Reconstructing Plantation Dominance in British Honduras: Race and Subjection in the Age of Emancipation

Abstract

At the 1868 Louisiana State Fair, a large crowd gathered at an exhibition dedicated to the display of colonial products from British Honduras. At one table, spectators looked at exemplary lumber. At another table sat several jars of different grades of sugar—“all of Colonial manufacture.”1 The cane was “enormous,” a journalist wrote, adding that “planters should see it.”2 For planters in New Orleans to see such sugar in the wake of the American Civil War was to imagine the process of plantation production. To see sugar in Louisiana was to know the possibility of sugar plantations in the aftermath of emancipation in the American South. The visceral impact that such sights had on individuals who thought that their lives as planters and as white people had been destroyed by Civil War could not be represented in print.