Mission plantations, space, and social control: Jesuits as planters in French Caribbean colonies and frontiers

Abstract

The Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, owned plantations in the Americas to fund missionaries who proselytized among native peoples and enslaved Africans while ensuring that colonists remained Catholic. Fusing the roles of planters and missionaries, Jesuits manipulated the spatial layout of plantations as a method to exercise social control over the laborers who were enslaved at these properties, as well as to influence the European and indigenous populations inhabiting the colonies and frontiers where mission work took place. Spatial layouts of French Jesuit plantations ( habitations) dating from the mid seventeenth century to the 1760s in Martinique, Dominica, and Guyane reveal some of the ways in which missionaries organized space. These Jesuit mission plantations were situated in prominent locations in order to attract gaze, and features such as crosses, churches, and gardens displayed the Society’s prestige and mission work. At the same time, maximizing efficiency and conducting direct surveillance of laborers were reduced in importance.

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