The Plantation: Violence and imaginary order in the gardens of Suriname and Amsterdam (Erasmus Lecture Series Part III)

The final lecture explores the plantation as an ideal-type of colonial governance and capitalist ordering through the lens of a strange historic coincidence. In 1683 the City of Amsterdam acquired a 1/3 part ownership of the plantation colony Suriname. That very same year, the mayors of Amsterdam decided to designate an entire neighborhood for leisure gardens, and called it “The Plantation”. Seventeenth-century Europeans depicted the plantation, the site of unspeakable horrors, as a model of rationally ordered agriculture, and often gave their plantations the same names as their domestic leisure gardens. This lecture will examine deeper connections between rationality and order, chaos and brutality behind this horticultural imagery.