Call for Papers: Plantations: Economy, Ecology, and Colonialism in the Long Dureé

RHN 80/2025 | Call

Organisers: Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies

20 November 2025, Bonn, Germany

Deadline for Submissions: 15 August 2025

 

Call for Papers:
Plantations: Economy, Ecology, and Colonialism in the Long Dureé
International Workshop


American Plantations were vital to the expansion of European capitalism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. They instantiated a model for extractive activity that has since transformed the global countryside. In light of new work from the field of global history, however, there is a need to reassess the lineaments and origins of the early modern plantation. For example, recent findings about the extent of sugar production in the Eastern Hemisphere, coterminous with the formation of the integrated plantation system of the Caribbean, pose a challenge to the Atlantic "plantation complex" framework .

This workshop seeks to identify long-term trends and clarify disjunctures in the global history of the plantation complex. We are interested in projects that

  • Study the political economy of land-based agricultural regimes (latifundia, manor, plantation), including forms of husbandry, in any world region in the past two millennia.
  • Investigate links between resource use and forms of slavery and strong dependency in non-European contexts.
  • Explore the environmental dimensions of the plantation and its hinterlands, for example, the question of non-human agency.
  • Consider the linkages between plantations and other realms of economic behavior, i.e, finance and consumption.
  • Broadly address theoretical questions of spatiality and temporality in the study of plantation capitalism.

Funding for travel and accommodation is available for scholars based in Europe and the United Kingdom, however, a hybrid component will be available for those wishing to present from farther afield, and we strongly encourage applicants from all world regions to apply.

 

Please submit an abstract (2-300 words) and a brief bio by August 15, 2025, to jbiggers@uni-bonn.de under the heading "Plantations Workshop"

Kontakt

Joe Biggerstaff (jbiggers@uni-bonn.de)

For further information click here. 

 

Source: H-Soz-Kult