Most people know that plantations had names - like Mount Vernon or St. Nicholas Abbey - but when and why did they receive these names, and what can they tell us about what kind of place it was understood to be? This project uses the radically underutilized evidence of place-names to explore how plantation was redefined on the ground in early America, and the way it shaped, and was shaped by, the individuals who embraced the status of “planter.” The names that individuals gave to plantations reveal what exactly they thought a plantation was. By analysing plantation names from across the English Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries, this project charts the changing popularity of elements within plantation names, including geographic descriptors, European place-names, and the affects of the landowner.

After Oliver Cromwell’s ill-fated Western Design washed up on the island of Jamaica in 1655, everyone agreed that the key to making this backwater of Spanish America into a valuable English possession was planting. But what exactly did that mean? This project explores the way in which the English conquest of Jamaica brought to the fore the divergent definitions of plantation that had emerged in the English Atlantic over the previous two decades. The effort to settle Jamaica brought together individuals with colonial experience in Barbados, New England, Suriname, and Ireland, who all had subtly different definitions of plantation. The imperial state’s particular interest in the fate of Jamaica made the new colony a critical site for testing these competing definitions, both through formal imperial policy and through the reconstruction of spatial order on the island.

In 1706, during the height of the War of the Spanish Succession, French forces invaded and devastated the English territory on the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, destroying buildings and seizing property and enslaved people. In an unprecedented move, the British Parliament formally recognized the value of the planters to the Empire. It agreed to compensate them for their losses and sent commissioners to inventory all of the lost property. These officials gathered data that offers a unique window into the material life of the early eighteenth-century Caribbean. But they were also acutely sensitive to the identities of individual claimants and their status within the empire, recording some as “planters” and others as merchants, tradesmen, or merely inhabitants. Analysis of these records reveals the extent to which the status of planter had come to be defined in relation to the state and the imperial economy.