Plantation Ecologies: The Experimental Plantation in and against James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane

This essay examines the Scottish poet and physician James Grainger’s 1764 “West-India georgic,” The Sugar-Cane, to chronicle the transformation of the plantation into an ecologically-unique site for experimentation, produced through material processes and imaginaries of British enclosure in the West Indies. Through its cataloguing of Caribbean diseases, natural remedies, and oblique references to medical experiments on the enslaved, The Sugar-Cane offers a powerful articulation of what I call the “experimental plantation,” an enclosed site from which empirical knowledge is produced, extracted, and transplanted from tropicalized lands and bodies. At the same time as the poem registers the enclosure of human and non-human life within the experimental plantation, it also belies an anxiety about the disordering, tropicalizing forces of various “fugitive” species in the Caribbean, including tropical diseases, wild animals, and maroon communities, all of which threaten to dissolve and overtake the enclosed borders of the plantation. In The Sugar-Cane, the image of the plantation as an ecologically-enclosed, protected space of British cultivation and experimentation is revealed to be a fragile colonial fantasy, always on the verge of being “infected” and creolized by indigenous plants, animals and diseases, as well as by Africans both within and outside of the enclosures of the plantation.