The African City and the Plantation

The plantation is not merely a chapter of the past. As a race‑making institution and a world‑shaping economic system, it has become increasingly relevant to how we understand and theorize the making of the modern world and its deepening crises. Since the 15th century, the plantation emerged as an extractive system, intimately bound to colonial expansion, the enslavement and forced labor of millions, and the massive appropriation of land. It transformed entire ecologies into monocultural machines for the global production of cash‑crops such as cotton, sugarcane, coffee, cocoa, and palm oil. Historians have shown how this system fueled both capitalism and environmental change, and how its afterlives continue to shape political power and racial inequality today.