with the permission to store bonded goods.32 In a sense, it established a warehousing system where the payment of duties on imports was no longer made during the first importation of goods. Thus, any good, unless it was brought into circulation or re-exported, could be deposited in ‘bond,’ avoiding the payment of any duty or duty at an unfavorable market condition and price for the product.33 The merchants, for a period of up to twelve months from the date of the first entry of their merchandise and at the expense of solely a small rent, could release large sums of capital in favor of further commercial activities. This way, their safely deposited goods generated both time and funds to expand their entrepreneurial spirit and activities, encouraging the investment and development of new speculations. The warehouses of the West India Docks became active development nodes for the nineteenth-century economy. From sorting and distributing to processing and marketing, the West India merchants ventured into various fields and engaged in a range of activities, such as manufacturing, financing, landholding, work managing and selling.34 It was particularly the modification of raw materials and foreign goods intended for re-export that altered not only the relation between British imports and exports but also the model of the British economy at large. They constructed a much broader economic base, which was not so much about the consumption of home-grown products and imports but about the export of commodities that were “enhanced by the additional industry and labor of its inhabitants.”35 Through this architectural and legislative setting of building stock, many merchants at the beginning of the nineteenth century gained absolute control over production and, ultimately, the entire chain of supply. Relying on the safety and stability that the warehouses and their regulatory framework provided, early factories were built in proximity to the West India Docks and beyond, processing and manufacturing the various imported raw materials and tropical goods, such as sugar, chocolate, coffee and cotton, supplied by the spaces of storage.36 As Eric Williams claimed, trade and merchant profits, extracted and accumulated from the West India colonies, financed critical steps in scientific

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and technological progress which, hand-in-hand with other inventions and innovations, revolutionized and intensified industrial production via the development of new machines of unprecedented sophistication, size and cost.37 They significantly contributed to the reorientation from a proto-industrial phase towards a phase of factory production and the shift from a largely craft-based rural economy to a machine-based industrial economy. It was not a coincidence that the gigantic warehouses of the West India Docks were developed from a call by the West India merchants. From their location in the advantageous Isle of Dogs to their rapid construction, the new storage facilities reflected their interests and materialized “the mercantile vision of an orderly dock system . . . architecturally restrained, but highly expressive of well-regulated, rationally conducted and, above all, secure commerce.”38 However, it could be argued that these enormous structures even exceeded what the West India merchants demanded. They were not only a large enough scheme able to cater to present needs but a favorable mechanism able to anticipate any future change and fluctuation in trade. The warehouses of the West India Docks literally translated the flexibility that the market required into a spatial proposition: an empty space with no attributes able to accommodate anything and neutralize any impasse of time. The possibility of flexibly managing accumulated goods and participating in local and global markets was granted to the merchants with utmost security. Warehouses Nos. 1–11 became architectural artifacts in constant shift, capable of adjusting to the newly arriving bulk commodities. Rather than only stocking one commodity for matters of subsistence, as the locally managed decentralized storage spaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used to do, the first major storage improvement since the rebuilding after the Great Fire consolidated the presence of the merchant firms “in what was to become an increasingly concentrated trade.”39 It provided the West India merchants with the right environment to further tighten their grip over colonial goods and administration, guaranteeing abundance and control over supply. The endless and highly managed supply optimized the leading West India merchants’ operational efficiency, boosting their profits and bringing them additional savings. By relying on an atmosphere of security that these spaces had created, the merchants could direct their “capital and other resources where the pressures and opportunities of the times suggested they would earn most and preferably where [they] could retain a high degree of liquidity of . . . assets.”40 This way, the “men of an extensive genius”41 fostered their entrepreneurial mentality since the warehouses allowed them to expand to a size that made them more resilient to market forces, as they had both “more resources to carry them through the difficult periods and more access to capital from banks, insurance companies and connections.”42 Apart from the growth of their revenue, the increase in their economic activity protected them further from periods of unpredictability. Within an unstable environment, in which wars, competitions, shortage and abundance fluctuations defined a variable context of economic depressions and expansions, the warehouses, via their ‘fixed base,’ protected the merchants by allowing them to widen their field and diversify their interests. Their flexible space – foundations in a system of increasing wealth concentration – generated an opportunity for a new structure of enterprise and finance that relied on two apparent motives: “the spreading of risks

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and the extension into adjacent areas to increase or guarantee their existing business when other enterprise was in some way inadequate,”43 ultimately permitting the merchants to significantly minimize their exposure. The warehouses of the West India Docks critically contributed to the development of what Karl Marx described as the non-idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.44 Capitalizing on the “treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder [that] floated back to the mother-country,” they became, by the size and scale of their stock as well as their modus operandi, “the nursery for a number of new industries.”45 They actively accelerated the transformation of the pre-capitalist relations of production into capitalist ones. Assigned exclusive rights and privileges by the government, these spatial paradigms of a public-private venture facilitated the development of a ‘national capitalism’ that concentrated on the extraction and production of surplus value. Beyond mere reservoirs of supply, the uninterrupted spaces, which emerged as the result of the new exchange culture, evolved into prolonged fulcrums for the merchants to endlessly accumulate greater wealth and for Britain to maintain its monopoly power and supremacy around the world. The turn of the nineteenth century would find the banks of the River Thames flooded by an array of spatially flexible warehouse complexes that, using warehouses Nos. 1–11 as their precedent, steered the merchants towards a highly lucrative model of capital accumulation and market expansion, radically transforming the country’s economy, society and culture at large (Figure 10.5).

Figure 10.5 From left to right: St. Katharine Docks (1828), London Docks (1802), Surrey Docks (1804), West India Docks (1802), East India Docks (1805). Source: Drawing by the author.

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Notes 1 William Vaughan, On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses for the Port of London: With Hints Respecting Trade (London, December 1793), Preface. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 If in 1751 ships and cargo tonnage at the port of London were 1,682 and 234,639 respectively, by 1794 the first figure had more than doubled (3,663) and the second had almost tripled (620,845). Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Best Mode of Providing Sufficient Accommodation for the Increased Trade and Shipping of the Port of London (London, 1796), v. 6 The first English slave-trading expedition took place in 1562 by Sir John Hawkins. See Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (New York, NY: Capricorn Books, 1966), 22. 7 Between 1645 and 1667, there was a radical transformation in Barbados from “11,200 small white farmers and 5,680 Negro slaves… [to] 745 large plantation owners and 82,023 slaves.” See ibid., 17, 23. 8 See Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. 9 Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (London: M. Clark, 1689), 14–15. 10 David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16. 11 See Joseph Guinness Broodbank, History of the Port of London, vol. 1, 2 (London: D. O’Connor, 2012); Walter M. Stern, “The First London Dock Boom and the Growth of the West India Docks,” Economica, New Series 19, no. 73 (February 1952): 60. 12 By the end of the last decade of the eighteenth century, less than one-third of sugar arriving from the West Indies could be hosted at London’s warehouses. Vaughan, On Wet Docks, 10. 13 See Ibid., 11. 14 Due to prevailing winds across the Atlantic, West India merchants’ boats filled the Thames between July and October. See William Vaughan, Tracts on Docks and Commerce: Printed between the Years 1793 and 1800 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1839), 20. 15 When the country was at war, the West India merchants, to protect their fleets and merchandise, followed a ‘convoy system’ that meant vessels arrived in groups, rather than individually, and large amounts of goods, often triple the size of the present warehouses, unloaded at the same time. See Stern, “The First London Dock Boom,” 63. 16 For more on the Committee appointed by the West India merchants on September 10, 1793, see House of Commons, Report (1796), Appendix (R r.). 17 Vaughan, On Wet Docks, Preface. 18 The Corporation of London objected as it wanted to maintain its power and dockage monopoly. The Customs Commissioners did not favor the plan as it required a new and separate customs establishment. Sufferance wharfingers and owners of legal quays also protested. The conflicts were finally resolved when, in June 1799, an Act of Parliament allowed the collaboration between the West India merchants and the Corporation of London for the construction of the new docks in the form of a joint stock company. On July 12, 1799, a new Act was passed, establishing the West India Dock Company. See Stern, “The First London Dock Boom,” 60, 64–65, 68. 19 The project was designed by civil engineer William Jessop, together with his colleague Ralph Walker. The works officially began in February 1800. See Hermione Hobhouse, ed., Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (London: London County Council, 1994), 251–253. 20 See Ibid., 268–272; Peter Cunningham, Handbook to London: As It Is (London: John Murray, 1879), 68. 21 Warehouses Nos. 2,3,4,6,7,8 were ‘high’, while Nos. 1,5,9 were built as ‘low’ structures. See Ibid., 284–290.

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22 Ibid., 288–289. 23 Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Consider of Means of Improving and Maintaining the Foreign Trade of the Country (London, 1823), 143. 24 See Nos. 1–9 warehouses, West India Docks, 6620682–8, Port and River Archives, Museum of London Docklands, London. 25 Hobhouse, Survey of London, 287–288. 26 See No. 11 warehouse, West India Docks, 6620742, Port and River Archives, Museum of London Docklands, London. 27 Henry Longlands, A Review of the Warehousing System: As Connected with the Port of London (London: John Richardson, Royal Exchange, 1824), 54. 28 For more on security measures, see Hobhouse, Survey of London, 310–313. 29 The ‘compulsory clause’ obliged all vessels arriving from the West Indies to use the West India Docks to unload and store their goods. It was launched together with their opening and lasted for twenty-one years, ensuring the venture’s success. See House of Commons, Report (1823), 19–20, 170, 200. 30 By 1830, some of the ‘high’ warehouses that previously accommodated sugar and coffee were taken over by the storage of grain, while, by the mid-nineteenth century, they accommodated a variety of goods, including cotton, jute and rice. See Hobhouse, Survey of London, 288. 31 House of Commons, Report (1823), 21. 32 The first section of the Warehousing Act of 1803 made specific reference to the warehouses of the West India Dock Company. See Stern, “The First London Dock Boom,” 72–73; K. L. Bhatia, Textbook on Legal Language and Legal Writing (Delhi: Universal Law Publishing, 2010), 141. 33 West India merchants’ bulk merchandise of sugar, coffee and rum was directly linked to consumption trends, making their price dependent on market fluctuations. See Stern, “The First London Dock Boom,” 61. 34 See Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51. 35 Vaughan, On Wet Docks, 20. 36 See Peter Neaverson and Marilyn Palmer, Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900 (London: Routledge, 1994), 42. 37 See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 102–103. For a detailed description, see also Earl J. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Rise of Modern Industry (London: Methuen & Co., 1925), 110, 116–130; Paul S. Barnwell et al., eds., The Vernacular Workshop: From Craft to Industry 1400–1900 (York: Council for British Archeology, 2004), 75. 38 Hobhouse, Survey of London, 281. 39 Longlands, Warehousing System, 34. The Enclosure Acts, particularly between 1761 and 1801, centralized accumulation and gave small farmers and yeomen who lived at the margins of subsistence the final push. See Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1964), 141–142; Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 40 Chapman, Merchant Enterprise, 39. 41 From understanding merchandise to judging every commodity and being familiar with customs of different trading nations, merchants had a wide range of general skills. Robert Campbell, The London Tradesman (London: T. Gardner, 1747): 284–298; See also Fernand Braudel, “The Wheels of Commerce,” in Civilization and Capitalism 15th– 18th Century, vol. 2 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 381. 42 Chapman, Merchant Enterprise, 28. 43 Ibid., 38. 44 See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 753–754. 45 Ibid.; Chapman, Merchant Enterprise, 38.

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Reference List Barnwell, Paul S., et al., eds. The Vernacular Workshop: From Craft to Industry 1400–1900. York: Council for British Archeology, 2004. Bhatia, K.L. Textbook on Legal Language and Legal Writing. Delhi: Universal Law Publishing, 2010. Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century. Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992. Broodbank, Joseph Guinness. History of the Port of London. Vol. 1, 2. London: D. O’Connor, 2012. Campbell, Robert. The London Tradesman. London: T. Gardner, 1747. Chapman, Stanley. Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Cunningham, Peter. Handbook to London: As It Is. London: John Murray, 1879. Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons. Report from the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Best Mode of Providing Sufficient Accommodation for the Increased Trade and Shipping of the Port of London. London: The House of Commons, 1796. Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons. Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Consider of Means of Improving and Maintaining the Foreign Trade of the Country. London: The House of Commons, 1823. Hammond, Earl J., and Barbara Hammond. The Rise of Modern Industry. London: Methuen & Co., 1925. Hobhouse, Hermione, ed. Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs. London: London County Council, 1994. Littleton, Edward. The Groans of the Plantations. London: M. Clark, 1689. Longlands, Henry. A Review of the Warehousing System: As Connected with the Port of London. London: John Richardson, Royal Exchange, 1824. Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century. London: Methuen, 1964. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954. Neaverson, Peter, and Marilyn Palmer. Industry in the Landscape, 1700–1900. London: Routledge, 1994. Ormrod, David. The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Overton, Mark. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Port and River Archives, Museum of London Docklands, London. Stern, Walter M. “The First London Dock Boom and the Growth of the West India Docks.” Economica, New Series 19, no. 73 (February 1952). Vaughan, William. On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses for the Port of London: With Hints Respecting Trade. London, December 1793. Vaughan, William. Tracts on Docks and Commerce: Printed between the Years 1793 and 1800. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1839. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. New York, NY: Capricorn Books, 1966. Zahedieh, Nuala. The Capital and the Colonies: London and the Atlantic Economy, 1660– 1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

11 Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery Samuel Blodget’s First Bank of the United States Peter Minosh

In 1795, Samuel Blodget completed the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia (Figure 11.1). Blodget was an economist, banker, and real-estate developer who was an early investor and, later, superintendent of the Federal District of Washington. Blodget integrated the Federal District with northern financial networks by gaining official oversight of the construction of the city while privately developing its land. In his role within northern intellectual circles, he was a theorist of political economy, writing several treatises on the subject while serving as the architect of the First Bank of the United States. His neoclassical edifice was to be the central institution for managing the debts and wealth of the United States, with nationwide branches extending an economic infrastructure reaching from southern plantations to northern finance networks. As such, it was instrumental in transforming the plantation commodities extracted by enslaved people into financial instruments underlying the national economy. This chapter considers Blodget’s design for the First Bank as an effort for American neoclassical architecture to resolve enlightenment desires with the realities of an enslaving extraction economy. To this end, I situate the Bank within discourses of liberal economics and American enlightenment that saw the virtue of unassailable private property tied to the freedom from the mercantile system. This freedom took place within an enslaving extraction economy. The personal liberties of unassailable private property and unimpeded exchange ended where the property or product of enslaved people could never be considered private or liberal. In an eighteenthcentury plantation economy, pretenses of enlightenment had to be preserved. The economic liberalism that abhorred forced labor also defended the sanctity of private property. Labor theft practiced through slavery was anathema to Adam Smith’s ideology of free and open markets. For Smith, following John Locke, labor is the “sacred and inviolable” foundation of all other property.1 Moreover, in his notion of the inherent efficiencies in self-interest, enslaved people with no economic stake in the product of their labor could have no interest in its progress. “A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.”2 However, the same free-market ideology that resisted the labor theft of enslaved people was even more squeamish about the property theft of slaveholders. Private property was inviolable in liberal economics, the theft DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-15

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Figure 11.1 Samuel Blodget, First Bank of the United States, Philadelphia, 1795. Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS PA,51-PHILA,235–6.

of personal property – one’s own belonging to oneself – notwithstanding. Abolitionists making the economic argument against slavery were caught in the contradiction that the restitution of one kind of property theft – an enslaved person’s belonging to oneself – required another kind of property theft – the forfeiture of human chattel. The invisible hand of capital that balanced needs against resources could never quite reach the plantation, and so the wealth of nations could only be founded upon the latter of these. Blodget’s Bank performed this service by presenting an economy based on slavery as a project of enlightenment. His design, I argue, sought to resolve this crisis by employing neoclassical architecture to launder the realities of the enslavement economy. At issue here is the basis of a national economy, specifically pertaining to the ground of wealth. If, as Blodget believed, the ground of a nation’s wealth is the quality of its production, then architecture must operate as a device to transform wealth created by enslaved black workers into an ennobled form that could serve as the basis for a free American economy. Developing the Federal District Blodget’s efforts to design the first bank are tied to the project of Alexander Hamilton, who conceived the project of the national bank as an infrastructure for the

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national economy. The purpose of the First Bank was to offer short-term loans for goods on their way to market, be they items in transit, harvests being shipped, or products for sale. These types of items were backed with “double-name paper,” where the borrower had a promissory note for payment on receipt of goods that they would sign over to a bank for cash at a discount (usually 6%). This was considered a safe investment that would allow merchants, farmers, and manufacturers to operate capital while anticipating sales.3 The Bank was to serve as a financial infrastructure for the circulation of agricultural goods. It regularized and made more predictable the commodity markets produced by enslaved labor. As such, it also regularized enslaved labor within the national economy, making the national economy dependent upon the enslaving plantation economy. Hamilton’s concept, based on the Bank of England, was that the national economy should mirror the lending resources of a bank – the national wealth could serve as a reserve for borrowing towards future investment. Hamilton was already testing his theories architecturally through the design of Washington, D.C. There, real estate worked as an investment vehicle that stored wealth against which money could be borrowed while spurring speculative investment.4 Blodget was exactly the type of northern financier that the union of Hamilton’s banking system demanded. His activities encompassed government, finance, real estate development, urban planning, and architecture. He was well-connected in the financial circles of the early republic and highly influential in the nation’s nascent banking infrastructure. He was one of the early shareholders of the First Bank of the United States and counted among its initial trustees. He held a vote on the Bank’s board and eventually rose to the position of secretary and cashier of the Bank. While investing in the First Bank, he concurrently founded a separate bank in his home city of Boston, the Union Bank, which was partially owned by the state of Massachusetts, serving a similar function on the State level that the First Bank would on the Federal, and included among its shareholders Samuel Adams and a group of “Old Whigs in order some say to counteract in part the too great Influence of the U. S. Bank & its Branches in tending fast toward ye Consolidation of the State Governments &c. &c.”5 On both the state and federal levels, Blodget was able to navigate the union of public and private wealth within financial networks. This position within the northern financial sector brought Blodget to play multiple roles in the construction and realization of Washington, D.C., where he was initially employed in financing the construction of the city itself. His role in the procurement of funds necessary for the construction of Washington, D.C., perfectly illustrates the new role of financial instruments in the development of the city while offering a sketch of the nascent banking system of the early republic. On March 6, 1792, Washington approved the procurement of a loan of half a million dollars, to be secured by lots surrounding the President’s house, for the construction of the city. Blodget acted as an intermediary in this transaction, guaranteeing the funds by taking possession of the real estate securities and, in effect, personally underwriting the loan. He would thus advance funds to the government every six months to be remitted to the First Bank of the United States no sooner than May of 1800 at a rate of 6% interest.6 With the financial crisis of 1792, Blodget was compelled to

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 173 draw the initial payments from both the Boston branch of the First Bank as well as from his own Union Bank in Boston. In this capacity as a banker, Blodget was instrumental in realizing Hamilton’s idea of inscribing the real estate of the Federal District within northern capital networks. This role in providing financial resources for the construction of the city soon expanded to oversight of that construction itself. In November 1792, L’Enfant had a falling out with the Commissioners over disagreements on the limits of his authority. On the 13th, Jefferson suggested that Blodget replace L’Enfant in the position of superintendent of the Federal District. The Commissioners appointed him “supervisor of the buildings and in general of the affairs committed to our care,” a role in which he would oversee all details of the construction of the city.7 Blodget fully understood Hamilton’s plan for the economic development of the city, writing, “I doubt not, by the next season, that the laying the foundation for the principle Buildings will give due encouragement to settlers, many of whom are only waiting to see the principle objects rising at their approach to the seat of our future greatness.”8 In conjunction with the city’s public construction, he was responsible for the coordination and sale of the city’s lots, thus becoming instrumental in advancing public works to encourage such private investment. Once again, his position within northern financial circles uniquely suited him to this task. The territory of the Federal District would be divided into lots, half of which – on an alternating basis – would be ceded to the federal government by their existing proprietors. Any further land necessary to establish the seat of government – such as roads, squares, or public spaces – would be taken by eminent domain at double the original value (estimated at $200 per acre).9 Blodget had the city plan engraved in Boston and distributed copies to his contacts in the northern financial circles of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Through him, the land of the Federal District was taken out of its territorial relations with the South and made to circulate within the financial sectors of the industrial North. In his unique public/private role, Blodget was himself among those investors in the city. In February of 1792, he purchased the Jamaica Farm property in the northwest of the city. An 1888 map shows the properties ceded to the federal government alternating with those that he retained in anticipation of rising real estate values (Figure 11.2). He developed the stretch of prime real estate on Pennsylvania Avenue between the proposed sites of the President’s House and the Capitol. Among the buildings that he developed was a “hotel” designed by White House architect James Hoban to be sold by raffle to raise funds for the construction of the city. The Commissioners were eager to accommodate Blodget and quickly advanced work on the infrastructure of these sites. Banking Within a National Economy Blodget thus realized Hamilton’s program as it concerned the transformation of landed property into a commodity for circulation within the nation’s financial networks. Being a banker, he saw an increase in capital stock as the key to unlocking the economic capacities of the nation. The Bank of England had extensive gold reserves that could maintain a “fractional reserve system” where the Bank would

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Figure 11.2 Lorin Blodget, Estate of Samuel Blodget Jr. showing properties on Jamaica Farm ceded to the United States, 1888. Source: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G3852.J3G46 1870.B5.

lend money in excess of its capital holdings on the assumption that all its depositors would not demand their savings at the same time.10 The United States, having limited specie reserves, based the First Bank on managing the nation’s debt. If the United States could reliably make interest payments on foreign debt, they would have wide access to the capital needed to develop the national economy. Economic growth from investment based on borrowing would produce the tax revenues to manage the debt – a logic that relied on unlimited growth. In his 1801 treatise Thoughts on the Increasing Wealth and National Economy of the United States of America,11 he specifically credited Hamilton’s Banking system with the nation’s economic growth while arguing for a continued expansion in credit: From the commencement of our funding system, till the year 1795, our country prospered beyond all former example. New villages, towns and cities sprang up as if by magic: our agriculture flourished, our commerce extended to all parts of the globe: our public and private credit became universal: contentment and happiness were everywhere diffused.12 Blodget calculated that with the nearly unlimited potential that the nation enjoyed in its untapped resources and following the principle of exponential growth, it

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 175 would, by 1896, reach the European population of 160 million.13 The nascent republic, Blodget argued, had far greater capacities than Europe, and the limits to realizing them would be in the ability to circulate money to accommodate an increasing scope of commerce and trade. Blodget understood the capacity of the public debt to function as money and made a plea to expand the public debt in his subsequent 1806 treatise Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America.14 The role of a properly run national bank was to manage this balance of debt to equity such that it would serve as a source of inexhaustible wealth. Basing his observations on the Bank of England, he warned that any diminishment of that debt must be replaced lest it decrease the nation’s effective capital holdings. He described this management of debt to generate wealth in alchemical terms: A clear fluid moving in a circle, neither increasing or diminishing except at the pleasure of its fiscal guide, and only troubled to prevent that stagnation which would render it useless to the professors of this inexhaustible fountain of wealth; a fountain from which all the world are now willing to partake at the market prices in exchange for the most precious commodities; a fountain, whose magical waters may be made finally to absorb a great portion of all the precious metals above ground.15 This magical fountain transforms all goods into commodities and circulates them as money, bringing private wealth into endless general circulation. Money would thus become an abstract form, circulating freely and endlessly between material object and financial instrument, widening its scope with every cycle. He cites Smith in observing that money is less the material specie of precious metal than a medium of exchange. While specie is liable to change in values, “Money is the sign of, or the pledge for, the necessary articles in view of the receiver, at the time of its reception in trade or commerce.”16 The Bank was to absorb all material wealth and redeploy it as circulating money. The nature of that wealth – be it in the form of land, commodity, or specie – was incidental; it transforms any commodity into its own value form. What mattered was that wealth be absorbed into the banking system and placed into continuous motion to forever circulate as currency – should it exit this circulating medium and return to its material state, it would be lost to wealth production. Blodget perfectly understood the First Bank of the United States to be exactly such a magical fountain of inexhaustible wealth, and his design for the institution speaks to this capacity. We can take this description of the bank as a starting point for Blodget’s design for the First Bank of the United States. The banking system rendered immaterial the tangible wealth of commodity, transforming everything into the medium of exchange. Talbot Hamlin described this three-story marble façade in a monumental Corinthian order as “a simple, large, dignified three-story house, barely to be distinguished from many mansions of the period in Salem and Boston.” For Hamlin, this building, completed in 1795, was already an architecture of the past: “The white

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marble portico which he put on the façade to give it a public character is noble, but it is still in the tradition of English Palladianism.”17 His design is based on Thomas Cooley’s 1769–1779 Royal Exchange in Dublin, drawn from plans acquired by James Hoban (Figure 11.3).18 Cooley’s Exchange wraps the two street-facing elevations in a monumental Corinthian order. The minor east elevation has a flat-roofed tetrastyle portico while the main south elevation is treated with a pedimented hexastyle with paired columns at the corners – both hew close to their elevations to affect a concatenation of superimposed layers. Between the monumental pilasters are a crowded array, ionic intercolumniations around the entrances, rusticated bands, panel reliefs, and broken entablatures. Cooley’s Exchange stands as an outpost of the British Colonial Empire and an instrument of a mercantilist economic system. The First Bank, while modeled on the Bank of England, is, by contrast, the center of a classical economic order. Blodget replaces Cooley’s array of formal and decorative elements with a single monumental order. He retains one dominant elevation and clearly demarcates the different masses of the building by projecting the portico further beyond the envelope and fluting of its columns and pilasters. The elevation maintains an unbroken entablature, a minimal deployment, and a clean distinction of decorative elements. Perhaps we can take the white marble of the Bank façade, its trim, fluted columns

Figure 11.3 Thomas Cooley, Royal Exchange, Dublin, 1769–1779. Engraving by James Malton, 1792. Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Typ 705.99.552.

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 177 of the Corinthian order spanning two stories, and its deep, monumental pediment to mark this transformation of the material into the immaterial, the sensuous into the supra-sensible, the formulation of the bank as an endless spring of wealth. In passing through Colley’s Palladianism, Blodget redeploys its voraciousness – its politics of difference that incorporates all that is foreign into a single body – as the classical unity of his magical fountain that renders all the same. The Modernity of this classicism, I would argue, is its contemplation and expression of this unity in relation to the money form of value within a slave economy – a form that is brought into crisis by the First Bank itself. Finance Capital and the Plantation Economy The wealth that the First Bank managed was the agricultural wealth of the American export economy and, as such, the export capacity of agricultural goods produced by enslaved workers. Blodget’s discussions on banking echoed contemporaneous efforts to promote the potential of the American agricultural sector. For Blodget, the generative capacity of capital is still not the general ground of wealth itself but only its manifestation. Blodget’s Bank design can be taken within debates between the Jeffersonian physiocratic view of the origin of all wealth in land and a classical economic view of its origin in labor. Jefferson elaborated his theory of the common natural wealth in Notes on the State of Virginia to refute Buffon’s position that the fruits of European soil were superior to those of American. For Buffon, the claim that animal species were smaller in the Americas than in Europe was proof that the Americas were inferior in their natural resources. Jefferson took the view that the resources of nature were common to both sides of the Atlantic, each being “warmed by the same genial sun” and having “soil of the same chemical composition.”19 Within this commonality was the unique development on either shore. While the Americas had different native crops and species than Europe, they were not to be considered inferior; hence “a Pigmy and a Patagonian, a Mouse and a Mammoth, derive their dimensions from the same nutritive juices.”20 This notion of the common and the singularity implies an equivalence between the natural productive capacity of Europe and the new world.21 Despite Buffon’s proposition that the resources of the Americas were somehow inferior to Europe, for Jefferson, this physiocratic ground of wealth was universal and naturally incorruptible. Citing Jefferson’s invocation of mammoths as proof of the favorability of American soil and climate, Blodget acknowledges the material benefits of land to national wealth.22 But, this wealth could only be realized through an increase in capital stock. Quoting Hume, Blodget argued that the good policy of the magistrate consists only in keeping [capital], if possible, still increasing; because, by that means, he keeps alive a spirit of industry in the nation, and increases the stock of labor, in which consists all real power and riches.23

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Capital stock must increase, but this is ultimately a mere step towards the amelioration of labor that stands as the ultimate basis of wealth. An increase in the money supply would enable labor to realize productive employment and bring about an increase in general wealth. If the ultimate ground of wealth is in labor, then Blodget’s design for a national bank that transforms wealth into a commodity enters a certain crisis. This circulation of commodity exchange could be materially affected by its origin in enslaved labor. Enslaved people, according to Blodget, did not work as efficiently as free men, nor did their product match that of their European counterparts. “Each slave that I have seen,” Blodget observes, “does not while at work perform half as much as the common laborer, nor does the business under which his master sits down contented appear to be half of what we in England require to be done in the same time.”24 Commodities produced by enslaved people would be diminished in value and thus upend this smooth process. Moreover, the commodity is further and more substantially diminished by the degeneration of the abstract human labor that is objectified or materialized within it. With the ultimate source of wealth in labor, slavery would prove an existential hazard to the wealth of the United States. Unlike the natural capacities of the earth, labor rested within social relations and was therefore corruptible. It is telling, then, that Blodget opens Economica, his 1806 work on political economy, with a discourse on slavery.25 Here, Blodget picked up Jefferson’s notions of the common and singularity of nature precisely at their point of crisis within Jefferson’s writings: at the question of the natural equality of the African races. While Jefferson had employed these notions to show that Europeans and Native Americans were equal in all respects, he refused to extend this commonality to Africans. Blodget repeats this claim as the opening position in his proposals, stating: Mr. Jefferson, in his philosophical inquiry, has proved, that there are distinguishing points to be found in the African, that differ so widely from other traits in our aboriginal American, that no one can be long at a loss to define them, or to decide in favor of the latter as the sublimely more interesting creature.26 If all wealth has its ground in labor, then the national wealth is ultimately based on the quality of that labor and, by extension, the qualities immanent to the laborer. An increase of European labor to the United States would only benefit this stock, but, as he would point out, “we are a nation of choice spirits, except alas! In the alloy of our African slaves.” He thus quotes a popular source in arguing for the benefits of free labor.27 “The real riches and strength of a nation, consist rather in the quantum of industry of its inhabitants, than either in their number, or the quantity of lands they possess.” And later, “All essential labor must ever be carried on chiefly by the poorer ranks of people; but a dependent mind will never be able to make any improvement, nor be brought to adopt one, however plainly it may be pointed out.” Blodget thus calls for a form of free labor which could offer “every individual a

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 179 certainty of being able to benefit himself, in the first instance, by every vigorous exertion he can make.”28 Blodget explicitly defines the value of an enslaved person in terms of the product produced by his work, “the price of a slave is no test of his value of a labourer [sic], but the quantity of work and its goodness.”29 He thus rejects the Jeffersonian notion of the enslaved role as purely an intermediary in realizing the natural wealth of the earth, i.e., his value purely as a laborer, as the basis of that enslaved person’s worth. In Blodget’s estimation, the institution of slavery that encourages listlessness and inactivity to the point of “willful destruction and an almost universal disposition to pilfer” threatens the efficacy of the agricultural – and hence the national – economy. While Blodget admonished the use of enslaved labor, he saw it centrally as a risk of underproduction in a sector that underpinned the national wealth. We should then offer another assessment of Blodget’s design for the First Bank. Its mode of abstraction is the realization of material wealth as exchange value via the transformation of that wealth to its obscured form of use value, yet for Blodget, all of this has its ultimate ground in labor. What we call use-value is, in the last instance, determined by its embodiment of labor within the material product. The efficacy of the Bank’s transformative capacity depends upon the quality of that labor, and for Blodget, this must be an unadulterated (to be distinguished from an unalienated) labor.30 Blodget’s design for the First Bank of the United States is in this way racialized; it professes “a nation of choice spirits” without “the alloy of our African slaves.” All merchandise within the national economy has embedded within it the nature – the quality and efficiency – of its production. The ground of labor upon which the nobility, manifested in the Corinthian order, ultimately rests must necessarily be a free, white labor. This claim was already lost at the moment of its realization in architectural expression. The integration of the enslavement economy with national finances was instrumental in the success of the First Bank.31 By 1774, a full third of southern wealth was in the form of human capital, that is, the property value of enslaved people. By the 1860s, this would rise to almost 50%.32 Gavin Wright has thus shown the importance of slavery in American economic development not simply as the source of natural resources upon which northern industrial enterprise depended but as the collateral upon which the Southern banking system was built. This is the very collateral that would make a national banking system viable, that would extend credit markets in the North, and that would ultimately serve as the foundation of the nation’s credit rating within international financial markets. This shows a racial content to the national debt that Hamilton called “a national blessing,” which would be “a powerful cement to our union.”33 The First Bank had the effect of regularizing these informal networks by inscribing agricultural exchange and the commodification of slavery within a nationally organized central banking system. Bonnie Martin describes the great extent to which enslaved people were employed as financial securities during the colonial period. In the first instance, enslaved people operated as simple securities; a seller could retain the title of an enslaved person until the purchase was fulfilled, and once owned outright, that person could be considered capital to be borrowed

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against. But much as any other security, enslaved people could be bundled and commoditized, becoming divisible and interchangeable subjects of complex financial instruments. In cases of aging, injury, or illness, different people could be substituted as the securities in a contract; skilled workers could appreciate and be remortgaged on better terms; and loans could be over-collateralized to allow for multiple enslaved people to secure a contract for a single purchase.34 Initially, as Martin points out, these networks “operated alongside, but not directly through, the emergent banking system: banks were used as facilitators and as places for repayment, rather than as the primary lenders.”35 Enslaved people passed as commodities through informal lending networks. As agricultural wealth increasingly underlay the holdings of the bank, a risk to that sector became a generalized risk to the national economy. Disruption of the slave economy would have undermined Northern financial markets. In addition to institutionalizing the plantation economy within the national economy, the First Bank also worked directly in the slave trade. The Bank was never intended to hold real estate or human capital as collateral on debt. Hamilton opposed the use of either as a financial security because of volatility in real estate prices and the high risk of enslaved capital.36 However, Sharon Ann Murphy shows that the First Bank was also directly involved in the ownership, sale, and collateralization of enslaved people. Defaults would sometimes occur, and the Bank would go after the debtor’s assets – and in many cases, these assets were enslaved people. Murphy details numerous cases where the First Bank either extended the terms of these loans with enslaved people as collateral – transforming short-term loans backed by double-name paper into long-term loans backed by human capital – or sold enslaved people at auction as part of the foreclosure process.37 These cases illustrate that human collateral served as an ultimate security on short-term commercial loans across the First Bank’s southern branches. The real estate value of enslaved people was a basis of wealth that allowed the First Bank to operate in the agricultural sector that offered few other securities. As often as Blodget celebrates the native genius of American production in his Economica – be it in the native inhabitants of the continent, the productive capacities of its industry, the commercial reach of its shipping, or the talents of its American-born artists Copley, Trumbell, and Stewart – there arises the caveat of slavery. This institution of slavery moves furtively within this architecture as relentlessly as it manifests in the pages of this treatise. The material wealth that grounds the First Bank is not founded in the noble efforts of a free people but in an alloy of free whites and enslaved Black people. Its classical expression veils the realities of an enslavement economy. Notes 1 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776], ed. Andrew S. Skinner and R. H. Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.x.b.12; 138. 2 Ibid., III.ii.9; 387. 3 Murphy, Other People’s Money, 47–49.

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 181 4 I expand upon L’Enfant’s design of Washington, D.C. as it pertains to equity capital and the financialization of the slave economy. Peter Minosh, Atlantic Unbound: Architecture in the World of the Haitian Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming). 5 “Blodget to Jefferson,” Boston, 25 June 1792. Saul Kussiel Padover, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital: Containing Notes and Correspondence Exchanged between Jefferson, Washington, L’Enfant, Ellicott, Hallet, Thornton, Latrobe, the Commissioners, and Others, Relating to the Founding, Surveying, Planning, Designing, Constructing, and Administering of the City of Washington, 1782–1818 (Washington: U.S. Govt. print. off., 1916), 146–147. 6 “A Declaration to be made by the President,” Philadelphia, 6 March 1792. Padover, 107–108. 7 “Jefferson to the Commissioners,” Philadelphia, 13 November 1792. Padover, 157–158. 8 “Blodget to Jefferson,” Boston, 25 June 1792. Padover, 146–147. 9 C. M. Harris offers a thorough history of L’Enfant’s tenure as architect of the Federal District as well as an analysis of the politics surrounding the planning of the city. C. M. Harris, “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 56, no. 3 (1 July 1999): 527–564. 10 Daniel Abramson traces the architectural and financial history of the Bank of England. Daniel M. Abramson, Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694–1942 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 11 Samuel Blodget, Thoughts on the Increasing Wealth and National Economy of the United States of America (City of Washington, Washington, DC: Printed by Way and Groff, 1801). 12 Blodget, Thoughts, v. 13 Blodget, Thoughts, 7. 14 Samuel Blodget, Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (City of Washington, Washington, DC: Printed for the author, 1806). 15 Blodget, Thoughts, 35–36. 16 Blodget, Thoughts, 32. 17 Talbot Hamlin, Greek Revival Architecture in America: Being an Account of Important Trends in American Architecture and American Life Prior to the War between the States (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). 18 Matthew Baigell, “James Hoban and the First Bank of the United States,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 2 (May 1969): 135–136. 19 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London: Printed for Thomas Stockade, 1787), 71. 20 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 71–72. 21 Michel Hardt elaborates these notions of the common and the singularity as an elaboration of Jefferson’s notions on race. Michael Hardt, “Jefferson and Democracy,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 41–78. I take them to be markers of a physiocratic theory that is embedded within the practices of the American plantation system. 22 Blodget, Economica, 87. 23 Blodget, Thoughts, 12. Quoting David Hume, Of Money, 1752. 24 Blodget, Economica, 80. 25 Ibid. 26 Blodget, Economica, 1. 27 Blodget quotes a source identified as “Anderson, and monthly reviewers” at length. Blodget, Economica, 82–86. 28 Blodget, Economica, 82. 29 Blodget, Economica, 80.

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30 Unalienated labor would come to be understood as the right of the worker to retain the product of his labor, unadulterated labor would be the purity of the product stemming from the innate quality of the worker. 31 There is a great deal of literature on the central role of slavery in the economic development of the United States, this largely focuses on slavery and agricultural wealth production. Eric Williams offers a foundational text in this field. Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); I follow Gavin Wright in discussing slavery as property that can secure investments. Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Bonnie Martin offers a case study of slavery as investment property in colonial Louisiana. Bonnie Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property,” The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (1 November 2010): 817; Sharon Ann Murphy shows how the First and Second Banks of the United States were directly involved in the investment in and sale of enslaved people. Murphy, “The Financialization of Slavery”; Jonathan Levy and Sven Beckert discuss the transfer and consolidation of southern agricultural wealth in northern financial networks. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 32 Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development, 57, 60. 33 Gordon, Hamilton’s Blessing, 20. 34 Martin, “Slavery’s Invisible Engine,” 822. 35 Ibid., 819. 36 Cowen, The Origins and Economic Impact of the First Bank of the United States, 1791– 1797, 16. 37 Murphy, “The Financialization of Slavery,” 400–412.

Reference List Abramson, Daniel M. Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694– 1942. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Blodget, Samuel. Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America. City of Washington [Washington, DC]: Printed for the Author, 1806. Blodget, Samuel. Thoughts on the Increasing Wealth and National Economy of the United States of America. City of Washington [Washington, DC]: Printed by Way and Groff, 1801. Cowen, David Jack. The Origins and Economic Impact of the First Bank of the United States, 1791–1797. New York: Garland Pub, 2000. Gordon, John Steele. Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt. New York: Walker and Company, 1997. Hamlin, Talbot. Greek Revival Architecture in America: Being an Account of Important Trends in American Architecture and American Life Prior to the War between the States. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Hardt, Michael. “Jefferson and Democracy.” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 41–78. Harris, C. M. “Washington’s Gamble, L’Enfant’s Dream: Politics, Design, and the Founding of the National Capital.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 56, no. 3 (July 1, 1999): 527–564. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: Printed for Thomas Stockade, 1787. Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Choice Spirits or the Alloy of Slavery 183 Martin, Bonnie. “Slavery’s Invisible Engine: Mortgaging Human Property.” The Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 1, 2010): 817. Matthew Baigell. “James Hoban and the First Bank of the United States.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 2 (May 1969): 135–136. Minosh, Peter. Atlantic Unbound: Architecture in the World of the Haitian Revolution. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming. Murphy, Sharon Ann. Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Murphy, Sharon Ann. “The Financialization of Slavery by the First and Second Banks of the United States.” The Journal of Southern History 87, no. 3 (August 2021): 385–426. Padover, Saul Kussiel, ed. Thomas Jefferson and the National Capital: Containing Notes and Correspondence Exchanged Between Jefferson, Washington, L’Enfant, Ellicott, Hallet, Thornton, Latrobe, the Commissioners, and Others, Relating to the Founding, Surveying, Planning, Designing, Constructing, and Administering of the City of Washington, 1782–1818. Washington, DC: U.S. Govt. print. off., 1916. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776]. Edited by Andrew S. Skinner and R.H. Campbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Williams, Eric Eustace. Capitalism & Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

12 Castle Brew Dreams Realized and Dreams Devastated Courtnay Micots

The transatlantic slave trade is the single, largest forced movement of peoples across borders in history for the sole purpose of enslavement. More than 12.5 million people from Africa were displaced into the Americas from the late sixteenth to early nineteenth century. Many studies concentrate on the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on African communities. While some scholars examined the slave experience inside the “slave holes” of European forts, including those built on the former Gold Coast in today’s Ghana,1 this chapter concentrates on a slave trader’s grand manor house and complex in terms of a space experienced by both trader/ patron and enslaved. Lefebvre addresses space as physical, socially produced, and imagined.2 Spaces created for the transatlantic slave trade are the product of complex social and economic systems directing the capture, containment, transfer, and sale of African people for the economic benefit of Europeans and Euro-Americans. Castle Brew will be analyzed architecturally and spatially to comprehend the multisensory experiences of those inhabiting these spaces in the late-eighteenth century. Castle Brew reveals a complicated story of cultural and commercial relationships occurring in the once-bustling metropolis of Anomabo (Figure 12.1). Initial patron, Irishman Richard Brew (c.1725–August 5, 1776), served as Governor of Anomabo fort, built for the London-based Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (The Company), but made his fortune as a slave trader. Brew called his two-story home “Castle Brew,” but it was also known as aban kakraba (Little Fort). For Brew, it visualized commercial success, high status in the community, and ties to his Irish homeland. The courtyard and perhaps warehouses behind the manor served as holding cells for overflow prisoners from the fort and Brew’s own purchased captives for sale to European and American ships. Although Castle Brew symbolized Brew’s dreams realized, it also symbolized devastated dreams for those extracted from their homes waiting in limbo for an uncertain future. Brew Builds Wealth and Presence on the Gold Coast Brew is one of the few Europeans to construct a house in Anomabo. Margaret Priestley, who wrote a Brew family history, surmised that Brew came from County Clare in western Ireland that “abounded in castles.” His father, also named Richard, was a vintner who claimed bankruptcy when Brew was a teenager. Following DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-16

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Figure 12.1 Castle Brew Complex as viewed from Fort William/Anomabo fort. Source: Photo by author, 2009.

others hoping to acquire wealth, the son left to seek his fortune.3 Brew arrived on the Gold Coast in 1745, working for the soon-to-be-defunct Royal African Company. He was registrar at Cape Coast Castle in early 1750, then chief factor at the fort in Tantumkweri. Later, he shared command of Dixcove’s fort. The Company, founded in 1750, took over the Royal African Company forts. Brew was reappointed to Tantumkweri’s fort from 1751 to 1754.4 The transatlantic slave trade, a cohesive economic force, involved African consent and involvement and brought European and African cultures together. Key to the eighteenth-century European presence was their dependence on Indigenous communities for social and political connections, relying on locals for labor, food, water, wood, and the land they rented. Brew dealt privately in slave trading to the detriment of other traders who depended on assistance from the fort. Brew created a monopoly, consequently driving up prices for competitors and increasing his personal wealth. In November 1753, Brew faced his first of several conflicts with The Company, resigning in early 1754 to establish his private business. However, in July 1756, Brew was reinstated and given the command of a new fort in Anomabo, a city of approximately 20,000 inhabitants.5

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Brew built contacts among the Fante, a coastal Akan group in the Central Region. The local head chief (omanhen) Eno Besi Kurentsi, known to Europeans as John Currantee, allowed The Company to build their fort.6 Brew oversaw the completion of the Anomabo fort, designed and begun in 1752 by engineer John Apperley, who died from consumption in 1756. Apperley and his small staff had rented space in Kurentsi’s palace, a former Dutch Lodge (c.1640–1642). Likewise, Brew stayed at Kurentsi’s and later married his daughter Effua Ansah, securing a strong political union.7 Brew moved into the fort in 1757, and it was “near being finished” in 1759. Thomas Trinder, the Overseer of Works, and engineer Captain John Baugh assisted after Apperley died. Governors appointed to trading forts and castles were expected to engage in private trade within limits. Although The Company suspended governors who overstepped the mark, Brew used his position to personal advantage by engaging in private trading to the exclusion of other traders the fort was supposed to support. Due to its location in London, The Company could do relatively little to stop it. Brew held the governorship for two periods: 1756–1760 and 1761–1764. When the fort, which received shipments from Britain only once a year, and the local community were low on stores, the governor was expected to make up differences with his own resources. Thus, overlooking governor engagement in private trade was advantageous to The Company.8 Brew left the service of The Company in January of 1760 to return to Britain after almost fifteen years in Africa. While in London, he forged a valuable business partnership with Samuel Smith, who supported him with powerful political backing and credit during his next phase as governor. The Company reappointed Brew as Governor in 1761, with Brew returning to Anomabo in September.9 Although Brew was reprimanded occasionally by The Company for disrespect toward other traders, it was not until 1763 that the scale of his private operations caused greater concern. The Company issued a warning to Brew and a suspension in December 1763. Brew discharged himself from service in April 1764 to expand his business. Brew’s partnership with Smith allowed Brew to establish factories along the Gold Coast and further east along the so-called Slave Coast in Whydah, Popo, Lagos, Benin, and Cape Lopez. Brew owned schooners, brigs, and sloops to ship cargo, including the enslaved, to the Caribbean and North America.10 Thus, Brew became a major competitor with The Company with contacts across the West African coastline, England, and the Americas. Castle Brew as a Visual Declaration of Power Castle Brew is the finest surviving example of an eighteenth-century European residence on the Gold Coast. In 1763, Brew began construction on his house, located “50 yards” from the fort’s northwestern corner.11 Brew used The Company’s 1750 act allowing “any of his Majesty’s Subjects trading to Africa, for the Security of their Goods or Slaves, to Erect Houses and Warehouses, under the Protection of the said Forts… for the better carrying on of his or their Trade there.”12 Second-in-command, Mr. Johnson, complained to the governor of Cape Coast Castle that the fort was

Castle Brew 187 being neglected to concentrate on Brew’s own affairs. The “gardener and the rest of the castle slaves were fully employed on the house: for the past fortnight they had been cutting timber in the bush.” Trinder and Baugh likely oversaw the construction. Baugh may have designed the manor, wall, and warehouses. This abuse of resources was somewhat overlooked by The Company because of Brew’s lucrative partnership with “men of power” in London. Brew continued living in the fort and used its holds.13 In a 1763 letter, a Company officer noted that 440–450 enslaved people were being held for sale in the Anomabo fort, and all but fifty to sixty belonged to Brew, and half of the fort’s warehouses were filled with his trade goods.14 While Brew was reprimanded and suffered criticism, it did not sway his business ambition and practices. His connections with the omanhen and townspeople made The Company wary of pursuing charges against Brew.15 However, when Smith filed for bankruptcy in 1774, the Smith and Brew Company, and Brew by extension, fell on hard times.16 Brew was not the first individual to build a “fort” next to a European merchant company fort. Thomas Edward Barter’s seventeenth-century house set precedence for constructing residences inspired by European fortresses as symbols of both status and power.17 Barter, a mixed-race merchant, was educated in England at the expense of the Royal African Company in 1690–1693. When he returned, the Company employed him, yet he also worked as a private trader as Brew would years later.18 Indeed, Castle Brew was a large complex, said to equal the size of the Anomabo fort, with high walls surrounding the manor house and warehouses, armed with “guns,” probably cannons.19 The complex visually communicated Brew’s identity as a major player in the slave trade to the local community and European traders. Brew consciously appropriated the power image of the massive stone forts to visually equate himself with the power of the Fante, British, and Dutch. The name Castle Brew was likely inspired by the grand homes called castles in County Clare; the title was “suggestive of his intention that it should rival the fort in the eyes of the Fanti [Fante] population.”20 To further his display of wealth and status, Brew “sought to create the material conditions appropriate to an eighteenth-century gentleman – house, furnishings, pictures and books.”21 This is exemplified by the items listed in his will. Brew bequeathed to his wife and their two daughters the Castle Brew enslaved servants and the proceeds from the sale of the plate, apparel, and furniture.22 The remainder would settle Brew’s extensive debts. Among the first items listed in the inventory are boxes filled with gold, silver, and coral. His bed chamber included a mahogany bedstead, bureau, settee, two armchairs, trunk, and a backgammon table. In the hall was “A Side Board, Mahogany Buffet, 23 Windsor Chairs, 66 pictures of different sizes [no details provided], 2 Settees, 4 Mahogany Tables, A Glass Chandelier, A Looking Glass, 2 Bureau Bookcases, [and] An Organ.”23 His extensive library contained popular British periodicals, novels, poems, and essays. He owned an array of silverware, linens, cookware, knives, beads, fifteen waistcoats, nine coats, sixteen shirts, nine velvet collars, four cravats, patterned black silk breeches, sixteen silk breeches, six worsted breeches, seventy silk stockings, and gold lace.24

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An Irish Georgian/Palladian Country Manor Castle Brew is a prime example of the Palladian style. The original building, conceived as a simple two-story compact mass, used a strict symmetrical plan and minimal exterior decoration, similar to Irish Georgian/Palladian country manors. Palladian architectural style swept through Ireland in the early eighteenth century, becoming the preferred style of the aristocracy. Palladian architecture, deriving from the work of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio, was introduced to Ireland by Florentine architect Alessandro Galilei, who designed Ireland’s first Palladian mansion, Castletown House, in 1719 (built in 1722).25 Palladian style is also known as Georgian, named for the period of reigning British monarchs named George, roughly 1714–1820.26 Castle Brew’s materials and construction method are similar to County Clare Georgian/Palladian manors, which were usually constructed from “locally-quarried limestone” or bricks made nearby.27 Palladian stone nog construction involved packing small stones, shells, corncobs, broken bricks, and other materials with a lime-based mortar into a wood framework to construct walls in layers. The same technique was used in European commercial forts and homes on the Gold Coast.28 Castle Brew, located on the far north section of today’s complex, faces east with the fort to its southeast and the omanhen’s palace (former Dutch fort) located northeast. Thus, Castle Brew is situated in the corner of a triangle of large Europeanconstructed strongholds. Like these other buildings, Castle Brew is a complex, built in stages with living quarters, warehouses, and, in the case of the fort and Castle Brew, strong walls to fortify the space of a courtyard. While Brew’s original manor was begun in 1763, subsequent additions were added in the 1840s by Scotsman Brodie Cruickshank and in the late 1860s by local George Kuntu Blankson. Details regarding Brew’s original mansion follow. Façade and Floor Plan

The façade incorporates classical features with a central entrance, arched windows, a belt course, two-story pilasters, and elaborate cornice. Four pilasters are spaced across the façade. A belt course divides the two stories. The entrance may have once been surrounded by a portico, pediment, or engaged columns. This façade is organized similarly to several in County Clare, including a seventeenth or eighteenth-century home in Appleville, with a symmetrical window arrangement and a single central window over the entrance. Windows in Appleville had eight panes, unlike six at Castle Brew, and no arched pediments.29 County Clare houses from this era also had pitched roofs, slated or thatched.30 Possibly the original roof of Castle Brew was thatched, as were local Fante homes. By the 1960s, however, the building had a hip roof covered with metal corrugated sheeting.31 The façade entrance and upper-story entrance from the courtyard have double doors of sturdy odom wood and may be original to the eighteenth century. Long iron hinges, perhaps dating to the eighteenth century, survive only on the front

Castle Brew 189 doors; locks on both sets and the hinges on the courtyard doors are recent. The anse de panier arch, also known as a three-centered or basket-handle arch, used in Castle Brew for windows and doorways, is seen in Irish Palladian manors. The arches extend beyond the rectangular window’s width, acting as an entablature, mimicking pediments in some Irish homes. None of the original glass panes remain. The arched entablatures were cemented, and all of the windows have been reframed for contemporary jalousie windows and screens, most since 2019.32 Previously, hinged, wavy-glass-paned windows graced part of the residence, perhaps dating to Brew’s time.33 Floor plans for both stories are similar. Entrance doors open into a large grand hallway with spacious chambers on each side. The upstairs retains its original timber floors. Two rectangular doorways with arched transoms, echoing the shape of the windows, lead from the hall into these chambers. Transoms originally had glass panes. Chambers are roomy and light, thanks to high flat ceilings and large windows. Likely, Brew used the northern room for living quarters and the southern for business, where Brew could view what was happening at the fort, beach, and in his courtyard. Possibly, a door on the right side facing the southern wall once led to a balcony and/or stairway to a lower level. On the ground floor, two wide anse de panier arches separate the hall and chambers, dark and likely used for storage.34 Courtyard, Warehouses and Repairs

While visitors may enter from the façade, they may also have been invited through the south entrance into a courtyard and through the upper-story back (west) entrance (Figure 12.2). A grand staircase extends from the courtyard to a veranda.35 Five anse de panier arches spring from half piers spanning the veranda, while arches on each side catch north-south breezes. A checked pattern of black and white marble tiles, placed diagonally, lines the path from steps to double wooden doors, further impressing visitors.36 The stairway was constructed from stone overlaid with imported brick. The railings with their lancet pattern, likely constructed with imported brick, have, at least since 2008, been plastered over with cement. The same construction materials and lancet pattern were used in the steps leading to the southern-facing wing. Those steps were also covered with alternating black and white tiles. This part of the southern wing was likely constructed during Brew’s time. Anse de panier arches were also used on the innermost southern wall and two perpendicular walls leading into the courtyard (Figure 12.3). While the walls are of stone nog, bricks line the arches. Stone nog appears over the arch under the stairway, only on the right side next to the southern wall. It seems likely that the bricks used to build the stairway were a later addition. Another wall, completely made from bricks, was built further west, connecting to the eastern stone nog wall with a staircase (Figure 12.4). This also appears to be a later addition. These walls present a confusing puzzle. Brew and subsequent owners left little written documentation of construction details.

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Figure 12.2 Rear façade of Castle Brew. Source: Photo by author, 2008.

Figure 12.3 Courtyard facing south. Source: Photo by author, 2009.

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Figure 12.4 Southwest courtyard. Source: Photo by author, 2009.

Castle Brew had its own warehouses behind the main house (see far right Figure 12.3), where enslaved house servants may have had sleeping quarters (or on the ground floor of the manor). Constructed in stone nog, the one-story building extends across the entire back side of the property from the brick wall toward the

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north, ending in line with the northern side of Brew’s manor. Bricks lined doorways and windows. However, the upper portions of this building today have reddish stones. Likely, the original buildings suffered and required a later renovation to make them useful. A. D. C. Hyland’s drawing of the complex did not complete the northern end of this building. Possibly, the renovation was completed by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) in the 1960s. These later renovations are confirmed by Pat Carter’s aerial photographs published in Priestley’s book, showing that prior to the GMMB renovation, the southern wall extended to two stories, but that second story was in ruins. The second-story wall appears to have extended from Brodie Cruickshank’s manor addition to the end of the southern wall. The GMMB probably removed the upper story (likely it was unstable), added the brick staircase attached to Cruickshank’s extension, and added the brick balustrade with rectangular-shaped cut-outs (not lancets) to the southern wall present in my visits between 2007 and 2014, but removed and replaced with concrete block by 2016. The brick staircase on the inner wall, with a balustrade made from bricks with lancet openings, was present (see Figure 12.3). The lancet pattern matches those in the original stairways. The inner west wall is also documented, but no warehouse building appears, though foundations may be visible. An upper-story ruin on the northern and western walls existed during my visits (2007–2016). In Carter’s photograph, these ruins were part of a two-story wall extending over the brick wall connecting to the other side of the staircase. The current brick wall extends higher than the area where the GMMB built their brick balustrade, so it is plausible that a two-story building with stairs leading to it was once present on the southwest side of the complex. Hyland drew the inner walls to show construction during Brew’s eighteenthcentury occupation, while the “stores or servants’ quarters” and the southernmost building were constructed later. The narrative is more complicated. While brick walls and staircases may date to the nineteenth century, they likely replaced earlier construction. Conceivably, the lower stone nog walls of the warehouse may have been constructed in either century. The southernmost building uses stone nog. In Carter’s photographs, the second-story ruins could be understood as original stone nog construction. However, all of these use bricks to fully line the windows and openings, while the anse de panier arches in the courtyard’s southern wall, under the western wall, and under the eastern staircase use brick only to outline the arch and not to edge the sides, making it different than the technique used in the southernmost building and on the twostory wall ruins. This assemblage suggests later, likely nineteenth-century, additions. Brew constructed warehouses on the premises, and possibly the change in stonework marks a renovation using part of the old, which were ruinous, structure(s) or the entire structure was built over the general area of Brew’s building(s). Brew must have had an upper-story balcony at least, using the courtyard’s southern wall, with a stairway for access, for Brew had numerous guns/cannons that would have been placed on the upper story, aimed at the beach.

Castle Brew 193 Other walls exist in the courtyard. Ruins from a previous wall extend into the courtyard, bisecting the space and emanating from the stairs leading into the house (see Figure 12.3). This stone nog wall appears to have been made during Brew’s time but does not appear on Hyland’s plan. Finally, the courtyard may have been paved with stones in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Today, cement mortars the older flat stones in place. As further evidence of later construction repairs, rocks uncharacteristically jut out from the northeastern corner of the exterior of the main house. This evinces a poor restoration overseen by Horatio Smith, Brew’s assistant in 1769 and Samuel Smith’s cousin (see Figure 12.2, far left). Brew and Horatio Smith had strong differences of opinion about money owed to Smith before Brew’s death.37 Horatio got his revenge when he purchased Castle Brew in 1778 for the local balance owed of ₤115 and the ₤7,000 owed in London to creditors.38 He renamed the mansion Smith House and remained in residence as a private trader, eventually working for The Company. The house fell into poor condition; a section collapsed in early November 1778. Governor Miles wrote, “What I’ve long dreaded is now come to pass: the fall of Castle Brew!”39 After a visit to the property, The Company officer wrote, “The East Room at the end of the Hall is in part down and carried with it as far as one window of the Hall went: the remaining part of the Hall seems to stand firm.”40 Enslaved Labor at Castle Brew Various parts of the complex served different purposes for those who lived and worked there. Brew’s daily life was complicated with family, clerks, cooks and servants working (and many living) within the walls of the main house.41 According to Evans, “If anything is described by an architectural plan it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records – walls, doors, windows and stairs – are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space.”42 The upstairs hall and chamber encompassed a reception area, business office, and personal quarters. While relationships between European men and African women on the Gold Coast were common, such marriages may or may not have been based on love or even consent. They were often commercial unions providing benefits to both parties and their mixed-race children.43 Brew was married twice to local women. He had two sons from his first marriage, and both were educated in England. After they returned in 1768, they worked for their father but did not appear in his will.44 While he moved in Indigenous elite circles, it is difficult to interpret how Brew related to humans he bought and sold. The courtyard and perhaps warehouses functioned as Brew’s holding area for enslaved peoples. Brew, like other private traders then, viewed enslaved peoples no differently than other trade goods. Trade was an economic venture. However, Brew wrote in a 1770 letter that he was “a friend to liberty” and hated “logs and chains.”45 Priestley states that this comment relates to debts incurred through the Smith partnership.46 Although “chains” would be understandable in this context, “logs”

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seem odd. Possibly, he was referring to the heavy yokes, or coffles, placed between captives who were force-marched to the coast. Yokes bound captives around the neck with two pieces of wood fastened to each other at the ends.47 Brew’s reference to liberty may have concerned ideas circulating in pre-revolutionary New England, where he had contacts. Like other private traders, Brew was caught up in the trade with its economic profits, yet was not unaware of the brutality. It is possible Brew’s attitude toward his own enslaved labor was different from those he held for trade. While “an African complement of house slaves” worked in Castle Brew,48 they may have followed a local or a fort system of enslavement. Larger coastal forts had over 100 enslaved men, women, and children who spent their entire lives in service. The men in English forts were highly skilled, apprenticed from an early age in carpentry. Slave wages were paid in goods and according to age and sex. They were allowed to supplement these wages by taking work, often constructing “European-style houses” outside their official working hours. Strict rules directed their treatment as the best workmen were irreplaceable. They remained in service after the abolition of the slave trade since, according to Lawrence, “they were well paid and cared for, and could look forward to a comfortable retirement.”49 West African slavery was multifaceted, “highly structured, regulated, and restrictive,” in contrast to Anglo-American slavery, which was primarily economic. Intermarriage and periodic, rather than lifetime, service was common in West Africa. The local enslaved often lived in the same homes with the family they served, usually in a room off the courtyard.50 Unfortunately, the names of Castle Brew’s servants, enslaved or not, were not recorded. Likely, these people were of coastal, maybe Anomabo, heritage. Their treatment would have been more like forms of local slavery. Victoria Ellen Smith noted that the “impoverished free would also volunteer to enslave themselves to principal families in a patron/client relationship. During the slaving era this was done to gain protection… A respected domestic slave may be included in family meetings but must consult their master about personal decisions from clothes worn and company kept to independent ventures.”51 Castle Brew’s enslaved domestics were surrounded by an art gallery, fine mahogany furniture, and bookcases filled with almost one hundred books they could not read. Fine dinners served by candlelight on fine china, glassware, linen (probably Irish), and silverware would have seemed curious compared to their backgrounds, yet they may also have felt a certain privilege to work in the manor in contrast with those who worked the fields in the hinterland. Certainly, they witnessed the harsh treatment of people enslaved and brought to the Anomabo fort or held at Castle Brew. They would have desired to separate themselves, as other locals on the coast did, from these nnonkofo. Nnonkofo – the Enslaved Experience Europeans on the coast called northern local peoples by the Akan word for slaves: nnonkofo (singular, odonko), and considered them uncivilized and worthy of being enslaved. Centuries of commercial contact with the Fante led Europeans to

Castle Brew 195 view coastal peoples as superior to nnonkofo.52 Scholars have tried examining the history of trade along the Gold Coast from the victim’s perspective. While this essay will not attempt to address all their findings, it is important to understand the victims’ journey to the coast and their experience within holding spaces using available first-hand accounts. Scholars disagree on the source of enslaved labor in West Africa. According to Nelson, individuals sold into slavery in the eighteenth century were largely not war prisoners. Rather, they were the result of kidnapping and sometimes internal legal processes, debt, or famine. Kidnapping was often achieved by raiders setting a village on fire and capturing inhabitants fleeing their homes.53 In contrast, other historians state that the majority of the enslaved originated as war captives supplied by the Asante, who were expanding their territory. Captives were brought to the fort in Anomabo “by Fante merchants, by small-time bush traders with one slave to sell, by brokers from the interior with coffles of slaves, and by Fante merchants who bought them from inland markets.”54 The Kasena, Bulsa, Chiana, and Gwollu were some of the northern peoples of present-day Ghana who were captured. Others were forcibly marched from as far away as in present-day Mali.55 Nine major routes directed captives, bound to yokes, to the coastal forts. One route went through Salaga and Assin Manso and then to Cape Coast or Anomabo, two major centers in the slave trade. Some came from villages closer to the coast.56 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (John Stuart), a Fante, described his experience as an enslaved person through his publications to abolish slavery in the 1780s. As a child, he and his playmates were tricked by local traders into following them down to Cape Coast, where he “saw several white people, which made me afraid that they would eat me, according to our notion as children in the inland parts of the country.” The next morning, he was brought to the castle, where “the horrors I soon saw and felt, cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some hand-cuffed, and some with their hands tied behind.” Cugoano was sold for a gun, cloth, and lead. He cried “bitterly” and was led to the prison.57 According to Lefebvre, every society and its respective town or city produce spaces that hold onto pieces of memories from the individuals inhabiting them. “The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space… The task of architectonics is to describe, analyse and explain this persistence.” If, as Lefebvre proposes, a space is filled with “magico-religious entities,” rites and rituals, then the spaces with their spiritual essence survive. Thus, the architectonic space within and around the Brew complex is worthy of examining in terms of its historical senses of pride, conflict, subjugation, pain, and misery for the various peoples who inhabited that space. Furthermore, “the social control of space weighs heavy indeed upon all those” within. Social space is codified in terms of hierarchy and modes of conduct.58 While Brew was the Governor, owner, trader, and master at the top of the hierarchy, others served underneath, including the lowest who were the enslaved, especially those soon to be traded to ship captains.

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While individuals experience space differently, the reconstruction of the spatial experience on a physical and sensory level for those within Castle Brew’s complex can be estimated. In a NASA investigation on the effects of space travel on senses, visual perception and touch sensations are greatly altered. The principal investigator noted the study “focuses on the idea of multi-sensory interactions, how our senses combine to give us an understanding of our surroundings and our position in them.”59 Certainly, equal disorientation happens when a person is forcibly taken from their homeland, made to suffer the tortures of the walk to the coast, and then placed inside a slave hole with a large crowd of other captives. Cugoano stated, “There was nothing to be heard but the rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow men.”60 NASA scientists believe the body adapts to changed sensory input during longduration missions, and when the crew returns to Earth and its gravity, they will again experience an “altered perception of motion, orientation, and distance.”61 In the same way, every time the enslaved person was removed and placed into confined areas in terrifying conditions, they would experience altered perceptions, including when they arrived in a foreign land. Cugoano wrote about this alteration. “All my help was cries and tears, and these could not avail; nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe, and dread, swelled up another. Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery.”62 Spaces with so many suffering individuals would have absorbed this pain, emotional conflict, and disorientation. Pain lessens but does not dissolve completely. As Cugoano noted, “From the time that I was kid-napped and conducted to a factory, and from thence in the brutish, base, but fashionable way of traffic, consigned to Grenada, the grievous thoughts which I then felt, still pant in my heart; though my fears and tears have long since subsided.”63 Similarly, the architectonic spaces hold onto the fears and pain of those who inhabited them, even from centuries ago. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, in veterans and child abuse victims has been shown by Van der Kolk to be held in the mind and body as trauma.64 Since space can absorb the essence of this trauma from victims within, something of trauma persists in the architectonic spaces of slave holes and other holding areas, including those at Castle Brew. Coupled with the pride of accomplishment his father had not achieved but realized by the son Brew, the architectonic space of Castle Brew has a rather schizophrenic sensibility. The senses and experiences of future occupants, including school children in the early twenty-first century when I first encountered the complex, are layered in this architectonic space, resulting in a sensory experience of accumulation, of dreams realized and dreams devastated. Conclusion Through his complex, Brew erected a statement of status and power on the Gold Coast, directly confronting British and other European powers on the coast, including his own employer. While Castle Brew visually challenged these merchant companies, his fortlike complex also stood to remind the local people of his power. Castle Brew was Brew’s dream house, but it was also a place of lost dreams for those held captive within. Understanding the multivalence of Castle Brew’s complex as a space for Brew’s pride in achieving his dreams of success and as a space for disappointed hopes and

Castle Brew 197 terror for the newly-enslaved complicates the context of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade and humanizes these spaces. Such environments were also a part of the larger international trading scheme that provided a large source of income for a few and brought misery to millions. Castle Brew and its spaces will be transformed by successive owners and eventually willed over to the local Blankson family. *I am grateful to my colleagues in the field Kwa Nyanfueku Akwa, Anomabo’s former historian, and Phillip Atta-Yawson, caretaker of Fort William and Castle Brew. For support and feedback on my draft, I thank Amy Schwartzott, Elizabeth C. Hamilton, and Robin Poynor. Notes 1 A “slave hole” refers to a chamber used to hold slaves. See Louis P. Nelson, “Architectures of West African Enslavement,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 21, no. 1 (Spring 2014): note 2, p. 120; and Arnold Walker Lawrence, Fortified Trade-Posts: The English in West Africa, 1645–1822 (London: Cape, 1969), 181, 223. 2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1974. Trans and reprint 1994). 3 Margaret Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society: A Family Study (London: Oxford, UP, 1969), 30–32, 34. 4 Eveline C. Martin, The British West African Settlements 1750–1821: A Study in Local Administration (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1927; reprint, New York: Negro Universities, 1970), 13–14; and Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 36–37. 5 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 37–38. 6 Ibid., 14, 38–39; Newell Flather, “Anomabu: The History of a Fante Town on the Ghana Coast,” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1966, 59–60, 136; and Henry Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa (London: Thomas Nelson, 1812; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1967), 152. 7 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 33–34, 42–44. 8 Ibid., 5, 43–45, 47, 58. 9 Ibid., 49–50. 10 Ibid., 47, 51–53, 72, 77. 11 Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors, Records – Detached Papers, Letter from Richard Brew to Richard Miles, 22 February 1776, National Archives, Kew London [T 70/1534]. 12 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 2 (New York: Octagon, 1965), 482; and Randy Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 76. 13 Ibid., 58–61. 14 Ibid., 75–77; Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, 90. 15 After Kurentsi passed away, Brew kept in good graces with his successor Amonu Kuma. Kurentsi and Kuma allowed and participated in the slave trade. Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 15. 16 The bankruptcy included Castle Brew and all of the property connected to Smith and Brew Company. Brew made an agreement to purchase the house but died on August 5, 1776, before it was carried out. Ibid., 63–64, 80. 17 Dutch merchant Willem Bosman described Barter’s house as “not unlike a small fort” near Cape Coast Castle. Willem Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: Printed for James Knapton . . . and Dan, 1705; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 104.

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18 J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa Volume 4 c. 1600 – c. 1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 308. 19 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 57. 20 Ibid., 57. 21 Ibid., 34–35. 22 “Will of Richard Brew, Free Trader of Annamaboe, Africa,” National Archives, Kew, London [PROB 11/1077/304]. 23 Governor Richard Miles and Committee member Jerome Bernard Weuves completed the sale of Castle Brew’s effects and the subsidiary factories. Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors, Records – Detached Papers, “Inventory of the Effects of Rich Brew . . .,” 5 August 1776. National Archives, Kew, London [T 70/1534]. 24 Ibid. 25 Dolores O’Donoghue, “Palladianism in Ireland,” Anthology 15 (Summer 2021), 44; and Dan Cruickshank, A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of Britain & Ireland (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1985), 56. 26 “English Neo-Palladian and Georgian,” WordPress, 8 June 2011. https://s7hauhe.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/english-neo-palladian-and-georgian/. 27 Hugh Weir, Houses of Clare (Whitegate, County Clare: Ballinakella, 1986), introduction, n.p. 28 Edward E. Crain, Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1994), 61–62. Priestley erroneously states that Castle Brew was a “brick structure.” Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 57. 29 Weir, Houses of Clare, 6. 30 Weir, Houses of Clare, introduction, n.p. 31 The hip roof was probably replaced in the early twentieth century when imported sheeting became a popular roofing material. The hip roof can be viewed in an aerial photograph taken by Pat Carter in Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, Fig. 2, opposite page 33. 32 Castle Brew fell into the hands of the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board during a tourist-oriented renovation in the 1960s. In the twenty-first century, the Blankson family instigated a court case to have ownership and occupation returned to their family. The case was won in c. 2016, and several renovations of the long-neglected property ensued. 33 I am grateful to the late Roy E. Graham, Historic Preservation, University of Florida, for his comments on the façade’s architectural features on April 17, 2009. 34 Arches are denoted on A. D. C. Hyland’s ground floor plan. 35 In Ireland, Palladian country homes situated stairs to the main entrance on the front façade; Brew chose instead to place stairs on the back of his grand house. He may have been inspired either by the staircases inside the Anomabo fort or by local vernacular architecture that favored stairs into the upper story from the courtyard. 36 Similar alternate black and white marble tiles were used for a balcony at Cape Coast Castle and in old homes in Elmina. Arnold Walker Lawrence, Trade Castles & Forts of West Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 355. 37 Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors, Records – Detached Papers, Letter from Richard Brew to unknown addressee. 12 March 1776. National Archives, Kew, London [T 70/1534]. 38 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 87. 39 Letters to and from Thos. Westgate, Letter from Richard Miles to Thomas Westgate. 5 November 1778. National Archives, Kew, London [T 70/1480]. 40 Letters to and from Thos. Westgate, Letter from Thomas Westgate to Richard Miles. 6 November 1778. National Archives, Kew, London [T 70/1480]. 41 It is not clear if Brew had servants separate from those enslaved. For more on the clerks in Brew’s employ, see Donnan, vol. 3, 186–187. Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 108.

Castle Brew 199 42 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” Architectural Design 48, no. 4 (1978): 267. 43 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 106–107; and Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, 80–85. 44 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 108. 45 Letters to and from Richard Brew, Letter from Richard Brew to William Devaynes. 2 May 1770. National Archives, Kew, London [T 70/1531]. 46 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 112. 47 Nelson, “Architectures of West African Enslavement,” 93. 48 Priestley, West African Trade and Coastal Society, 69. 49 See Lawrence, Trade Castles, 46–56. 50 Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2006), 157–158. 51 Victoria Ellen Smith, “If Walls Had Mouths: Representations of the Anglo-Fante Household and the Domestic Slave in Nineteenth-Century Cape Coast (Ghana),” Ph.D. diss, University of Warwick, Coventry, 2011, 58. 52 Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2008), 47–50. 53 Nelson, “Architectures of West African Enslavement,” 90–91. 54 Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters, 123, 135–136. 55 Nelson, “Architectures of West African Enslavement,” 92–93. 56 Akosua Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004), 40. 57 Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings (London, 1787; reprint New York: Penguin, 1999; trans. Vincent Carretta), x, 14. 58 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 229–233. 59 Melissa Gaskill, “Making Sense of Human Senses in Space,” 18 November 2018. NASA. www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/human_senses_in_space. 60 Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings, 15. 61 Gaskill, “Making Sense.” 62 Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings, 15. 63 Ibid. 64 Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014).

Reference List Bailey, Anne C. African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame. Boston, MA: Beacon, 2006. Bosman, Willem. A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London: Printed for James Knapton . . . and Dan, 1705; reprint, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Crain, Edward E. Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 1994. Cruickshank, Dan. A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of Britain & Ireland. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., 1985. Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah. Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Other Writings. London, 1787; reprint New York: Penguin, 1999. Translated by Vincent Carretta. Donnan, Elizabeth. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America. Vol. 2. New York: Octagon, 1965. “English Neo-Palladian and Georgian.” WordPress, June 8, 2011. https://s7hauhe.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/english-neo-palladian-and-georgian/. Evans, Robin. “Figures, Doors and Passages.” Architectural Design 48, no. 4 (1978): 267–278.

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Fage, John Donnelly and Roland Oliver, eds. The Cambridge History of Africa Volume 4 c. 1600 – c. 1790. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Flather, Newell. “Anomabu: The History of a Fante Town on the Ghana Coast.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1966. Gaskill, Melissa. “Making Sense of Human Senses in Space.” NASA, November 18, 2018. www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/human_senses_in_space. Holsey, Bayo. Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 2008. Lawrence, Arnold Walker. Trade Castles & Forts of West Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Lawrence, Arnold Walker. Fortified Trade-Posts: The English in West Africa, 1645–1822. London: Cape, 1969. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1974. Trans and reprint 1994. Martin, Eveline C. The British West African Settlements 1750–1821: A Study in Local Administration. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1927; reprint, New York: Negro Universities, 1970. Meredith, Henry. An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa. London: Thomas Nelson, 1812; reprint, London: Frank Cass, 1967. Nelson, Louis P. “Architectures of West African Enslavement.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 21, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 88–124. O’Donoghue, Dolores. “Palladianism in Ireland.” Anthology 15 (Summer 2021). https:// issuu.com/anthology1234/docs/anthology_magazine_issue_15_summer_2021_digital. Perbi, Akosua. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana. Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2004. Priestley, Margaret. West African Trade and Coastal Society: A Family Study. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Smith, Victoria Ellen. “If Walls Had Mouths: Representations of the Anglo-Fante Household and the Domestic Slave in Nineteenth-Century Cape Coast (Ghana).” Ph.D. diss, University of Warwick, Coventry, 2011. Sparks, Randy. Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014. Weir, Hugh. Houses of Clare. Whitegate, County Clare: Ballinakella, 1986.

13 Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context: The Case of Charleston and Rio de Janeiro in the Eighteenth-Century Alexander Lima Reis Introduction The history of indigo dye production in the Americas sheds light upon the life story of important agents in each part of the continent where exports were successful. Throughout the eighteenth century, the demand for indigo dye spurred a race to develop its production process. Contrary to what the traditional narrative of world histories may suggest, many technical cultivation and processing procedures were not simply transplanted. As for tropical genera, practical experience in daily plantation management was required to develop a new crop since successful cultivation presupposed knowledge about the most suitable topography; for instance, an acclimated plant might depend on flat or sloping terrain and moist or dry soil types. In addition, knowledge was required about the most appropriate species, which could include classification systems (local/universal) and an understanding of the plant’s vegetative, reproductive and harvest cycle. A quality product was the result of adaptation of the best species or variety, and this also depended upon knowledge about seasons and microclimates, with periods of rain/drought, cold/heat. Added to this was the complex stage of processing the raw material. In colonial regions, this kind of expertise was necessary for the basic operations of crushing, macerating, pressing, boiling, fermenting, decanting, melting, spinning and condensing. Another kind of expertise was the construction and maintenance of processing equipment with different driving forces, power transmission gears, and operating devices. Anil or indigo is a plant of the genus Indigofera that occurs in tropical latitudes around the globe and was used for the extraction of a blue dye. The device used in indigo dye extraction was seemingly simple, consisting of two overlapping tanks, but each step required specialized knowledge. Fermentation and decanting were successive operations to extract the dye. The branches of the plant were placed in the upper tank filled with water, in which they were kept submerged until fermentation took place. The resulting substance was transferred to the second tank, where it was stirred to separate the starch from the rest of the plant’s contents. After this process, the substance was allowed to rest while the heavier dye precipitated to the bottom of the tank. The water, which was greenish during fermentation, changed DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-17

202 Alexander Lima Reis to a yellowish color during decantation. This water was discarded, leaving the blue dye deposited at the bottom of the tank. Mastery of these processes was essential since it affected the quality of the dye. In other words, if the preparation time was longer or shorter than the ideal, the entire batch was damaged and unsalable. A new cultivation technique or processing procedure could generate economic reward and social prestige. These practices, on a broader scale, were associated with mercantilism. According to Robert Duplessis, one of the political actions of the European states of seventeenth-century Europe was to engage actively in commerce.1 Zorina Khan notes that the Royal Society of Arts, created in 1754 in London, offered prizes for those who managed to establish new cultures and processes in colonial areas.2 The “grace of the Crown” was a form of privilege exclusive to societies in the modern period. In Rio de Janeiro, these incentives also occurred through a reward system centered on the Portuguese Crown and mediated by viceroys and local agents. The acclimation and processing of plants for commercial purposes in a given territory was a form of invention. Murillo Florindo Cruz Filho states that the original meaning of the word invention was to found or establish.3 Privileges were granted upon the introduction of such technical procedures, particularly products in high demand that were imported from other nations. Blue was a color used for a variety of garments, especially military uniforms. In this context, production of this dye was encouraged as a way to reduce imports of strategic products. In the American context, the main exporters of indigo dye in the second half of the eighteenth century were the colony of South Carolina, the captaincy general of Guatemala, the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the captaincy general of Venezuela and Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Viceroyalty of Brazil. These sources stood out in the European market, but the dye was also produced in other locations, including the colony of Georgia, other islands in the Caribbean such as Martinique or Jamaica, and other Amazonian regions such as the captaincy of Grão-Pará and Maranhão. Essentially, indigo dye was produced in the Americas and sent across the Atlantic Ocean to its end consumers in Europe – the dyeing industry and textile mills. This chapter, therefore, argues that the cultivation of indigo crops was inextricably linked to the architecture of indigo dye extraction in the Americas. However, this chapter will concentrate on analyzing the local context of production in South Carolina and Rio de Janeiro. To that end, two indigo producers are observed, separated by many degrees of latitude but very similar in regard to the extraction system available at the time. Indigo production provided a way to maintain a favorable trade balance among European nations. In the seventeenth century, the indigo trade was banned by some European States to protect the local culture from another blue dye, which was extracted from a plant called woad in English and pastel in Portuguese. This plant, of the genus Isatis, was acclimatized in several parts of the European continent and islands of the Atlantic with a temperate climate. However, the indigo plant yielded a brighter blue than the woad. Having destabilized the European blue dye market, the indigo trade was legalized again only in the eighteenth century, when the production of this dye reached its peak on the American continent. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, the main supplier of indigo to Europe was India.

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 203 Images of Indigo Extraction The illustration that follows is dated 1742 but was first published in the 1720s in the book Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique by the Dominican missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat. This travel book was the main print source that contributed to the spread of indigo culture in America.4 Information about the indigo production process in this book is part of the observations in loco of the missionary when he visited the island of Martinique. Images of these apparatuses have been little explored in the historical writings that address the theme of dyes. This illustration exemplifies the masonry models from the first half of the eighteenth century. Indigo extraction apparatuses consisted of a series of tanks made of stone and mortar, usually built on sloping ground and, in the best of situations, with a water supply close to the upper tank (Figure 13.1). This model in masonry appears in the drawings as a standard for other areas of production in America up to c. 1760–1770. The second picture was published in 1762 in the editorial project Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences,

Figure 13.1 Masonry apparatus on the island of Martinique, 1742. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Jean-Baptiste Labat. Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique.

204 Alexander Lima Reis des arts et métiers. The picture represented an apparatus from the French West Indies and was reproduced and mirror published in the book Il Gazzettiere Americano in 1763.5 This book was translated from the original in English, The American Gazetteer, published in London in the year 1762 by Millar and Tonson. The Italian version, published in the city of Livorno by Marco Coltellini, included illustrations. The preface to this version states that the best collections of the time were used. In this regard, it is likely that Marco Coltellini chose to use the image contained in the French encyclopedia but inserted it in the entry on Charleston, which contains a considerable portion about the indigo culture. Hence, the illustration ended up being attributed to an indigo dye production unit in South Carolina. The illustration was also copied in another book, Le commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille, published by Pierre Chambon in 1764, where it was attributed to French Guiana (Figure 13.2). This picture became an ideal representation of an indigo dye extraction apparatus built on sloping terrain and with easy access to a water supply. Water was essential for extracting indigo dye and for cleaning the tanks after the production of each batch. Large indigo producers had large plots of land and resources at their disposal for the construction of masonry installations. However, as the culture of this dye expanded, new devices were built according to available materials and skills,

Figure 13.2 Masonry apparatus, 1762 model. Source: Internet Archive. Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts liberaux, et les arts mechaniques avec leur explication. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers.

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 205 overcoming the difficulties of sloping terrain and access to water. Interestingly, in the American Gazetteer, the entry on Charleston does not state that the apparatus was built of masonry but instead of cypress wood. But by the late 1760s and early 1770s, the number of masonry dye extraction tanks was already dwindling in the landscapes where this culture expanded. However, despite the fact that the image was not a reliable representation of a productive unit in South Carolina or French Guiana, it actually represented a model of its time, for, as will be discussed later, the first masonry dye extraction tanks in South Carolina were built in 1740 and in Rio de Janeiro in 1750 (Figure 13.3). The map was drawn by civil engineer Henry Mouzon II, who produced maps of the Carolinas. He drew up a grid of St. Stephen’s parish, located on the south side of the Santee River, bordering the district of Charleston in 1773. The magnified detail of the map shows the shape of the wooden device, possibly made of cypress, as described in the American Gazetteer. The overlapping structure of the equipment compensated for the absence of a slope, and water was supplied by means of a cylindrical water pump. Water was indispensable for the processes of fermentation, decanting and cleaning. In that period, a creative environment was developed to capture water for the first tank, and mechanical techniques were created to stir the water in the process of decanting the dye in the second tank. In India, where masonry tanks were already in use before their advent in the Americas, the substance was stirred by workers standing inside the tank. One of the first innovations in indigo dye extraction implemented in the Americas was the cessation of people working inside the dye tanks. The drawing in the French encyclopedia illustrates the use of rods attached to baskets to stir the water; however, the book Le parfait indigotier by Elias Monnereau, published in 1736, already

Figure 13.3 Map showing wooden apparatus in South Carolina, 1773. Source: South Carolina Historical Society, South Carolina. Henry Mouzon II. A Map of the Parish of St. Stephen, in Craven County.

206 Alexander Lima Reis mentioned the use of squeegee to stir the water by hand from outside the tank. There are several reports about the foul odor of the substance and swarms of flies gathering in the fermentation stage. In the case of Venezuela, there are records that the mechanical device was associated with reducing the harmful effects of proximity to the substance during manual work.6 Eliza Layne Martin mentions the noxious smell and ponders about the harmful impacts on livestock and humans.7 This was due to the medical theory of the time that attributed illness to miasmas. The indigo plant decomposed during the fermentation stage, exuding harmful gases that remained airborne. The stench and suspended gases were believed to cause illnesses. Public hygiene emerged during that period, introducing a process for classifying and controlling odors.8 Other innovations were introduced in the 1770s and 1780s, based on the use of different water pump models and the mechanization of the second operation. The purpose of introducing mechanization was twofold. One was to maintain the health of workers, i.e., keeping them away from the “harmful” substance-prevented illnesses. The second was to rationalize the production stage, thereby accelerating production while simultaneously decreasing the labor force involved in indigo dye extraction. At the time of this research, the oldest iconographic record of the mechanization of the apparatus was found in the book by M. Beauvais-Raseau, L’Art de L’Indigotier, published in 1770. The image portrays an apparatus on the island of Saint-Domingue. The first image in the sequence depicts a vertical and horizontal frame of the interior of the apparatus. Know-how about the generation of energy for sugar mills was employed to generate energy for the decantation of indigo. Energy transmission was achieved through animal traction, which turned a cogwheel that transmitted energy to the horizontal shaft gear connected to the blades in the decantation tank. The last image shows other types of driving forces, the first provided by a crank turned by hand and the second consisting of hydraulic force (Figure 13.4). In Rio de Janeiro, some devices were incorporated into production units to capture water and decant the dye. The first image in the sequence shows a wooden apparatus with overlapping tanks. Water was picked up by a Noria waterwheel and then stirred by a device called a paddle. The next image shows water being captured by a Chinese water pump driven by a cogwheel, as can be seen in the last plane of the image. The cogwheel transferred energy to a chain connected to the containers that lifted the water to a chute, which emptied into the tank. This type of Chinese pump was also used in the mining areas of Portuguese America. In addition, there is an apparatus equipped with a Greek human-powered wheel. The fourth image in the sequence features a cylindrical suction water pump like the model that appears on the map created by civil engineer Henry Mouzon II. The last image depicts the ideal rationalization of the production process, faster and using less manpower. In this last drawing, note the use of a cogwheel that conveys energy to two dye extraction apparatuses (Figure 13.5). Taken together, these drawings lead one to ponder about the way technical procedures circulated, as discussed by Kapil Raj. The circulation of knowledge

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 207

Figure 13.4 Apparatus with mechanized decantation stage, 1770. Source: Internet Archive. M. Beauvais-Raseau L’art de l’indigotier.

208 Alexander Lima Reis

Figure 13.5 Wooden apparatuses in Rio de Janeiro, 1785. Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro. Nove estampas das fábricas de anil nos distritos do Rio de Janeiro. Source: Composite illustration created by the author from images within the same correspondence. Section of manuscripts: Correspondência com a Corte, 1779–1790. L. 04, 04, 007, 111–120.

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 209 presupposes that societies build knowledge according to constraints at the global and local scale.9 In this case, knowledge about indigo dye extraction was resignified when dye production shifted from India to America. In America, European empires fostered the cultivation of indigo, and this ended up becoming technical knowledge that was shared, either amicably through meetings, books and shipments of plants and seeds or involuntarily, which could involve smuggling and espionage.10 Lissa L. Roberts argues that knowledge circulation requires local increment of ideas and practices in the networks of global circulation.11 The history of indigo was evidence of the circulation of ideas and technical knowledge that made it possible to complexify the history of the technique and architecture of indigo dye extraction in the Americas. Production of Indigo Dye in Charleston and Rio de Janeiro: Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu There is no evidence that Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu ever met, but they were part of the same frame of reference. The life story of these two people was connected based on the establishment of indigo dye in Charleston and Rio de Janeiro, respectively. More broadly, their paths in life can be associated with the aforementioned system of economic reward and social prestige typical of the modern period. The local scale of the two cities also had a structure of artisanal work typical of important colonial port cities on the Atlantic coast. Eliza was born in 1722 in Antigua, a Caribbean island. Her father, George Lucas, was a lieutenant colonel in the British army on this island. The conflicts between the English and Spanish forced her family to move to the colony of South Carolina, as her father had inherited land in the countryside there. Although she traveled to England several times, she spent most of her life in South Carolina and died in Philadelphia in 1793, where she went to seek medical attention. Jerônimo was born in the archdiocese of Braga, Portugal, ca.1728. Many young people from that region grew up to become businessmen in the cities of Porto and Lisbon.12 Others chose to cross the Atlantic. As a young man, Jerônimo came to Portuguese America, and records show that, in 1754, he lived in Mariana, Village in the captaincy of Minas Gerais.13 Other records show that he stayed in the city of Rio de Janeiro until his death in approximately 1800. Both these people had an elementary education but were self-taught with respect to their cultivation and processing projects. Eliza owned large rice plantations, while Jerônimo was a partner in a rice mill in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro. The two were brought up in a slave society, which was no coincidence at all. They each participated in a global extraction system with a state policy to encourage the development of products that were in high demand in European empires. Thus, individuals in different parts of the American continent were driven to develop some sort of useful colonial technical knowledge. The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that encompassed Atlantic societies to varying degrees on many levels. Even everyday objects were targets for reform, such as cultivation and processing techniques, under the justification of a process of rationalization.

210 Alexander Lima Reis Despite the similarities in terms of their investment in global extraction, there were many differences between these two historical figures and the political contexts in which they lived. First, Charleston participated actively in the American War of Independence between 1770 and 1780. In 1763, Rio de Janeiro became Brazil’s new capital, replacing the city of Salvador, in Bahia. The power of the viceroyalty of Brazil was strengthened, and the entire administrative structure was transferred to the new capital and seat of the viceroyalty. Eliza had many more resources than Jerônimo. In addition to her lands, she owned approximately two hundred enslaved people by the end of her life.14 It is not known whether Jerônimo was a slave owner; it is possible that he owned slaves. However, it is interesting to investigate the technical procedures for cultivation and processing as a know-how shared along the imperial routes of the Atlantic Ocean. Emma Hart, in research on the port and daily life in Charleston, reports that historians tend to ascribe the city’s growth to the export of indigo and rice. However, the author finds that other local processes contributed to this expansion, for example, the local market held on the docks and the expansion of construction. Emma Hart describes how the docks were central to local and maritime trade. On the dockside, beer was for sale from Philadelphia and indigo from Guatemala, along with rice, sugar, bacon, butter and other products. As for civil construction, Emma Hart describes artisans, masons and carpenters as contractors that contributed to the construction of houses and buildings of “classical Charleston.” Some were successful, like carpenter Thomas Elfe, who owned rental properties downtown. Between 1767 and 1773, the sale of urban real estate nearly equaled the exports of cattle, grain, and other general tax products.15 In this regard, the importance of these urban properties in this port city stands out. Rice and indigo brought in considerable revenue; however, local commerce and construction began to play an important role in Charleston’s expansion: “and by the time the Lucases arrived, Charleston was the most important British port in Atlantic North America south of Philadelphia.”16 Eliza is relatively well-known in American history. In 1989, she was inducted into The South Carolina Business Hall of Fame for her agricultural enterprises in South Carolina. Eliza carried out the first indigo dye production experiments on Wappoo plantation near Charleston between 1740 and 1744. In the book Eliza Pinckney, published in 1896, by her great-granddaughter Harriott Horry Ravenel states that: “Great Britain immediately offered a bounty of six-pence a pound, in order to exclude French indigo from her markets.”17 Virginia Pezalla states that Eliza’s greatest interest was agriculture, possibly influenced by her father.18 She took over the administration of the family lands at a very young age because her mother, Ann Lucas, fell ill. Moreover, her father spent less than one year in Charleston, after which he returned to the island due to the Anglo-Spanish conflicts.19 From Charleston, Eliza kept up a correspondence with her father in the Caribbean. George Lucas sent seeds of indigo and other plants to enable his daughter to carry out experiments to develop new crops. In addition, her father sent her two experts in the cultivation and processing of indigo dye from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean. Nicholas and Patrick Cromwell went to Wappoo, where they

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 211 participated in the initial experiments, but the first attempts were not successful, and the brothers were accused of trying to sabotage production. Nevertheless, it was they who built the brick vats described by her great-granddaughter. Furthermore, Eliza Martin points out that the activities of the Cromwell brothers exemplify the movement of these agents with specific expertise between South Carolina and the Caribbean.20 As mentioned earlier herein, knowledge was shared, albeit not always in the form pacific. Eliza planted a grove of fig and orange trees. Eliza also sought to introduce hemp, using the expertise of the Irish in the cultivation of this plant. Hemp was useful for the production of hemp canvas fabric, bags, clothing and, particularly, ropes. Eliza also experimented with the silkworm that feeds on mulberry leaves. According to Virginia Pezalla, she had three dresses produced from the silk she collected and processed. In the entirety of the Atlantic system, the port of Rio de Janeiro was strategic to the maritime route that reached up to the basin of the La Plata River and to the eastward route that touched the southern point of the African continent. Some ports served as interports where ships were refueled and repaired, enabling maritime voyages to proceed onwards. Following the routes required knowledge of wind direction, sea currents and safe havens. This geographic dimension was a factor that contributed to the cultural and economic enrichment of colonial Rio de Janeiro.21 In 1782, during his travels in an English fleet, German minister Friedrich Ludwig Langstedt landed in the city of Rio de Janeiro. He recorded his impressions about the local trade, where bread, beef, mutton, pork, Turkish ducks and Calicut hens were sold, as were rum, wine, coffee, sugar and almonds. In addition, there was a trade in wild animals, such as parrots and monkeys.22 As for workshops, the minister reported that there were many shoemakers, tailors, goldsmiths, watchmakers, carpenters, jewelers and merchants. On the other hand, construction appears in the research of Carlos Alberto Medeiros Lima. Similar to the carpenter Thomas Elfe of Charleston, the cabinetmaker José Rodrigues Pereira owned two houses within the urban perimeter of the city. The notion of contract work, which Emma Hart describes as a construction company, can be exemplified by the carpenter João Damasceno, who hired other artisans to work on his construction sites, as did the mason Manoel de Mello.23 According to João Fragoso, in the late eighteenth century, Rio de Janeiro was the main commercial port of the South Atlantic. At that time, mercantile capital enabled the rise of homens de negócio de grosso trato (“wholesale traders”).24 Jorge Miguel Pedreira explains that wholesale traders in Lisbon gained a different status from retail traders.25 In this context, these wholesale traders were integrated not only into the large networks of imperial trade but also with local commerce, whose dynamic resembled that of Charleston. The integration with local commerce and between captaincies in Rio de Janeiro balanced the trade deficit between Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon.26 Jerônimo spent the rest of his life exporting rice from a warehouse on Praia do Peixe. In the early 1760s, he became his brother’s partner in a rice processing unit in Andaraí Pequeno, in the interior of the district of Rio de Janeiro.27 At that time, he made the first improvement of the rice husker, introducing a sheet of tin in the

212 Alexander Lima Reis operating device. According to his documents, millers and bakers were still making use of this overhaul in the late 1790s.28 In 1772, in a joint effort, Jerônimo and the wholesaler Manoel da Costa Cardozo conducted the first experiments to extract blue indigo dye.29 This wholesaler owned the first brick vats built in the 1750s. After extracting the first samples of the dye, viceroy Marquis of Lavradio issued an ordinance in 1773, charging Jerônimo to investigate the natural occurrence of the indigo plant on the farms in the district of Rio de Janeiro in order to collect seeds.30 During the 1770s, several batches were sent to the port of Lisbon and from there to the Court’s laboratories for inspection. The parameter for determining quality was the indigo of Guatemala. Secretary of State Martinho de Melo e Castro sent some of this Guatemalan indigo to Rio de Janeiro. Correspondence in Portugal Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (“Overseas Historical Archive”) keeps a history of these experiments until their stabilization. Indigo shipments arrived in the port of Lisbon. A part was sent on to a factory in the town of Covilhã, Portugal, while the remainder was exported, mainly to Holland and Hamburg. In 1783, Jerônimo was appointed inspector of export crops at the Inspection Bureau.31 This occupation ensured that he had the necessary resources to focus on the cultivation of indigo, which was spreading through the capital district, while still allowing sufficient time for him to develop other apparatuses. His letters to Portugal clearly indicate that he was aware of the value and usefulness of his services as a good vassal of the empire of Portugal. Jerônimo’s records include detailed information about the productive units and the drawings reproduced in the iconographic section (Figure 13.5).32 During the 1780s, he also designed and built two devices for the production of manioc flour, created an apparatus for processing hemp linen, and devised an innovation in the cylinder of the sugar mill, which was used in rural parishes around the city of Rio de Janeiro.33 By the early 1790s, there were already 406 indigo production units in Rio de Janeiro.34 Jerônimo continued working on the construction of useful devices for the export trade. During that period, he also developed infrastructural devices such as a new winch model, a port scale and another water pump. However, at an advanced age, he filed a lawsuit to prove several activities that he considered to be for public benefit. In 1794, he sent a copy of this lawsuit to Queen Mary I, but there is no evidence of a response to this letter. In 1798, another copy was sent, this time to the new Secretary of State, Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho.35 In 1799, he received a letter from the Crown giving him perpetual tenure of the land upon which his rice exports’ warehouse stood.36 The two historical figures, Eliza and Jerônimo, were involved in the same shared frame of reference in the Atlantic context. Driven by the advancement of knowledge of the natural world and its usefulness, many agents from different social segments became interested in undertaking new forms of planting and processing. The main port cities of the Atlantic had the necessary financing, packaging and transport infrastructure for the workings of a dye extraction market. The urban structure of these port cities also had the type of specialized artisanal expertise for the production of the strategic inputs and tools needed for the establishment of

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 213 new agricultural crops. Thus, this study of Charleston and Rio de Janeiro provides evidence of the dynamics of circulation and sharing of this technical knowledge. Final Remarks Several historical works have focused on the architecture of extraction in the Atlantic. In the eighteenth century, indigo dye processing was part of this landscape of extraction in the circuit of the Atlantic trade routes. One objective of this work is to examine the economic and social importance of establishing this knowledge about cultivation and processing. This know-how was part of a set of useful colonial skills encouraged by empires aimed at substituting products imported from other European states. From the broader scale, guided by mercantilism, to the local one, Eliza and Jerônimo worked to establish this and other cultures that contributed to structuring the Atlantic trade. Acknowledgment Thanks to historian Lorelai Kury for reading and suggestions. I would like to thank the Post-Graduate Program in the History of Sciences and Health of Fiocruz for the educational and financial support. Thanks to my translator, Beatrice Allain. Thanks to Bruno Capilé, who read the text in Portuguese and English. Thanks to Ivan Silva, who read the text in Portuguese. Thanks to Virginia Ellison of the South Carolina Historical Society. I also thank the anthropologist Wilma Marques Leitão for her encouragement. Notes 1 Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Economies in the Era of Early Globalization, c.1450-c.1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 370. 2 B. Zorina Khan, “Prestige and Profit: The Royal Society of Arts and Incentives for Innovation, 1750–1850,” National Bureau of Economic Research 23042 (January 2017): 1–44. 3 Murillo Florindo Cruz Filho, Fundamentos do Sistema de Patentes na Modernidade e sua Dissolução Filosofia, História e Semiótica (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Lumen Juris, 2018), 472. 4 Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 334. 5 “Indigo Manufacture, French West Indies, 1760s,” Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora. www. slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1028 (Accessed May 15, 2023). 6 José Germán Pacheco Troconís, “El Añil: historia de un cultivo olvidado en Venezuela,” Universidad Autónomo de Barcelona. Tesis de doctorado, Departamento de Economía, Barcelona, España, 2000, 399. 7 Eliza Layne Martin, “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World,” World History Connected 7, no. 1 (2010). 8 Alain Corbin, Sabores e odores: o olfato e o imaginário social nos séculos XVIII e XIX (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), 367.

214 Alexander Lima Reis 9 Kapil Raj, “Conexões, Cruzamentos, Circulações: a passagem da cartografia britânica pela Índia, séculos XVII e XIX,” Revista de História e Cultura das Ideias 24 (2007): 155–179. 10 Lorelai Kury, “Plantas sem fronteira: jardins, livros e viagens séculos XVIII-XIX,” in Usos e circulação de plantas no Brasil séculos XVI-XIX, ed. Lorelai Kury (Rio de Janeiro: Andrea Jakobsson Estúdio, 2013), 228–292. 11 Lissa L. Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (March 2009): 9–30. 12 Jorge Miguel Pedreira, “Os negociantes de Lisboa na segunda metade do século XVIII: padrões de recrutamento e percursos sociais,” Análise Social 27, no. 116/117 (1992): 407–440. 13 Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT). Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Conselho Geral, Habilitações, Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu, mç.10, doc.155. 14 Martin, “Eliza . . .”. 15 Emma Hart, “Atlantic and Local: Scales of Interdependence in Eighteenth Century Charleston, South Carolina,” Almanack Guarulhos 319, no. 24 (2020): 1–28. 16 Martin, “Eliza . . .”. 17 Harriot Horry Ravenel, Eliza Pinckney (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 331. 18 Virginia A. M. Pezalla, “Elizabeth (Eliza) Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793),” in Women in the Biological Sciences, ed. Louise S. Grinstein, Carol A. Biermann and Rose K. Rose (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1997), 401–406. 19 Martin, “Eliza . . .”. 20 Ibid. 21 Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico-Sul (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000) and Luiz Edmundo Tavares, “Brasil Lindeiro: o sul (1474–1750),” Revista Navigator 15, no. 8 (2012): 27–37. 22 Carlos Oberacker Jr., “O Rio de Janeiro de 1782 visto pelo pastor F. L Langstedt,” Revista do IHGB 299 (1973): 3–15. 23 Carlos Alberto Medeiros Lima, Artífices do Rio de Janeiro (1790–1808) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Apicuri, 2008), 332. 24 João Fragoso, “Mercados e negociantes imperiais: um ensaio sobre a economia do império português (séculos XVII e XIX),” História: Questões & Debates 36, no. 1 (June 2002): 99–127. 25 Pedreira, “Os negociantes . . .”. 26 Fragoso, “Mercados . . .”. 27 Dauril Alden, “Manoel Luís Vieira: An Entrepreneur in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s Eighteenth-Century Agricultural Renaissance,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 4 (November 1959): 521–537. 28 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU). Rio de Janeiro, Caixa:17, D.12378, 1798. 29 Dauril Alden, “The Growth and Decline of Indigo Production in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Comparative Economic History,” The Journal of Economic History 25, no. 1 (March 1965): 35–60 and Fábio Pesavento, “O azul fluminense: o anil no Rio de Janeiro colonial, 1749–1818,” Dissertação de Mestrado em Ciências Econômicas, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, 2005, 84. 30 AHU, D.12378, 1798. 31 The Inspection Bureau existed in the four main ports of Portuguese America: Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Pernambuco and Maranhão. 32 AHU, Caixa:123, D.9937, 1784 and National Library of Rio de Janeiro, Estampas de modelos de aparato de anil. L.04,04,007, fls.111–120, 1785. 33 Alexander Lima Reis, “Um inventor no Rio de Janeiro do século XVIII: Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu e a cultura do anil em perspectiva global,” Dissertação de Mestrado, Programa de Pós-graduação em História da UNIRIO, Rio de Janeiro, 2022, 136. 34 Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa, “Relatório do vice-rei do Estado do Brasil: Luís de Vasconcelos ao entregar o governo ao seu sucessor o conde de Resende,” Revista do IHGB 23 (1860): 143–239.

Architecture of Indigo Dye Extraction in the Atlantic Context 215 35 AHU, D.12378, 1798. 36 ANTT, Livro de Registro Geral de Mercês da d. Maria I. Carta de Sesmaria. Liv.30, n.156, fl.24.

Reference List Alden, Dauril. “Manoel Luís Vieira: An Entrepreneur in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s Eighteenth-Century Agricultural Renaissance.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 39, no. 4 (November 1959): 521–537. Alden, Dauril. “The Growth and Decline of Indigo Production in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Comparative Economic History.” The Journal of Economic History 25, no. 1 (March 1965): 35–60. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU). Rio de Janeiro, Caixa:123, D.9937, 1784. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU). Livro de Registro Geral de Mercês da d. Maria I. Carta de Sesmaria. Liv.30, n.156, fl.24. Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU). Rio de Janeiro, Caixa:17, D.12378, 1798. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT). Tribunal do Santo Ofício, Conselho Geral, Habilitações, Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu, mç.10, doc.155. Corbin, Alain. Sabores e odores: o olfato e o imaginário social nos séculos XVIII e XIX. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987. Cruz Filho, Murillo Florindo. Fundamentos do Sistema de Patentes na Modernidade e sua Dissolução Filosofia, História e Semiótica. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Lumen Juris, 2018. Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de. O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil no Atlântico-Sul. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Vasconcelos e Sousa, Luís de. “Relatório do vice-rei do Estado do Brasil: Luís de Vasconcelos ao entregar o governo ao seu sucessor o conde de Resende.” Revista do IHGB 23 (1860): 143–239. Duplessis, Robert S. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe: Economies in the Era of Early Globalization, c.1450-c.1820. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Fragoso, João. “Mercados e negociantes imperiais: um ensaio sobre a economia do império português (séculos XVII e XIX).” História: Questões & Debates 36, no. 1 (June 2002): 99–127. Hart, Emma. “Atlantic and Local: Scales of Interdependence in Eighteenth Century Charleston, South Carolina.” Almanack Guarulhos 319, no. 24 (2020): 1–28. “Indigo Manufacture, French West Indies, 1760s.” Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora. www.slaveryimages. org/s/slaveryimages/item/1028 (Accessed May 15, 2023). Khan, B. Zorina. “Prestige and Profit: The Royal Society of Arts and Incentives for Innovation, 1750–1850.” National Bureau of Economic Research 23042 (January 2017): 1–44. Kumar, Prakash. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kury, Lorelai. “Plantas sem fronteira: jardins, livros e viagens séculos XVIII-XIX.” In Usos e circulação de plantas no Brasil séculos XVI-XIX, edited by Lorelai Kury, 228–292. Rio de Janeiro: Andrea Jakobsson Estúdio, 2013. Lima Reis, Alexander. “Um inventor no Rio de Janeiro do século XVIII: Jerônimo Vieira de Abreu e a cultura do anil em perspectiva global.” Dissertação de Mestrado: Programa de Pós-graduação em História da UNIRIO, Rio de Janeiro, 2022. Martin, Eliza Layne. “Eliza Lucas Pinckney: Production and Consumption in the Atlantic World.” World History Connected 7, no. 1 (2010). Medeiros Lima, Carlos Alberto. Artífices do Rio de Janeiro (1790–1808). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Apicuri, 2008.

216 Alexander Lima Reis Oberacker Jr., Carlos. “O Rio de Janeiro de 1782 visto pelo pastor F. L Langstedt.” Revista do IHGB 299 (1973): 3–15. Pacheco Troconís, José Germán. “El Añil: historia de un cultivo olvidado en Venezuela.” Universidad Autónomo de Barcelona, Tesis de doctorado, Departamento de Economía, Barcelona, España, 2000. Pedreira, Jorge Miguel. “Os negociantes de Lisboa na segunda metade do século XVIII: padrões de recrutamento e percursos sociais.” Análise Social 27, no. 116/117 (1992): 407–440. Pesavento, Fábio. “O azul fluminense: o anil no Rio de Janeiro colonial, 1749–1818.” Dissertação de Mestrado em Ciências Econômicas, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Niterói, 2005. Pezalla, Virginia A.M. “Elizabeth (Eliza) Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793).” In Women in the Biological Sciences, edited by Louise S. Grinstein, Carol A. Biermann and Rose K. Rose, 401–406. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1997. Raj, Kapil. “Conexões, Cruzamentos, Circulações: a passagem da cartografia britânica pela Índia, séculos XVII e XIX.” Revista de História e Cultura das Ideias 24 (2007): 155–179. Ravenel, Harriot Horry. Eliza Pinckney. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896. Roberts, Lissa L. “Situating Science in Global History Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation.” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (March 2009): 9–30. Tavares, Luiz Edmundo. “Brasil Lindeiro: o sul (1474–1750).” Revista Navigator 15, no. 8 (2012): 27–37.

14 From Caravans to Railroads Trails, Architecture, and Urban Networks in Rio Pardo’s Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Landscapes of Extraction1 Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira and Renata Baesso Pereira In September 1819, the French naturalist Auguste de Saint Hilaire traveled the Caminho dos Goisases (Goisases Path), beginning his journey in the village of Franca and heading south to the city of São Paulo. The journey totaled eightysix leagues and “followed the road that the caravans travelled.”2 As he traveled the path, Hilaire passed through the Casa Branca and Mogi Guaçu freguesias and the villages of Mogi Mirim, São Carlos (currently Campinas, São Paulo) and Jundiaí. He described the stretch to the village of Mogi Mirim as sparsely populated fields “with almost no culture, and whose inhabitants, living at intervals from each other near the roads, are usually rude, ignorant, stupid men.”3 Despite the European man’s perspective, plagued by stereotypes, the naturalist presents the dynamic that characterized the Caminho dos Goisases and originated various population nuclei. These nuclei are called pousos (pouso in the singular form),4 and they paced the rhythm of caravan travels using “donkeys loaded with European merchandise or colonial goods.”5 This regional dynamic allowed for the generation of wealth by families involved in tropeirismo6 and the supply economy7 meant to provide essential goods to São Paulo and the Rio de Janeiro royal court. In 1878, iron rails from the Companhia Mogiana (a railway company) arrived in the old sertões of the Pardo River, making obsolete the modes of transportation that relied on animal traction and pousos since they were no longer lucrative for local elites.8 Tropeiro paths and railways structured the formation of the network and urban spaces in the Pardo River Sertão during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article aims to demonstrate the relationship between the architecture of production buildings and transportation routes in the formation of the urban network that composed the extraction economy of Brazil. Architecture played a central role in the occupation of the sertões and in supporting the agricultural and cattle economy. Similarly, these economies also determined the types of buildings and transportation networks built in each period. To this end, we analyze the buildings and physical constructions that existed in this landscape: rural manor houses and chapels. The architecture of the manor DOI: 10.4324/9781003367413-18

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houses and chapels played an important role in representing the hierarchies and social relationships among slaveowners, enslaved people and free workers. Our investigation lies within the field of the Urban History9 and uses a variety of scales – the macroscale, which corresponds to the territory, the microscale, which is represented by the various settlement structures and architectural remnants – to reveal the complexity of the urbanization process more adequately.10 We employ tools from the Historical Geographic Information System (GIS)11 to analyze the circulation networks related to farms, rural neighborhoods, freguesias, villages and cities. By using this technique, we can interpret the landscape as a palimpsest, meaning we can overlap various periods and structures built by different generations.12 The current landscape contains roads, paths and constructions that have been preserved, providing clues that allow us to understand the formation process of the territory and are important artifacts of regional heritage. The Occupation of the Sertões During the colonial period, the word “sertão” was always associated with the conquest of inland domains and the establishment of settlements in the Portuguese colony. The definition of “sertão” differs from the definition of “territory.” The latter is defined as an abstract demarcation of a government’s jurisdiction that develops into toponyms and into different branching sources of civil and religious power.13 Recent research allows us to reconsider the sertões and present them as plural, dynamic spaces created through the diverse interactions of humans with the world around them.14 During the colonization process of the Pardo River Sertão, population centers received different denominations according to their functions within the urban network and to how populated they were: descoberto, registro, pouso, arraial, freguesia and vila.15 Regions previously known as simply “sertões” receive toponyms that reflect their incorporation into the Portuguese colonial territory. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the discovery of gold motivated the occupation of the Grande River Sertões in the captaincy of São Paulo.16 The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an inflection of geopolitical strategies adopted by the Portuguese in the colony. The concept of territorial sovereignty, previously based on the virtual possession of unknown areas, changed to be defined as a territory that is spatially demarcated. The Treaty of Madrid (January 1750) adopted the new definition.17 In practice, the concept of uti possidetis meant that legitimate state power was only recognized when one exercised political and military control over a region: occupation would define possession.18 Within the context of the disputes between the Iberian crowns for the occupation of the Portuguese-Spanish sertões in America, there was a push towards urbanization through the creation of new freguesias and villages. These conflicts were reflected in the territorial policies adopted between 1765 and 1775 by Morgado de Matheus, the governor of the captaincy of São Paulo. During his government, de Matheus increased the rate at which freguesias and vilas were founded and

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provided incentives to the sugar and mining industries to keep the population in the territory. A broad, annual population census was used to identify those who were fit to serve in the military and who could be sent to areas of conflict with the Spanish. In the second half of the eighteenth century, disputes between the governments of the captaincies of São Paulo and Minas Gerais were centered around the descobertos in the sertões. The Pardo River descoberto was among them, a mining area that the Captaincy of São Paulo took possession of in 1765.19 The Caminho dos Goiases was the main route used to penetrate the sertão. A network of secondary paths connected the Caminho dos Goisases to the Caminho de Fernão Dias (Fernão Dias Path, opened in 1674) in the disputed regions of the captaincies. In 1775, in the region of the descoberto, the Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Bom Sucesso of the Pardo River freguesia was created. A chapel devoted to this saint was constructed on the bank of the Riberão Bom Sucesso, where the first arraial was formed. The freguesia was also known as “Caconde,” a word that originated from Indigenous and quilombo cultures.20 After the freguesia was founded, the entire region between the Rio Grande to the north and the village of Mogi Mirim (created in 1769) was named the “Rio Pardo Sertão” (Sertão do Rio Pardo). Secondary paths that originated in the Caminho dos Goiases connected population nuclei. The Caminho Velho (Old Path), opened in 1760, was the first route that connected the descoberto of Caconde to the Caminho dos Goisases. Later, the Caminho do Rio Pardo (Pardo River Path), opened between 1778 and 1780, was an alternative route parallel to the Caminho Velho, used to reach the Caconde Freguesia. At first, the freguesia’s population was comprised of gold miners and farmers who occupied the region near the border between the two captaincies.21 This was the area where the Registro of São Matheus, responsible for general tax collection and for the gold tax, was established. The freguesia’s population nucleus also maintained relationships with the pousos located in the Caminho dos Goisases.22 Mining was a less profitable economic activity in the freguesia than it was in other regions, and by the end of the eighteenth century, the freguesia’s economy had begun to decline, which led to a decrease in population.23 The progressive migration of people from the Captaincy of Minas Gerais to other regions of the Rio Pardo Sertão resulted in the growth of the population located near the pousos of the Caminho dos Goisases and helped develop agropastoral activities.24 In the last years of the eighteenth century, the Caconde Freguesia produced corn, beans, flour, lard, tobacco, rice and cotton. The region also raised cattle,25 a significant activity in most urban nuclei in the Rio Pardo Sertão. The region already presented traces of the agricultural production that would characterize the first half of the nineteenth century before the arrival of coffee. The Pousos as the Origin of Urban Nuclei Since the first half of the eighteenth century, many pousos were established in the Caminho dos Goisases. Among these was the Casa Branca pouso that, according

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to the 1767 census, contained two “fogos”26 and sixteen inhabitants.27 In 1783, the pouso had only one inhabitant, the soldier João de França.28 The Cocais pouso was located to the south of the Casa Branca pouso, and the Olhos d’Água pouso was located beyond Cocais. These pousos were the three stops that structured this part of the territory (Figure 14.1). There are practically no records of the architectural typology of a pouso except for the drawings made by Johann Moritz Rugendas (Figure 14.2). They portray the open shelter meant to house travelers. One can see other buildings in the

Figure 14.1 Diachronic map of the urban network 1900, representing the main trails, secondary paths, railways, urban nuclei and the network of farms and rural properties. Source: QGIS map made by the authors (2022).

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background, more durable than the open shelters highlighted in Rugenda’s drawing. The author’s representation refers to the idea of a primitive hut, explored in eighteenth-century architectural treatises.29 The naturalist Saint-Hilaire traveled the caminho and, in 1819, described that “on the very day of my arrival in the banks of the Rio Grande, I crossed the river and slept in a vast shelter covered in leaves and open on all sides.”30 He continued his journey, arriving at the Rio das Pedras pouso and described it as a “type of village comprised of a few small houses… The shelter in which I stayed was in better conditions than these huts.”31 Shelters for tropas, as Rugendas’ drawing suggests, coexisted with more perennial buildings inhabited by one or more families that probably owned the wayleave to cross the rivers when the properties were located on riverbanks. These families profited from trading with the tropeiros. The emergence of pousos should be understood based on three factors: how frequently people used a path, human presence in the region and the existence of previous structures, such as farms, capable of being adapted into a pouso.32 A pouso’s architecture was very simple and utilitarian, seeing as they were birthed from the need to shelter caravan travelers. Nevertheless, these ranches represented civilization hubs within the sertão.

Figure 14.2 Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858), Repos d’une caravane (1835). Source: Reproduction of the lithograph. Source: Collection of the Paulista Museum of the University of São Paulo.

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The voyages were planned based on the location of the pousos that had pastures and sources of water. These pousos organized the territory and conducted the travelers through known and relatively safe regions.33 Many pousos in the Caminho dos Goisases were established on the banks of rivers, lagoons and water springs. That is the case with the Olhos d’Água pouso, established on the banks of one of the many lagoons in the region. Saint-Hilaire stayed overnight at this pouso in his voyage in 1819 and stated that it was merely a partially covered shelter.34 A population consolidated itself in the same place as the old pouso due to the arrival of the Mogiana railway at the end of the 1870s and the inauguration of a railway station. Currently, the place is called Lagoa Branca, and it is a district of the city of Casa Branca. In 1807, Father Francisco de Godói Coelho, a resident of the Cocais pouso, obtained a sesmaria35 in the region and tried establishing a freguesia by building a chapel and a cemetery.36 The chapel built by Father Godói was not recognized as a freguesia, however, and one was created in the Casa Branca pouso through a royal decree by the Prince Regent of Portugal, D. João VI. The decree was part of the Crown’s colonization plan to bring immigrant families from the Azores to populate the inland regions of Brazil. Civilization becomes rooted in the sertões partly because of the chapels built in the pousos. The religious structures represented the presence of the Catholic Church even in the most distant places. The pousos and their simple architecture provided a base for the commercial, mining, and agricultural activities along the Caminho dos Goisases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Tropeiro Paths to Railways Some pousos became freguesias and villages due to the expansion of agropastoral activities along the Caminho dos Goisases. The main economic activity in these nuclei was the basic agriculture needed to supply goods to the province and the husbandry of cattle and horses. The population of the Casa Branca freguesia dedicated itself to cultivating these goods and raising cattle, horses and pigs. In 1825, there were three sugar and spirit mills in Casa Branca.37 Cattle were useful for transporting firewood and sugarcane, both of which were essential for mills. The raising of horses was probably meant to serve the transportation tropas in the Caminho dos Goisases. In the second half of the nineteenth century, new villages were created, including Caconde in 1864, Mococa in 1871 and São José do Rio Pardo in 1885. Farms in these villages gradually began cultivating coffee, competing, at first, with the cattle and sugar industries. The farms analyzed in this paper were active in a later period when coffee production was the main economic activity. The Mogiana railway branch in Casa Branca was inaugurated in 1878.38 It left from the city of Campinas and entered the Rio Pardo Sertão through Casa Branca. Later, the railway reached São José do Rio Pardo (1884) and Mococa (1890).39 The shareholders who invested in the expansion of the railway and large coffee plantation owners in the region had similar interests. The president of the railway company, for example, owned the Santa Maria Farm, a coffee producer in the Casa Branca territory.

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The railway stretching from Casa Branca to the village of São José do Rio Pardo was inaugurated in 1884 and was named Pardo River Railway Branch (Ramal Férreo do Rio Pardo). It was constructed by José da Costa Machado e Souza, a coffee grower in São José do Rio Pardo, who was also president of the Minas Gerais Province between 1867 and 1868.40 Costa Machado established himself in the Água Fria Farm, land owned by his father-in-law. He also explored contiguous lands and formed the Vila Costina Farm.41 His farm was one of the pioneers of coffee plantations in the region. In 1888, the Mogiana Company acquired the Pardo River Railway Branch and merged it with the Casa Branca branch. One of the most emblematic examples of an economic journey tied to the tropeiro roads and railways is that of the Prado family. Antônio da Silva Prado, the Iguape Baron (1848), built his fortune in the sugar business and by conducting mules and controlling tax collection. His daughter, Veridiana da Silva Prado, married Martinho da Silva Prado, her father’s half-brother. According to Bueno, Martinho Prado “was, for some time, the largest coffee producer in the world, with 3.54 million plants. Other than being a coffee grower, he was also one of the founders of the Companhia Paulista (“São Paulo Company”) and the Estrada de Ferro Sorocabana (“Sorocabana Railway”) in 1871, of the Mogiana Company and of Ituana (“Ituana Railway”) in 1872.”42 Martinho Prado and Veridiana explored the land in Casa Branca, which led to the construction of the Santa Veridiana Farm in 1866, the first to produce coffee in this region. One of the couple’s sons, Antônio da Silva Prado (1840–1929), would have been considered the ideal Brazilian businessman in that period. He owned large coffee plantations, administered an export company, and was a director in a bank and in a railway company.43 He was one of the most influential people in the city of São Paulo and became a Senator in the Empire in 1887. The start of the coffee-growing culture in the Casa Branca region was, therefore, the work of investors that had already created fortunes in the tropeiro business in the Caminho dos Goisases. This economic activity was born out of the gold cycle at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The trajectory of the tracks and the location of railway stations are related to the old paths: the tracks parallel the Caminho dos Goisases and reap the benefits of traversing the relatively flat valley floor (Figure 14.1). The construction of railways in the Mogiana region only occurred after coffee production was well established in the area. Farmers estimated that transportation using mules was economically viable within a 200-kilometer radius from the end of the tracks.44 Therefore, railways were built to explore the potential of areas whose transportation needs were already met by mules.45 The railways led to a disruption in the sertão due to the speed of transportation. Journeys that lasted months on animal-drawn vehicles now took only a few days. While new waypoints and connecting stations were established, the railway branches gave a new meaning to the location of the old pousos. Some became districts, such as the old Olhos d’Água pouso, or rural neighborhoods. The railway stations of the Mogiana branches were located near farms and the regional agrarian elite who had a capitalist mindset oriented towards the development of the coffee culture as the main Brazilian export in the nineteenth century. Rezende shows that the design of the tracks led to conflicts because the shareholders

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of the Pardo River Railway Branch were mostly farmers who disagreed when seeking to build railways close to their properties.46 There were also intense disputes involving the Paulista and Mogiana companies in the decade of 1880 concerning the concession of privileged zones to both companies. The construction of the Saint Veridiana branch by the Paulista company led Mogiana to take the dispute to court, and legal proceedings lasted until 1913. The arrival of the railway in the decade of 1880 boosted urban development, which brought new styles of architecture. The abolition of slavery in 1888 and the arrival of immigrants further contributed to the new architecture, as can be seen in the city of São José do Rio Pardo.47 Regarding building techniques, new industrialized materials begin to gradually substitute constructions made with rammed earth.48 Reis Filho reminds us that the “railways brought new construction resources on their tracks, but, above all, they brought a new way of building.”49 The railway stations served as new construction models with more refined workmanship. New architectural solutions were diffused throughout the inland of São Paulo Province and impacted both urban and rural architecture. The Santa Mathilde farm (Figure 14.3) was built in the decade of 1880 when coffee started being cultivated in the region. The Tubaca and Saint Mathilde farms are in the territory of the city of São José do Rio Pardo. The Tubaca Farm manor house was built in 1870, and in 1898, the farm produced 12,000 arrobas of coffee.50 It was the second largest coffee producer, bested only by the Vila Costina Farm,

Figure 14.3 Santa Mathilde Farm Manor House. Source: Rafael’s personal archive (2016).

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owned by José da Costa Machado e Souza, who produced 30,000 arrobas of coffee. The reason behind this difference in production certainly lies in the latter farm’s proximity to the railway stations. The Santa Mathilde Farm belonged to the Junqueira family, one of the many families that came from the Minas Gerais Province and populated the lands of the Rio Pardo Sertão. The manor house and the chapel already present elements of a neoclassical predilection, although in a simplified manner. Its façade’s apertures contain colonnades, friezes, and frames (Figure 14.3). In the Santa Mathilde Farm, the coffee-drying yards are aligned with the manor house. This alignment reflects the control and hierarchy exercised by the owners in the center of the property. Other than the functions that the buildings must serve, the symbolic aspects of the layout must not be overlooked since they represented the hierarchies between slave owners, enslaved laborers and paid agricultural workers. For this reason, concepts such as order, regularity and decorum are necessary to understand how aesthetics facilitated and composed the organization of a productive rural unit. The manor house was built on an elevated part of the property. The porches that protrude out from the house façade give the construction a sense of grandeur and enable visual control of the landscape (Figure 14.3). The architecture of the private chapels reveals stylistic elements associated likewise with the manor houses. The chapels were built on the farm’s private land and served the smaller family circle as well as the inhabitants of neighboring properties and the enslaved in the region. The chapel on the Santa Mathilde farm was scarcely decorated and had a triangular pediment and two towers that resemble miniature bell towers due to their proportions (Figure 14.4). The chapels found in the urban nuclei, on the other

Figure 14.4 Chapel of the Santa Mathilde Farm. Source: Rafael’s personal archive (2016).

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hand, enjoyed a higher status because they belonged to the ecclesiastical network of freguesias and villages. These chapels instigated the foundation of these urban nuclei that were born from the practice of dedicating a part of one’s rural land to a saint. This became known as a chapel’s property.51 The farms were nodes and, therefore, played an essential role in the organization of the territory by assembling the inhabitants of a diffused community. All settlement structures – farms, registros, pousos, arraiais and chapels – can be interpreted as “city fragments” that defined the territory and resulted from the urbanization process and the formation of an agricultural economy.52 Farms that usually had chapels in their living nucleus comprised of the manor house, coffee drying yards and other buildings related to agricultural production. The chapels located within the farms became the main adhesive of different social classes, seeing as each rural unit could be considered self-sufficient.53 Marquese defends the idea that these chapels represented social hierarchies and clientelist networks between enslaved laborers and slaveowners: “They functioned as vectors in the creation of new societal relationships.”54 We are, above all, interested in identifying the architectural transformations when it comes to typology, construction techniques, the use of formal vocabulary related to the manor houses and other buildings related to the coffee cycle in this territory. These served a symbolic function and played an active role in the nineteenth-century economy. One cannot understand the reasons behind this rural architecture without considering its symbolic role that materialized social hierarchies and cultural values. The structures adopted in the coffee-producing territory in the nineteenth century suggest transitional connections and possible comparisons with plantation slavery in the Atlantic territory in the long term. If we consider landscape as a valued historical artifact in these cases, we can shed light on connections between production buildings and religious edifices. This approach comports with current conservation policy that seeks to preserve the landscape as opposed to disconnected, isolated structures. As architectural artifacts, these buildings were central to social and technical history and can be amalgamated in a landscape born out of the uneven superposition of many historical periods.55 As Santos observes, the materials that form the landscape cannot explain themselves on their own, but they are important research topics that have the potential to instigate a reconsideration of the steps and means of production in the past. Considering the infrastructure networks in the territory becomes essential in our understanding of the formation of urban networks that enabled extraction. We seek to highlight the necessity of paying attention to the notion of urbanity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the analysis of extraction landscapes tied to the internal agriculture of supply and exports, in which many buildings were related, orbiting urban nuclei of different statuses. Notes 1 This article is part of a larger doctoral research thesis developed in the Architecture and Urbanism post-graduate program of the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas – São

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5 6

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8 9

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Paulo, Brazil, and supervised by Dra. Renata Baesso Pereira. See Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira. In the shadow of the chapel: the religious property in the constitution of urban spaces and in the formation of the territory polarized by the villages of Casa Branca and Caconde in the nineteenth century. PhD thesis (Campinas: PUC Campinas, 2022). Auguste de Saint Hilaire, Journey to the São Paulo Province (Viagem à Província de São Paulo) (São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1940), 111. Ibid. According to Vidal (2016), “instead of being analyzed in terms of its external objectives (the territorial occupation, urbanization, etc.), it seems important to understand the pousos in and of themselves. The sole etymology of the noun ‘pouso’ (from the Latim pausare, which originated the lexis ‘pause’) clearly suggests that it carries a double meaning of temporal (pause) and site (pouso) specificity.” Vidal defines pouso as “a spacial form derived from the wait of men in displacement, dedicated to sheltering those in pause.” Ibid., 111. Mules were used to transport goods and merchandise during the colonial and imperial periods, and this method of transportation established a connection between Brazilian regions. Tropeirismo emerged as an activity to support mining and contributed to the development of the south, south-east and center-west regions. A tropeiro was the owner of a herd of transportation mules. Rodrigo Fontanari, “Rompendo fronteiras: a marcha da economia de abastecimento sulmineira rumo ao território paulista (Casa Branca no meio século 19),” in Sul de Minas em transição: a formação do capitalismo na passagem para o século 20 (Bauru: Edusc, 2012), 69–92. Rodrigo Fontanari, O problema do financiamento: uma análise histórica sobre o crédito no complexo cafeeiro paulista. Casa Branca (1874–1914) (UNESP, 2012), 54. www. culturaacademica.com.br/catalogo/o-problema-do-financiamento/. See Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, Contribuição ao Estudo da Evolução Urbana do Brasil (1500/1720) (São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira; Edusp, 1968); Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, “Introdução,” Anais do Museu Paulista 20, no. 1 (June 2012): 11–40. Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, “Introdução,” Anais do Museu Paulista 29 (2021): 1–9. See Bernard Lepetit, Por uma nova História Urbana (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2016), 227–261. Anne K. Knowles, “GIS and History,” in Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, CA: ESRJ Press, 2008), 8. Milton Santos, A Natureza do Espaço: técnica e Tempo, Razão e Emoção (São Paulo: Edusp, 2002), 104. Cláudia Damasceno Fonseca, Arraiais e vilas d’el rei: espaço e poder nas Minas setecentistas (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2011), 557. Esdras Arraes, “Ecos de um suposto silêncio: paisagem e urbanização dos ‘certoens’ do Norte, c.I666–I820,” PhD thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017, 49. https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2018.tde-13062017-130722. Descoberto is an expression used to describe a small grouping formed next to locations where gold was found, sometimes next to rivers and brooks. The registros were, in the colonial period, travel warehouses along paths. They were used for tax collection over goods or gold. A registro is composed of a small site with a shelter for tropeiros and a building that serves as a military warehouse and tax collection location. The word pouso refers to road stops located along the caminhos where travelers stopped to rest. They were made of shelters and other buildings meant to shelter the caravans. Arraial was a term used to refer top laces that were dependent on a headquartes, meaning they did not have administrative autonomy (Fonseca, Arraiais, 28). In the nineteenth century, the word began to refer to different settlements such as rural neighborhoods, freguesias and villages, designating the population nucleus. Freguesia refers to the urban and ecclesiastical status of a population that has a parish church, a termo (a territorial constituency) and that is subordinate to a village. As the population of a freguesia grows, the

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17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

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inhabitants start having access to baptism, marriage and death registries. In the imperial period, one can note the distinction between freguesia (a civil term) and paróquia (an ecclesiastical term, meaning parish). The word vila refers to population nuclei that served as headquarters for a city and, therefore, enjoyed political and administrative autonomy. The upgrade from freguesia to vila meant that the location began to have a municipal council called a câmara, composed of indirectly elected aldermen. Furthermore, the limits of the territory were delimited, its termo could be composed of other subordinate freguesias. For more on this, read Rafael A. S. Ferreira and Renata B. Pereira, “Levar a justiça e a cruz aos sertões: os movimentos de ocupação dos sertões do Rio Grande e a formação da freguesia de N. Sra. da Conceição do Bom Sucesso do Rio Pardo na segunda metade do século XVIII,” Anais do Museu Paulista 29 (2021): 1–52. https://doi. org/10.1590/1982-02672021v29d1e10. Ibid., 16. Maria Fernanda Derntl, Método e arte: urbanização e formação territorial na capitania de São Paulo, 1765–1811 (São Paulo: Alameda, 2013), 45. Ferreira and Pereira, “Levar a justiça.” According to Senna, the toponym “Caconde” has African origins, “resembling Caconda, in western Africa, that would have originated the word ‘Cacunda,’ which is also used in Brazil instead of ‘dorsal’ or ‘back’” (Senna, “Nótulas”, 285). The author also presents the hypothesis that the word comes from the Indigenous phrase cáa-co-ndê, meaning “is this land yours?” (Ibid.). Carlos de Almeida Prado Bacellar and Lucila Reis Brioschi, Na estrada do Anhanguera: uma visão regional da história paulista (São Paulo: Humanitas, 1999), 52. See also: Rafael Augusto Silva Ferreira, “Entre fronteiras e conflitos: aspectos fundiários da formação do Sertão do Rio Pardo, 1775–1865,” Master diss., Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Campinas, 2017. Ibid. Bacellar and Brioschi, Na estrada, 52. Ferreira, Entre fronteiras, 157. Ibid., 164. Fogo is the expression used in the name list that designated registered dwellings. Amélia Trevisan, Casa Branca, a povoação dos ilhéus (São Paulo: Edições Arquivo do Estado, 1982), 34. Ibid., 34. Joseph Rykwert, A casa de Adrão no paraíso (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2019). Saint-Hilaire, Viagem, 112. Ibid., 113. Vidal, The Genesis, 406. Esdras Arraes, Sertões: habitar a simplicidade, reconhecer a poiésis do lugar (Rio de Janeiro: Paisagens Híbridas, 2022), 102–106. Saint-Hilaire, Viagem, 137. A sesmaria was a large expanse of land given to a beneficiary in the name of the king of Portugal. It was meant to cultivate virgin land. The sesmaria system originated in the final periods of the Middle Ages in Portugal and was largely used in the colonial period in Brazil. In Brazil, the concession of sesmarias began in 1534 and was abolished only after the country’s independence in 1822. Trevisan, Casa Branca, 37. Ibid., 136. Beatriz Mugayar Kühl, Arquitetura do ferro e arquitetura ferroviária em São Paulo: reflexões sobre a sua preservação (São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial; Fapesp, 1988), 132. Other branches of the Mogiana expanded to many regions in the São Paulo Province and in the south of the Minas Gerais Province, affirming itself as the largest track builder in the inland of São Paulo. Ibid., 132.

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40 Fábio Augusto Missura, “Costa Machado: ação política e empresarial na sociedade do café em Rio Pardo (1877–1917),” Thesis, UNESP, Franca, 2003, 3. 41 Rodolpho José del Guerra, No Ventre da Terra Mãe (São José do Rio Pardo: Rodolpho José Del Guerra; Graf-Center, 2001), 28. 42 Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, A cidade como negócio: mercado imobiliário rentista, projetos e processo de produção do Centro Velho de São Paulo do século XIX à Lei do Inquilinato (1809–1942) (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 2019), 233. https:// doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2019.tde-17012019-135711. 43 José de Souza Martins, O cativeiro da terra (São Paulo: Contexto, 2010), 273–274. 44 Ibid., 41. 45 Ibid. 46 Natalia Cappellari de Rezende, “A cidade de São José do Rio Pardo e as moradias do Centro Histórico (1865–1940),” Master diss., Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2019, 77. 47 Ibid., 60. 48 The hand-rammed earth technique (taipa de mão) is a construction technique that uses red clay and a wooden structure. It consists of a master structure of horizontal and vertical wooden pieces that were horizontally connected to other, thinner section pieces, forming a reticulated weft. The red clay was thrown at the weft and manually fixated, resulting in a closing wall. It was widely applied in the colonial period because it is easy to execute and the raw materials are readily available. 49 Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, Quadro da arquitetura no Brasil (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011), 156. 50 Hemeroteca Paschoal Artese. Jornal O Rio Pardo, nº 21, ano 01, edição de 27 de abril de 1898, fl. 3v. 51 Nilson Ghirardello, A formação dos patrimônios religiosos no processo de expansão urbana paulista (1850–1900) (São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2010). 52 Cícero Ferraz Cruz, “Cidade difusa: a construção do território na Vila de Campanha e seu termo, séculos XVIII-XIX,” PhD thesis, FAU USP, São Paulo, 2016, 193. 53 Fania Fridman, Donos do Rio em nome do Rei: uma história fundiária do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2017), 127. 54 Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “Revisitando casas-grandes e senzalas: a arquitetura das plantations escravistas americanas no século XIX,” Anais do Museu Paulista 14, no. 1 (June 2006): 11–57. 55 On the concept of landscape, read Santos. A natureza. . .

Reference List Arraes, Esdras. “Ecos de um suposto silêncio: paisagem e urbanização dos ‘certoens’ do Norte, c. I666–I820.” PhD thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017. https:// doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2018.tde-13062017-130722. Arraes, Esdras. Sertões: habitar a simplicidade, reconhecer a poiésis do lugar. Rio de Janeiro: Paisagens Híbridas, 2022. Artese, Hemeroteca Paschoal. Jornal O Rio Pardo, nº 21, ano 01, edição de 27 de abril de 1898, fl. 3v. Bacellar, Carlos de Almeida Prado, and Lucila Reis Brioschi. Na estrada do Anhanguera: uma visão regional da história paulista. São Paulo: Humanitas, 1999. Bueno, Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira. “Introdução.” Anais do Museu Paulista 20, no. 1 (June 2012): 11–40. Bueno, Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira. “A cidade como negócio: mercado imobiliário rentista, projetos e processo de produção do Centro Velho de São Paulo do século XIX à Lei do Inquilinato (1809–1942).” Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2019. https://doi. org/10.11606/T.16.2019.tde-17012019-135711.

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Bueno, Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira. “Introdução.” Anais do Museu Paulista 29 (2021): 1–9. Cruz, Cícero Ferraz. “Cidade difusa: a construção do território na Vila de Campanha e seu termo, séculos XVIII-XIX.” PhD thesis, FAU USP, São Paulo, 2016. de Bivar Marquese, Rafael. “Revisitando casas-grandes e senzalas: a arquitetura das plantations escravistas americanas no século XIX.” Anais do Museu Paulista 14, no. 1 (June 2006): 11–57. del Guerra, Rodolpho José. No Ventre da Terra Mãe. São José do Rio Pardo: Rodolpho José Del Guerra; Graf-Center, 2001. de Rezende, Natalia Cappellari. “A cidade de São José do Rio Pardo e as moradias do Centro Histórico (1865–1940).” Master dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2019. Derntl, Maria Fernanda. Método e arte: urbanização e formação territorial na capitania de São Paulo, 1765–1811. São Paulo: Alameda, 2013. de Senna, Nelson. “Toponymia Geographica de origem brasilico-indígena em Minas Gerais.” Revista do Arquivo Público Mineiro 20 (1924): 191–337. de Souza Martins, José. O cativeiro da terra. São Paulo: Contexto, 2010. Ferreira, Rafael Augusto Silva. “Entre fronteiras e conflitos: aspectos fundiários da formação do Sertão do Rio Pardo, 1775–1865.” Master dissertation, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Campinas, 2017. Ferreira, Rafael Augusto Silva. “À sombra da capela: os patrimônios religiosos na constituição dos espaços urbanos e na formação do território polarizado pelas vilas de Casa Branca e Caconde no século XIX.” PhD thesis, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Campinas, Campinas, 2022. Ferreira, Rafael Augusto Silva, and Renata B. Pereira, “Levar a justiça e a cruz aos sertões: os movimentos de ocupação dos sertões do Rio Grande e a formação da freguesia de N. Sra. da Conceição do Bom Sucesso do Rio Pardo na segunda metade do século XVIII.” Anais do Museu Paulista 29 (2021): 1–52. https://doi.org/10.1590/1982-02672021v29d1e10. Fonseca, Cláudia Damasceno. Arraiais e vilas d’el rei: espaço e poder nas Minas setecentistas. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2011. Fontanari, Rodrigo. O problema do financiamento: uma análise histórica sobre o crédito no complexo cafeeiro paulista. Casa Branca (1874–1914). UNESP, 2012. www.culturaacademica.com.br/catalogo/o-problema-do-financiamento/. Fontanari, Rodrigo. “Rompendo fronteiras: a marcha da economia de abastecimento sulmineira rumo ao território paulista (Casa Branca no meio século 19).” In Sul de Minas em transição: a formação do capitalismo na passagem para o século 20, 69–92. Bauru: Edusc, 2012. Fridman, Fania. Donos do Rio em nome do Rei: uma história fundiária do Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2017. Ghirardello, Nilson. A formação dos patrimônios religiosos no processo de expansão urbana paulista (1850–1900). São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2010. Goulart Reis Filho, Nestor. Contribuição ao Estudo da Evolução Urbana do Brasil (1500/1720). São Paulo: Livraria Pioneira; Edusp, 1968. Goulart Reis Filho, Nestor. Quadro da arquitetura no Brasil. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011. Hilaire, Auguste de Saint. Journey to the São Paulo Province (Viagem à Província de São Paulo). São Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1940. Knowles, Anne K. “GIS and History.” In Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. Redlands, CA: ESRJ Press, 2008.

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Kühl, Beatriz Mugayar. Arquitetura do ferro e arquitetura ferroviária em São Paulo: reflexões sobre a sua preservação. São Paulo: Ateliê Editorial; Fapesp, 1988. Lepetit, Bernard. Por uma nova História Urbana. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2016. Missura, Fábio Augusto. “Costa Machado: ação política e empresarial na sociedade do café em Rio Pardo (1877–1917).” Master dissertation, UNESP, Franca, 2003. Rykwert, Joseph. A casa de Adrão no paraíso. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2019. Santos, Milton. A Natureza do Espaço: técnica e Tempo, Razão e Emoção. São Paulo: Edusp, 2002. Trevisan, Amélia. Casa Branca, a povoação dos ilhéus. São Paulo: Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, 1982. Vidal, Laurent. “The Genesis of Pousos in Modern Brazil: Considerations on (urban) forms sprung from waiting.” Tempo 22, no. 40 (2016): 400–419.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure on the corresponding page. aban kakraba (Little Fort) see Ghana’s Castle Brew abolitionism 123, 127, 165, 188, 218 Acosta, José de 29 Adams, Samuel 166 Africa 9; architectural influence of 7–8, 95, 108–113, 109, 114; Asante people of 189; Blankson family of Ghana 182, 191, 192n32; enslaved people of 86, 88–89, 91–92, 96; Fante people of 180–182, 188–190; Ghana’s Castle Brew 9, 178–194, 179, 184, 185; Northern African craft traditions 129; Royal African Company 179, 181; Slave Coast 180; West African slavery 9, 188–190; see also African diaspora; slavery African diaspora: African Americans 102–103, 112–113; “Africanness” in architecture 108, 110, 113; in Barbados 86–80, 91–92, 95–96; Black-on-Black enslavement 112; Creolized Africans 96; in Cuba 139; dressing in Euromerican fashion 106, 107, 114; enslaved Africans in Barbados 86–89, 91–92, 96; gens de couleur libres 101–103, 108–110, 112, 114; Metoyer family of Louisiana 9, 101–103, 108–114, 109, 111; in the West Indies generally 151 “Africanness” in architecture 108, 110, 113 Agricola, Georgius 12–13, 14, 16–17, 19, 22n8 agricultural production: breadfruit 127; cash-crops 101, 113; cassava 127;

cattle 204, 211, 213, 216; coconut 127; corn 55n17, 145, 213; cotton 55n17, 101, 151, 158, 161n30, 213; hemp 205, 206; indigo 9, 195–210, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202; orangeries 120–121, 126–127, 127; rice 101, 161n30, 203–206, 213; tobacco 1, 45, 80, 101, 151, 213; wool 20; see also coffee; sugar Aksillisæt Innuin Nunejnnit. Billeder fra Grønland (Images from Greenland) 78–79, 78, 84n24 Alps 13 Altiplano 48 American Almanac 63 American Gazetteer, The 198–199 American Museum or Universal Magazine, The 58 American South 63, 103, 109, 112, 167, 173 Amigo, Ana 144 Andean communities in mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38 Anglo-Dutch wars of the late seventeenth century 151 Angulo, Francisco de 27 anil see indigo Anomabo fort, Ghana 178–180, 179, 181, 188, 189, 192n35 Ansah, Effua 180 anse de panier arches 183, 184 Antigua 123, 124, 125 Anti-Slavery Reporter, The 63–64 Apperley, John 180 Arcedeckne, Andrew 121, 126, 129 Arcedeckne, Chaloner 119–120, 122, 123, 124, 128

Index architecture 1–11, 2–4, 6, 7; abandoned structures 54, 74; “Africanness” 108, 110, 113; anse de panier arches 183, 184; bawns (walled courts) 89–91, 89; botanical gardens 9, 136–149, 140, 141, 143; in the British colonies of Ireland and Barbados 9, 86–100, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97; of early modern imperial mining exchanges 12–26, 14, 16, 18, 21; English Palladianism 88, 97, 170, 171; Fonthill Abbey (a Gothic folly) 122; French Colonial style and Greek Revival details 108–109; “Gentleman’s House” 93; Georgian architectural style 102, 103, 106; glass windows 76–77; Gothic follies 122; hip roofs 182, 192n31; ice houses 8–9, 57–71, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69n54; Indigenous architecture 72, 76, 82, 103–104; Irish Georgian/Palladian architecture 182–187, 179, 184, 185, 192n35; Italian architects 141, 182; Mexican baroque 46; modernity in classicism 171; neoclassical architectural style 64, 122, 144, 164, 165, 219; oppositional geographies in 137, 144–145; orangeries 120–121, 126–127, 127; prefabricated construction 63, 77; see also brick construction; vernacular architecture Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (Nelson) 87, 95 Archivo General de Indias, Seville 139 Archivo Histórico de Huancavelica 34 Argüelles, Agustín 138–139 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (“Overseas Historical Archive”) 206 arraial (community) 212, 213, 221n15 Arte de los metales (Barba) 30 artillery 12, 13, 15 Asante people of Africa 189 Association of Natchitoches Women for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches 103 Atlantic world: building for extraction 1–11, 2–4, 6, 7; early modern imperial mining exchanges 8, 12–26, 14, 16, 18, 21; the “interconnectedness of things” 65; see also colonialism; extraction; imperialism; specific imperial powers and their holdings

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Atuagagdliutit (newspaper) 82 Austen, Jane 123 Austria 17, 20, 21 Averlino, Antonio (Filarete) 12–13 Aymerich y Villajuana, Antonio 6, 6 Badoer, Federico 12, 13 Baja California 8, 51–53, 53, 54n14, 55n29 baleen 72 banking and finance: Bank of England 166–170; bankruptcy 178, 181, 191n16; financial crisis of 1792 166–167; First Bank of the United States 9, 164–177, 165, 168, 170; “fractional reserve system” 167–168; insurance and risk 119–120, 123–124, 128–130, 149; mints 5–6, 7, 19, 32; Mirabaud et Cie 52; Second Bank of the United States 176n31; specie 168, 169; Union Bank 166–167 Barba, Alvaro Alonso 30 Barbados 151, 152, 160n7; African diaspora in 86–80, 91–92, 95–96; British colonial architecture in 9, 86–100, 94, 96, 97; Drax Hall 87, 93–94, 94; Irish immigration to 86–93; Master and Servant Code 92; St. Nicholas Abbey 95, 96, 99n28; sugar in 88, 91, 93, 95, 151 Barba, Lope de Saavedra 37–38 Barter, Thomas Edward 181, 192n17 Baugh, John 180, 181 bawns (walled courts) 89–91, 89 Beauvais-Raseau, M. 200, 201 Beccafumi, Domenico 13, 14 Becker, Patricia 103 Beckert, Sven 176n31 Beckford family of absentee slavers 122, 125–126 Beckles, Hilary McDonald 91–92, 98n15, 98n20 Bender, Barbara 3–4 Berkeley, Sir William 57 Berthelsen, Rasmus 80–82, 81, 84n32 Beyond the Walled City (García) 144 Biet, Antoine 87 Biringuccio, Vannoccio 12–13, 17–18 Black people see African diaspora black powder 48 Blankson family of Ghana 182, 191, 192n32 Blodget, Samuel 9, 164–177, 165, 168, 170 Bohemia 16–17

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Bolivia 5–6, 6, 7, 8, 14, 17–21, 18, 19, 29–32, 34 Bombay Gazette 64 Bosman, Willem 192n17 Boston 60, 61, 62–63, 166–167 botanical gardens 9, 136–149, 140, 141, 143 Botero, Giovanni 20 Brazil: botanical gardens in 145; Caconde freguesia 213, 216, 220n1, 222n20; Casa Branca pouso 211, 213–214, 216–217, 221n1; Catholic Church in 216; coffee in 216–220; gold in 212–213, 217, 221n15; in the ice trade 63; indigo dye extraction in Rio de Janeiro 9, 195–210, 202; Mogiana railway 211, 216–218, 222n39; networks and infrastructure in the Rio Pardo landscape 9, 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219; Prado family of Brazil 217; Río de la Plata region 6, 205; Santa Mathilde Farm 218–219, 218, 219; São Paulo 211–213, 217–218, 222n39; sertão domains 212–213, 215–217, 219; sesmaria land grants 216, 222n35; Tubaca Farm 218; Vila Costina Farm 217–218 breadfruit 127 Brew, Richard 9, 178–194, 179, 184, 185 brick construction: at Castle Brew 183–186, 192n28; at Diamond Hill plantation 106; at Glevering Hall 128; at Golden Grove plantation 122, 127, 128; for ice houses 60, 68n20; for indigo vats 205, 206; for the West India Docks 154–157 British empire: 1807 Abolition Act 123; Antigua 123, 124, 125; architecture of absentee slavers 9, 119–135, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127; Bank of England 166–170; the Beckford family 122, 125–126; comparing the colonies of Ireland and Barbados 9, 86–100, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97; English settlers in Ireland 88–90; ice houses in India 63–65, 65, 66, 69n54; indigo from India 196, 199, 203; Oath of Supremacy for King James 88–89; privateers (Elizabethan sea dogs) 151; Royal African Company 179, 181; St. Kitts and Nevis 151; War of 1812 60, 62; Warehousing Act of 1803

157, 161n32; see also Barbados; Ireland and Irish immigration; Jamaica Brooks slave ship 123 Brown, Vincent 129 Buffon, Count de 171 Burke, Edmund 151–152 Burton, Decimus 121, 126, 127 Bustamante furnaces 17, 37, 38 cabinet of curiosities (kunstkammer) 16 Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (Ellis and Ginsburg) 86 Cabot, John 151 Caconde freguesia, Brazil 213, 216, 220n1, 222n20 California 48, 54n14; see also Baja California câmara (municipal council) 222n15 Caminho de Fernão Dias 213 Caminho dos Goisases 211, 213–214, 216–217 Camino Real de Tierra Adentro 47–48 Camino Real de Tierra Afuera 48, 54n13 Canny, Nicholas 86 capitalism 67, 217; among the Cherokee 104; economic liberalism and 139, 164–165; enslavement and 122, 128, 176n31; Marx’s view of “national capitalism” 159; material extraction and capital accumulation 45, 48, 150, 152–153, 159, 162n39; racial 83 Capitalism & Slavery (Williams) 122, 158, 176n31 Capoche, Luis 19–20 Caribbean 1, 7–9, 57; see also Atlantic world; Central America; Mexico; South America; West Indies Carlos III of Spain 137 Carney, Judith 145 Carrera de Indias 47 Carter, Pat 186, 192n31 Carvam Ticlla, Juana 35 Casa de la Moneda (Mint Building) Potosí, Bolivia 5–6, 7 cash-crops 101, 113 cassava 127 Castañeda, Rafael García 5 Castle Brew, Ghana 9, 178–194, 179, 184, 185 Catholic Church 19, 22, 35; in Brazil 216; Dominican and Franciscan

Index missionaries 54n14, 197; Jesuits 29, 54n14, 54n14; St. Augustine of Natchitoches, Louisiana 109–110, 111, 116n26 cattle 204, 211, 213, 216 Central America: Guatemala 138, 196, 204, 206; Panama 47 Cerro de Potosí (Cieza de León) 19 Chambon, Pierre 198 Charleston, South Carolina 9, 65, 69n39, 195–210, 199, 201 Charles V of Spain 17 chattel slavery 86, 87, 92, 93, 98n23, 103, 104, 125, 165 Cherokee people 101–107, 105, 113, 114 Cherokee Phoenix 104 Children of Strangers (Saxon) 112 Christianity: Danish Missions 9, 72–73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81–82, 84n19; Lutheranism 77, 79, 83; Moravians 72, 82; on nakedness 79; Oath of Supremacy for King James 88–89; see also Catholic Church Cieza de León, Pedro 19 cinnabar 32, 37 Civil War (English) 81, 91–92, 95 Civil War (US) 60 Clark, William 124, 125 “closed” colonies 72 coconut 127 coffee: in Brazil 216–220; as colonial consumer good 75, 79–81, 162n33, 205; in Cuba 7; as harmful addiction among Indigenous peoples 73, 75, 79–81; in Jamaica 124; transport and storage of 153, 157, 158, 161n30, 216–220 Coincoin, Marie-Thérèse 103, 108, 113 Colombia 47 colonialism: “closed” colonies 72; “gaze of the colonizer” 66; material extraction and capital accumulation 45, 48, 150, 152–153, 159, 162n39; mercantilism 13, 20–21, 152, 157, 158, 164, 170, 196, 205, 207; modernity and 45; monopolies 13–15, 32, 72, 157, 159, 161n18; see also banking and finance; extraction; networks and infrastructures; specific colonial powers and their holdings Coltellini, Marco 198 Columbus, Christopher 1

235

commodity exchange see extraction; colonialism; networks and infrastructures; specific industries and commodities Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (The Company) 178–180, 181, 187 concessions 51, 53, 55n29, 218, 222n35 Constitution of Cádiz 139 “convoy system” 161n15 Conyngham, William 95, 99n28 Cooley, Thomas 170, 170 copper 1, 51, 53, 73 copper sulfate 50 corn 55n17, 145, 213 Corporation of London 161n18 Costa Cardozo, Manoel da 206 Costa Machado e Souza, José da 217, 219 cotton 55n17, 101, 151, 158, 161n30, 213 Covarrubias, Gaspar de 4–55 Criolla, Maria 35 criollos in Cuba 144, 146 Cromwell, Nicholas and Patrick 204–205 Cromwell, Oliver 81, 91–92, 95 Cruickshank, Brodie 182, 186 Cruickshank, James 128–129 Cruxent, José Maria 1 Cuba: African diaspora in 139; coffee in 7; Havana Ice House 63; Havana’s Botanical Garden 9, 136–149, 140, 141, 143; Ingenio San José de la Angosta 143, 143; peninsulares (Spanish-born Cubans) 144; sugar in 142–143; white Cuban identity formation 136–137, 144, 146 Cuerva, Miguel Ángel Sorroche 8, 43–56 Cugoano, Quobna Ottobah (John Stuart) 189–190 culture: aestheticized plantation life 87–88, 93; dressing in Euromerican fashion 106, 107, 114; the ideal of the single-family home 77–79; industrial heritage of Mexico 43–44; material culture 43, 75; see also architecture; vernacular architecture Currantee, John (Eno Besi Kurentsi) 180, 191n15 currency see banking and finance cyanidation 55n22 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond 197, 198 Danish empire: Danish Missions 9, 72–73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81–82, 84n19; Danish Royal Greenland Trading Department (KGH) 72, 76, 77,

236

Index

78–79; the Kalaallit Inuit under Danish rule 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81 Daughters of the American Revolution 102 Davy, Henry 121 Deagan, Kathleen 1 de Bivar Marquese, Rafael 220 Delgadillo, Martin 35 Denmark see Danish empire De Pirotechnica (Biringuccio) 12–13, 17–18 De Re Metallica (Agricola) 12–13, 14, 16–17, 19, 22n8 descoberto (gold site) 212, 213, 221 de Senna, Nelson 222n20 de Toledo, Francisco 17–19, 21–22, 27, 31–32 Diamond Hill plantation, Georgia 9, 101–108, 106, 107, 112–113, 114 Díaz, Porfirio 53 Dickason, David 63 Diderot, Denis 197, 198 dioramas 16 dispossession 45, 86, 93, 145, 151 Dominican missionaries 54n14, 197 Dominican Republic 1 Drake manuscript (Histoire Naturelle des Indes) 1, 2 Dries, Mark P. 8, 27–42 Dudley, Tara 108–109 Dunn, Richard S. 88, 93 Duperly, Adolphe 120 Duplessis, Robert 196 dynamite 50, 55n22 Eassie, William 59 East India Docks 160 East Indies 63 Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (Blodget) 169, 172, 174 economic exchange see capitalism; networks and infrastructures economic liberalism 139, 164–165 Eftaxiopoulos, Georgios 9, 150–163 Egede, Hans 73–74 El Boleo company 51–53, 53 Elfe, Thomas 204, 205 Elgström, Ossian 84n32 “Elizabethan sea dogs” (privateers) 151 Elliott, Jennifer 103 Ellis, Clifton 7, 86 El Primer Crónica y Buen Gobierno (Poma de Ayala) 33 Embargo Act of 1807 (US) 62

eminent domain 108, 167 empire see imperialism; specific imperial powers Enclosure Acts (UK) 162n39 encomiendas 1, 29 Encyclopedia Britannica 57 Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et métiers (Diderot and d’Alembert) 197, 198 England: Bristol 122, 152; under Cromwell 81, 91–92, 95; Enclosure Acts 162n39; English indigo (woad) 196; English settlers in Ireland 88–90; Fonthill mansion 122; Glevering Hall 120–121, 124, 126, 126–128, 127, 130, 133n63; Isle of Dogs 154, 158; Liverpool 152; Navigation Act of 1651 151; Parliament 150, 153, 154, 157, 161n18; Thames River 150, 152, 153, 159, 161n14; war with France 150, 153; see also British empire; London England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies (Stephen) 123 Englishmen Transplanted (Gragg) 96 Engombe (Ingenio de Santa Ana) 1, 3 environmental degradation 7, 29, 36–39, 43, 46, 70n62 Equiano, Olaudah 123 Espinos, Mariano 137 Euromerican fashion 106, 107, 114 Europe: Bohemia 16–17; Habsburg empire 8, 15–21; Industrial Revolution in 45; silver and gold in 17, 19; the Tyrolean Alps 13, 16, 20; the Vosges 15, 16, 20; see also colonialism; geopolitics; imperialism; specific countries of Europe Evans, Robin 187 Expedición Botánica al Virreinato de Nueva España 137 exports see networks and infrastructures extraction 1–11, 2–4, 6, 7; boom-andbust cycles 27; environmental degradation and 7, 29, 36–39, 43, 46, 70n62; see also agricultural production; architecture; mining; natural resources Falkenstein, Austria 20, 21 Fante people of Africa 180–182, 188–190 Fasting, Ludvig 76 Federal District of Washington 156, 164, 165–167, 175n9

Index Fenton, Sir Geoffrey 88 Ferdinand I of Bohemia 16–17 Ferdinand VII of Spain 139 Ferreira, Rafael Augusto Silva 9, 211–225 “Filarete” (Antonio Averlino) 12–13 Filho, Murillo Florindo Cruz 196 financial crisis of 1792 166–167 First Bank of the United States 9, 164–177, 165, 168, 170 “Five Civilized Tribes” 104, 113 “Flight of the Earls” 88 Flora Havanensis (Ossa) 142 Florentine Codex (Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España) 21–22 Fonthill mansion 122 fossil fuels 53, 75–77 “fractional reserve system” 167–168 Fragoso, João 205 France/French empire; Bourbon imperial reforms 5, 50–51; La Croix-auxMines silver mines, Lorraine 15–16, 16; Louisiana Purchase 108; Martinique 62, 69n39, 196, 197; Peasant’s Revolt of 1524 15; “Rouge Myne” of Sainte Marieaux-Mines 15; Saint-Domingue/ Haiti 108, 123, 124, 196, 200; St. Kitts and Nevis 151; St. Pierre 69n39; War of 1812 60, 62; war with Britain 150, 153 Franciscan missionaries 54n14 Franklin search party 75 freguesias (parishes) 211–213, 216, 220, 221n15 Fresh Pond in Boston 60, 61 Fugger family of Germany 17 Gabinete Real de Historia Natural of Madrid 137 Galile, Alessandro 182 Gamle Grønlands nye perlustration (Egede) 73 García, Guadalupe 144 “gaze of the colonizer” 66 gender 4; Lutheran ideals of masculinity 77, 79; marriage 28, 35, 79, 104, 113, 187, 188, 221n16; see also women gens de couleur libres 101–103, 108–110, 112, 114 “Gentleman’s House” 93 geopolitics: Anglo-Dutch wars of the late seventeenth century 151; notions of sovereignty 15, 72, 104, 114, 139,

237

212–213; Seven Years War 151; uti possidetis 212; War of 1812 60, 62; see also colonialism; imperialism Georgia: Diamond Hill plantation 9, 101–108, 106, 107, 112–113, 114; Major Ridge House 102; New Echota 104; Savannah 69n39, 112; State Park system 102 Georgia Historical Commission 102 Germany: Black Forest wood 15; El Progreso Mexican-German company 52; Fugger family 17; Saxony 13, 17 Ghana Museums and Monuments Board (GMMB) 186, 192n32 Ghana’s Castle Brew 9, 178–194, 179, 184, 185 Ginsburg, Rebecca 7, 86 glass windows 76–77 Glissant, Édouard 86 Godói Coelho, Francisco de 216 gold 1, 15, 19, 21, 49–51, 55n17, 167, 212–213, 217, 221n15 Gold, Benjamin 104 Gold Coast see Ghana’s Castle Brew Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) 112–113 González, Armando Garcia and Mercedes Valero 142 Graah, Wilhelm 76 Grætze family of Greenland 79 Gragg, Larry 96 Grant, Colesworth (“H. Cotton”) 64 Great Fire of London (1666) 153, 158–159 Greene, Jack P. 91, 92 Greenland 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81 Gross, Heinrich 15–16, 16 Guatemala 138, 196, 204, 206 gunpowder 14–15 Gwilt, George 154–157, 155, 156 Habsburg empire 8, 15–21 haciendas 45, 48–51, 52, 55n24 Hague, Stephen 93 Haitian Revolution 108, 123, 124, 196, 200 Hamilton, Alexander 165–169, 173–174 Hamlin, Talbot 169–170 hand-rammed earth technique (taipa de mão) 218, 223 Hansêraq 82–83 Hart, Emma 204, 205 Harvey, Thomas 127 Havana, Cuba 9, 63, 136–149, 140, 141, 143 Hawkins, Sir John 160n6

238

Index

“H. Cotton” (Colesworthy Grant) 64 hearth of the Inuit home (qulleq) 76–77, 79 hemp 205, 206 Henry, Cammie 103 Herod, Marc 66 Hertzog, Henry and Hypolite 108 Higman, Barry 143 “hijo natural” (illegitimate son) 34 Hilaire, Auguste de Saint 211, 215–216 hip roof 182, 192n31 Hispanic Society 19 Histoire Naturelle des Indes 1, 2 Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (Florentine Codex) 21–22 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Acosta) 29 Historical Geographic Information System (GIS) 212 Hoban, James 167, 170 Hobhouse, Hermione 155 Holsteinsborg colony, Greenland 74 Holy Roman Empire (Habsburg empire) 8, 15–21 homens de negócio de grosso trato (“wholesale traders”) 205–206 House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story, The (Miles) 102–103 huayras (ovens utilizing wind) 29, 30 Hunter, Clementine 103, 112–113 Hyland, A. D. C. 186–187, 192n34 Iarocci, Louisa 8–9, 57–71 “Ice House and the Hot House, The” 59 “Ice House Diary” (Tudor) 62 ice houses 8–9, 57–71, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69n54 “Ice King of the World” 62–63, 68n29, 69n39 illuut (Inuit homes) 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81, 83n1 Images from Greenland (Rudolph) 78–79, 78, 84n24 immigration 86, 88–90, 144, 216, 218; see also Ireland and Irish immigration; specific colonial powers and their holdings imperialism: botany in the service of empire 9, 136–149, 140, 141, 143; early modern imperial mining exchanges 8, 12–26, 14, 16, 18, 21; impulse to chart imperial territory 20; see also colonialism; networks and infrastructures;

specific imperial powers and their holdings imports see networks and infrastructures Incan labor system 18, 32, 34 indentured labor 87, 88, 91–94 India 63–65, 65, 66, 69n54, 196, 199, 203 Indigenous peoples of the Americas: architecture of 72, 76, 82, 103–104; Cherokee 101–107, 105, 113, 114; dispossession of 45, 86, 93, 145, 151; “Five Civilized Tribes” 104, 113; Grætze family of Greenland 79; “harmful addictions” to foreign goods among 73, 75, 79–81; Inuit homes (illuut) 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81, 83n1; nakedness of 79; “Native Southerners” 113; Oconaluftee Village 104, 105; preconquest Mayan culture 21; Vann family of Georgia 9, 101–108, 106, 107, 112–113, 114 indigo dye 1, 9, 195–210, 197, 198, 199, 201, 202 Industrial Revolution 45 Ingenio de Santa Ana (Engombe) 1–2, 3 “Ingenio San José de la Angosta” 143, 143 ingenios (mills) 1–2, 3, 143, 143 Inghirami, Matteo 17–18 Inglefield, Sir Edward Augustus 75 Innsbruck, Austria 17 Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) 50 insurance and risk 119–120, 123–124, 128–130, 149 “interconnectedness of things” 65 International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) 44 interpreters (lenguas) 34, 35, 36 Inuit homes (illuut) 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81, 83n1 Ireland and Irish immigration 9, 86–100, 89, 90; Castletown House 182; Cavanacor House 90, 90, 93, 95, 98n14; conquest of 86; Doe Castle 89–90, 89, 95; during Cromwell 81, 91–92, 95; English and Scottish settlers in 88–90; “Flight of the Earls” 88; Irish Georgian/ Palladian architecture 182–187; Irish immigration to Barbados 86–93; Munster plantation 88, 91; Royal Exchange in Dublin 170,

Index 170; “servitors” in Ireland 90; Springhill House 95, 97 iron 12, 17, 55n17, 75, 156, 182, 211 Israel, Janna 8, 12–26 Italy: architects from 141, 182; the Dolomites 13; Elba 17; Medici family 17–18, 21; Milan 20; during the Renaissance 12, 46 Jamaica 7, 9, 93, 95, 152, 196; big houses in 87; coffee in 124; Golden Grove Estate 9, 119–135, 120; mahogany from 128; sugar in 9, 119–135, 120; Tacky’s Revolt 123; white people in 128; Zong massacre 123 James I of England 88–89 Jefferson, Thomas 167, 171–173, 175n21 Jessop, William 161n19 Jesuits 29, 54n14, 54n14 João VI of Portugal 216 Journal of the Asiatic Society 63 Kagan, Richard 19–22 Kalaallit Inuit homes 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81 Kangermiu, Aalut 80, 80, 82–83, 84n32 Kantian sublime 125 KGH (Danish Royal Greenland Trading Department) 72, 76, 77, 78–79 Khan, Zorina 196 Kölber, Jörg 21 Kuma, Amonu 191n15 kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) 16 Kurentsi, Eno Besi (John Currantee) 180, 191n15 Labat, Jean-Baptiste 197, 197 labor: encomiendas 1, 29; haciendas 45, 48–51, 52, 55n24; immigration and 86, 88–90, 144, 216, 218; indentured Europeans 87, 88, 91–94; liberalism and 139, 164–165; mita labor system 18, 32, 34; unalienated labor 173, 176n30; see also slavery La Española (Quisqueya) 1 land: eminent domain 108, 167; encomiendas 1, 29; land use regulations 44, 86; redistribution 88; sertão domains 212–213, 215–217, 219; sesmaria land grants 216, 222n35; see also plantations; property; urban space/urban planning Laplante, Eduard 143

239

L’Art de L’Indigotier (Beauvais-Raseau) 200, 201 Lavradio, Marquis of 206 lead slag recovery 17–18 Le commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille 198 Lefebvre, Henri 10n3, 178, 189 Lemaur, Francisco 139–146, 140 L’Enfant, Pierre Charles 167, 175n4, 175n9 Le parfait indigotier (Monnereau) 199–200 Levy, Jonathan 129, 176n31 liberalism 139, 164–165 Ligon, Richard 87–88, 92–95, 152 Llorens, Seraphin 10 Locke, John 164 London: “compulsory clause” 161n29; Corporation of London 161n18; Great Fire of 1666 153, 158–159; in the sugar trade 151, 153, 156–157, 15, 161n12, 161n30, 162n33; Royal Society of Arts 196; the Thames 150, 152, 153, 159, 161n14; Warehousing Act of 1803 157, 161n32; West India Docks 9, 150–163, 152, 154, 155, 156, 160; see also British empire; England López de Velasco, Juan 20 Lost Cause movement 112, 113 Louisiana: Melrose plantation 9, 101–103, 108–114, 109, 111; New Orleans 65, 69n39; purchase of 108; St. Augustine Catholic Church of Natchitoches 109–110, 111, 116n26 Lucas, George and Ann 203, 204 Lutheranism 77, 79, 83 Madrid, botanical garden of 136–139, 141, 141, 143, 146 Madrid, Treaty of (1750) 212 maguey paper 3, 4 mahogany 128, 181, 188 Mansfield Park (Austen) 123 marriage 28, 35, 79, 104, 113, 187, 188, 221n16 Martin, Bonnie 173–174, 176n31 Martin, Eliza Layne 200, 205 Martinique 62, 69n39, 196, 197 Martyr, Peter 21 Marx, Karl 159 Mary I of England 206 Master and Servant Code 92 material culture 43, 75 Matheus, Morgado de 212–213 McDonald, Peter D. 65

240

Index

McKittrick, Katherine 145 Medici family of Italy 17–18, 21 Medina, Bartolomé de 31 Mellifont, Treaty of (1603) 88 Melo e Castro, Martinho de 206 Memorias de La Real Sociedad Económica de La Habana 138, 144 Meneses, Diego de 15, 22n10 mercantilism 13, 20–21, 152, 157, 158, 164, 170, 196, 205, 207 mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38 metalworking see mining and metallurgy Metoyer family of Louisiana 9, 101–103, 108–114, 109, 111 Mexico: Baja California 8, 51–53, 53, 54n14, 55n29; the baroque in 46; El Progreso Mexican-German company 52; gold in 21, 49–51, 55n17; Guanajuato 8, 29, 46–48, 50–51, 55n24; haciendas 45, 48–51, 52, 55n24; Las Tres Vírgenes Volcano 53; Mexico City 3, 6, 19, 47, 54n13, 137; mining heritage in 8, 43–56, 47, 49, 52, 53; Nahua people of 3, 21, 55n15; Pachuca 8, 31, 46, 51, 52; Posada de la Misión hotel discovery 49; reales de minas (mining district) 3, 6–7, 46, 47, 55n24; role in the Industrial Revolution 45; routes of circulation in 47–48; San Luis Potosí 48; Santa Ana 36, 38, 55n24; Santa María silver mine 3, 53; Santa Rosalia 51–53, 53; sugar in 45; Taxco 8, 46, 47, 49; Temascaltepec 3–5, 4; Veracruz 47; Zacatecas 6, 8, 29, 43, 46–49, 49, 54n13; see also silver Micots, Courtnay 9, 178–194 Mignon, Francois (Frank Mineah) 110–113 Miles, Richard 187, 192 Miles, Tiya 102–103 Milligan, Robert 155 Mills, Elizabeth 103, 133 miners’ guild 34 mining and metallurgy: amalgamation processes 17–19, 31, 49, 50; artillery 12, 13, 15; boom-andbust cycles in 27; Bustamante mercury furnaces 17, 37, 38; cinnabar 32, 37; copper 1, 51, 53, 73; cyanidation 55n22; dynamite 50, 55n22; early modern imperial mining exchanges 8, 12–26, 14,

16, 18, 21; fossil fuels 53, 75–77; gold 1, 15, 19, 21, 49–51, 55n17, 167, 212–213, 217, 221n15; huayras (ovens utilizing wind) 29, 30; ingenios (mills) 1–2, 3, 143, 143; iron 12, 17, 55n17, 75, 156, 182, 211; lead slag recovery 17–18; mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; metallurgical knowledge 12–13; Mexican mining heritage 8, 43–56, 47, 49, 52, 53; mints 5–6, 7, 19, 32; open-pit mines 48; saltpeter 14–15; silica dust 37; trapiche (animal-powered mill) 1, 3; see also metallurgy and metalworking; silver Mining Law (1892) 50 Minosh, Peter 9, 164–177 mints 5–6, 7, 19, 32 Mirabaud et Cie 52 mita labor system 18, 32, 34 Mitchell, Margaret 112–113 mixed ancestry 35, 79, 102, 123, 181, 187 modernity 45, 171 Modest, Wayne 128 Møller, Kirstine 9, 72–85 Møller, Lars Aqqaluk 80, 84n32 money see banking and finance Monnereau, Elias 199–200 monopolies 13–15, 32, 72, 157, 159, 161n18 Monroe, James 106–107 Montejo, Esteban 145 Moravians 72, 82 Morena, Isabel 35 More, Thomas 58 Morrissey, Lee 9, 86–100 Mouzon, Henry II 199, 199, 200 mule driving (tropeirismo) 211, 215, 216–217, 221n6, 221n15 Murillo, Dana Velasco 6 Murphy, Sharon Ann 174, 176n31 Nahua people of Mexico 3, 21, 55n15 nakedness 79 Napoleon 139 National Historic Landmark 110 National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia) 50 “Native Southerners” 113 natural resources: Black Forest wood 15; mahogany 128, 181, 188; sealing

Index 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81; whale oil and whaling 9, 72–75 Navigation Act of 1651 151 “negotiated dialectics” 145 Nelson, Louis P. 87, 95 networks and infrastructures: banking within a national economy 167–171; building the Mogiana railway, Brazil 211, 216–218, 222n39; building the West India Docks, London 9, 150–163, 152, 154, 155, 156, 160; circulation routes in Mexican mining 47–48; concessions 51, 53, 55n29, 218, 222n35; “convoy system” 161n15; finance capital and the plantation economy 171–174; the ice trade 8–9, 57–71, 59, 61, 62, 65, 66; in Mexico 47–48, 54n13; mercantilism 13, 20–21, 152, 157, 158, 164, 170, 196, 205, 207; along the Rio Pardo in Brazil 9, 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219; tropeirismo (mule driving) 211, 215, 216–217, 221n6, 221n15; see also banking and finance Newberry Library 3 Newman, Simon P. 87, 91, 97 New Spain 3, 6, 29, 43, 47, 139; see also Spanish empire New York Ice Company 61, 62 Niell, Paul 1–11, 144 Nine Years War (Tyrone’s Rebellion) 88, 91 Nizhny Tagil Charter for the Industrial Heritage 44 nnonkofo (“slave” in Akan) 188–190 North Carolina 104, 105 notaries 34, 35 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson) 171 nouveau riche 122 Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (Labat) 197, 197 Nugent, Lady Maria 128 Oath of Supremacy for King James 88–89 O’Callaghan, Sean 92 Ocio, Manuel de 51, 55n21 “Of Ice and Icehouses” 58 On Wet Docks, Quays, and Warehouses, for the Port of London (Vaughan) 150 oppositional geographies 137, 144–145 orangeries 120–121, 126–127, 127 Ortiz, Luis 20 Ossa, José Antonio de la 139–140, 142, 143, 146

241

Palladianism: English 88, 97, 170, 171; Irish Georgian 182–187, 179, 184, 185, 192n35 Palladio, Andrea 182 Palla, Ynes Chimbullo 34, 36 Panama 47 panoptic plantation model 143 Pardo River 9, 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219 Peasant’s Revolt of 1524 15 Pedreira, Jorge Miguel 205 Peláez, Luis Gordo 1–11 peninsulares (Spanish-born Cubans) 144 Pequeno, Andaraí 205–206 Pereira, José Rodrigues 205 Pereira, Renata Baesso 9, 211–225 Peru 15, 17–21; Huamanga 27, 34, 35; Huancavelica 8, 19, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; the Lima mint 19; mita labor system 18, 32, 34; Piombino 17–18 Petterson, Christina 77 Pezalla, Virginia 204–205 Philadelphia: First Bank of the United States 9, 164–177, 165, 168, 170; indigo dye trade and 203, 204 Philip II of Spain 4, 13, 17, 20, 22 Phoenix Fire Office 119 “pickaninny” 95 Pinckney, Eliza Lucas 203–207 plantations: aestheticizing plantation life 87–88, 93; as built typology of subordination 86; comparing sites in Barbados and Ireland 9, 86–100, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97; Diamond Hill plantation, Georgia 9, 101–108, 106, 107, 112–113, 114; finance capital and the plantation economy 171–174; Golden Grove Estate, Jamaica 9, 119–135, 120; Melrose plantation, Louisiana 9, 101–103, 108–114, 109, 111; mythologized in Gone with the Wind 112–113; panoptic plantation model 143 “Planting the Sugar Cane” (Clark) 124, 125 Polk, James K. 98n14 Poma de Ayala, Guaman 33 Portugal/Portuguese empire 203; Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (“Overseas Historical Archive”) 206; Portuguese indigo (pastel) 196; sertão domains 212–213, 215–217, 219; sesmaria land grants 216,

242

Index

222n35; Treaty of Torsedillas (1494) 151; wholesale traders of the 205–206; see also Brazil Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) 190 Potosí silver mines of Bolivia 5–6, 6, 7, 8, 14, 17–21, 18, 19, 29–32, 34 pousos 211–217, 220, 221n4, 221n15 Prado family of Brazil 217 precious metals see mining Priestley, Margaret 178–179, 186–188, 192n28 privateers (Elizabethan sea dogs) 151 property: chattel slavery 86, 87, 92, 93, 98n23, 103, 104, 125, 165; private property 164–165; see also land; plantations Puckrein, Gary A. 96–97 Pushaw, Bart 9, 72–85 Quashie 122, 124, 129 quicksilver see mercury extraction Quisqueya (La Española) 1 qulleq (hearth of the Inuit home) 76–77, 79 race 9, 101–118, 105–107, 109, 111; Cuban criollos 144, 146; “gaze of the colonizer” 66; Jefferson’s views on race 172, 175n21; mixed ancestry 35, 79, 102, 123, 181, 187; “one drop” to become “Other” 113, 114; “pickaninny” 95; racialized specter of the “igloo” 73; see also African diaspora; Indigenous peoples of the Americas; white people Raj, Kapil 200–201 Ramírez, Alejandro 138, 144 Ravenel, Harriott Horry 204 reales de minas (mining districts) 3, 6–7, 46, 47, 55n24 Real Jardín Botánico of Madrid 136–139, 141, 141, 143, 146 registro (warehouse) 212, 213, 220, 221n15 Reis, Alexander Lima 9, 195–210 Relaciones Geograficas (Philip II) 4, 20, 22 Relación general de la villa imperial de Potosí (Capoche) 19–20 Repton, Humphry 121, 124–126, 126 Ribeaupierre family of France 15 rice 101, 161n30, 203–206, 213 Richards, Jason 101 Rink, Hinrich 82, 84n32 Rio de Janeiro 9, 195–210, 202 Río de la Plata 6, 205

Rio Pardo 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219 Roberts, Lissa L. 203 Robins, Nicholas 7 Rodriguez, Juana 33–34, 36 Rowen, Jonah 9, 119–135 Royal Academy of History dictionary (RAH) 55n15 Royal African Company 179, 181 Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation 150 Royal Exchange in Dublin 170, 170 Royal Society of Arts 196 Rudolph, Christian 78–79, 78, 84n24 Rugendas, Johann Moritz 214–215, 215 rum 122, 129, 153, 157, 162n33, 205 Sabatini, Francisco 141 Said, Edward 123 Saint-Domingue, Haiti 108, 123, 124, 196, 200 saltpeter 14–15 Sandford, John 89 Santa Cruz y Cárdena, Joaquín de 137 Santa Mathilde Farm, Brazil 218–219, 218, 219 Santos, Milton 220 São Paulo, Brazil 211–213, 217–218, 222n39 Sartorius, David 139 Saunooke, Osley B. 113 Saxon, Lyle 110–112 Schwazer Bergbuch 16, 20, 21 Scottish settlers in Ireland 88–90 Scott, Julius 123 sealing 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81 Second Bank of the United States 176n31 selective immigration 86, 88 Serra, Antonio 20–21 Serrano, Felipe 32, 34–36 sertão domains 212–213, 215–217, 219 sesmaria land grants 216, 222n35 Sessé y Lacasta, Martín 137–138, 142 Sessions, Lee 9, 136–149 Seven Years War 151 Sharp, Granville 123 shipping see networks and infrastructures Shiver, Art 103, 110, 113 silica dust 37 silver: mercury extraction and 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; mining in Europe 15–17, 16, 20, 21; “patio process” 31, 50, 51; Potosí silver mines 5–6, 7, 8, 14, 17–21, 18, 19, 29–32, 34 Singleton, Theresa 7, 145

Index “slave holes” 178, 190, 191n1 slavery: 1807 Abolition Act 123; abolitionism 123, 127, 165, 188, 218; absentee architecture of 9, 119–135, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127; Akan word for slaves 188; Anglo-American slavery 188; Beckford family of absentee slavers 122, 125–126; Black-on-Black enslavement 112; Brooks slave ship 123; chattel slavery 86, 87, 92, 93, 98n23, 103, 104, 125, 165; emancipation 123, 127, 129, 130; finance capital and the plantation economy 171–174; first English slave-trading expedition 160; houses of enslaved people 123–124, 126–129; and Havana’s botanical garden 136, 143–145; security and distance in the slaveholding relationship 129–130; slave resistance 88, 122–124; Spanish coartación policy for buying freedom 108; wealth built from 178–180; West African slavery 9, 188–190; Zong massacre 123; see also plantations Smith, Adam 123, 150, 164, 169 Smith, Horatio 187 Smith, Samuel 180, 181 Smith, Victoria Ellen 188 Sociedad Patriótica of Cuba 142 Sousa Coutinho, Rodrigo de 206 South America: Andean communities in mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; Bolivia 5–6, 6, 7, 8, 14, 17–21, 18, 19, 29–32, 34; Colombia 47; colonial festivals in 7; the Río Pardo region of Brazil 9, 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219; Río de la Plata region 6, 205; the Altiplano 48; Venezuela 196, 200; see also Brazil; Peru South Carolina 9, 65, 69n39, 195–210, 199, 201 Southern Literary Renaissance between the World Wars 112 Spain: Almadén 37, 38; Cadiz 47, 138, 139; Carlos III 137; Constitution of Cádiz 139; Madrid’s Real Jardín Botánico 136–139, 141, 141, 143, 146; Seville 47, 139 Spanish empire: alcalde mayor (district magistrate) 4–5; Andean

243

communities in mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; botanical expeditions 137; Canary Islands 47, 138; coartación policy for buying freedom 108; La Isabella 1; New Spain 3, 6, 29, 43, 47, 139; Treaty of Torsedillas (1494) 151; see also Cuba; Mexico specie 168, 169 Spectator, The 95 Starving Kalaallit (Berthelsen) 80–82, 81, 84n32 Stephen, James 123 Stiefel, Barry L. 9, 101–118 St. Kitts and Nevis 151 St. Pierre 69n39 Stuard, John (Quobna Ottobah Cugoano) 189–190 Sturge, Joseph 127 sugar: in Antigua 124, 125; in Barbados 88, 91, 93, 95, 151; coming into London 151, 153, 156–157, 15, 161n12, 161n30, 162n33; in Cuba 142–143; in Jamaica 9, 119–135, 120; in Mexico 45; networks and infrastructures 95, 200, 216–217; rum production 122, 129, 153, 157, 162n33, 205; slavery and 88, 93; “sugar revolution” of the 1640s and 1650s 151 Sugar and Slaves (Dunn) 88, 93 sulfur 37 sulfuric acid 50 Sverdrup, Jørgen 79 Swan, John 152 Tacky’s Revolt 123 Tara plantation 112–113 Taylor, Simon 119–120, 122–124, 126–129 technology see extraction Thames River 150, 152, 153, 159, 161n14 Thoreau, Henry David 65–66 Thoughts on the Increasing Wealth and National Economy of the United States of America (Blodget) 168 TICCIH (International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage) 44 tobacco 1, 45, 80, 101, 151, 213 To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (O’Callaghan) 92 Tolosa, Juan de 49 Torres de Portugal y Mesia, Fernando 19 Torsedillas, Treaty of (1494) 151

244

Index

trade see colonialism; networks and infrastructures; slavery Trail of Tears 104, 105, 106–107 transatlantic slave trade see slavery transportation see networks and infrastructures trapiche (animal-powered mill) 1, 3 traza (Spanish colonial town grid) 27 Treatise on Architecture (Filarete) 12–13 Trelawny, Edward 123 Trinder, Thomas 180, 181 tropeirismo (mule driving) 211, 215, 216–217, 221n6, 221n15 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, A (Ligon) 87–88, 92–95, 152 Tubaca Farm, Brazil 218 Tudor, Sir Frederick (“Ice King of the World”) 62–63, 68n29, 69n39 Tutino, John 6 Tyrolean Alps 13, 16, 20 Tyrone’s Rebellion (Nine Years War) 88, 91 unalienated labor 173, 176n30 Underwood, J. J. 64 UNESCO 47 Union Bank of Boston 166–167 United States: African Americans 102–103, 112–113; American South 63, 103, 109, 112, 167, 173; Boston 60, 61, 62–63, 166–167; Charleston 9, 65, 69n39, 195–210, 199, 201; Civil War 60; domestic ice houses 58–61, 59, 61; Embargo Act of 1807 62; Federal District of Washington 156, 164, 165–167, 175n9; financial crisis of 1792 166–167; Great Lakes region 57, 60; Lost Cause movement 112, 113; as “a nation of choice spirits” 172–173; “Native Southerners” 113; North Carolina 104, 105; Northeast and Great Lakes region 57, 60; Philadelphia 9, 164–177, 165, 168, 170, 203, 204; Second Bank of the United States 176n31; Virginia 57, 171; War of 1812 60, 62; War of Independence 103, 204; see also Louisiana Urban History 212 urban space/urban planning: Andean communities in mercury extraction 8, 27–42, 28, 30, 33, 37, 38; arraial (community) 212, 213, 221n15;

descoberto (gold site) 212, 213, 221; eminent domain 108, 167; freguesia (parish) 211–213, 216, 220, 221n15; Mexican mining districts 3, 6–7, 46, 47, 55n24; pousos 211–217, 220, 221n4, 221n15; registro (warehouse) 212, 213, 220, 221n15; transportation and extraction in Rio Pardo, Brazil 9, 211–225, 214, 215, 218, 219; traza (Spanish colonial town grid) 27; vila (small city) 212, 222n15 Utilitarianism 123 uti possidetis 212 Uztáriz, Geronimo de 24n37 Van der Kolk, Bessel A. 190 Vann family of Georgia 9, 101–108, 106, 107, 112–113, 114 Vargas, Bernardo Pérez de 13–15, 22n10 Vaughan, William 150, 153 Venezuela 196, 200 vernacular architecture: hand-rammed earth technique (taipa de mão) 218, 223; homes of enslaved people 123–124, 126–129; the ideal of the singlefamily home 77–79; Indigenous architecture 72, 76, 82, 103–104; Kalaallit Inuit homes 9, 72–85, 78, 80, 81; Middle Eastern construction techniques 64 Vidal, Laurent 221n4 Vieira de Abreu, Jerônimo 203–207 Vila Costina Farm, Brazil 217–218 vila (small city) 212, 222n15 Villa, Salvador de 6 Virginia 57, 171 Vitruvius Britannicus (Campbell) 122 Voigt, Lisa 7 Vosges 15, 16, 20 Walden (Thoreau) 65–66 Walker, Ralph 161n19 Warehousing Act of 1803 157, 161n32 War of 1812 60, 62 War of Independence 103, 204 Wealthy Kalaallit (Kangermiu) 80–81, 81 Weffring, Blasius 22n8 Weightman, Gavin 70n62 West Indies: African diaspora in the 151; Antigua 123, 124, 125; ice houses in 62–63, 69n39; indigo dye in the 198, 198; risk in investing in 124; SaintDomingue (Haiti) 108, 123, 124,

Index 196, 200; St. Kitts and Nevis 151; triangular trade of the 151, 153, 155, 161n12, 161n29; see also Atlantic world; Barbados; Cuba; Jamaica Weuves, Jerome Bernard 192n23 whale oil and whaling 9, 72–75 Whitehead, Tom 103, 110, 113 White, John 121, 128 White, J. S. 104 white people: indentured Europeans 87, 88, 91–94; insurance/credit and 128; need for security 123–124; white Cuban identity formation 136–137, 144, 146; white supremacy 9, 114; whiteness among people of color in the Atlantic world 9, 101–118, 105–107, 109, 111; see also Ireland and Irish emigration; slavery

245

Williams, Eric 122, 158, 176n31 Wilson, Lee 93, 98n23 women: in Andean communities 36; criolla women and Havana’s botanical garden 144; Kalaallit Inuit women 77, 79–81, 80, 81; marriage 28, 35, 79, 104, 113, 187, 188, 221n16; “yndia ladina” (Spanish-speaking Indian woman) 35 wool 20 Wright, Gavin 173, 176n31 Wyatt, James 122 Yarico 95 “yndia ladina” (Spanish-speaking Indian woman) 35 Young, Arthur 123 Zong massacre 123