Trajectories of migration and racialization across empires and political units were documented while engaging in conceptual work and collaborating with social partners, through the following activities: (i) literature review of digital and physical sources in Lisbon, London, Toronto, Washington D.C. Georgetown, Honolulu, Dartmouth, New Bedford, Port Louis, Rome, drawing on a shared corpus of readings; (ii) archival research in the UK (London, Kew, Greenwich, Cambridge, Edinburg, Glasgow), Portugal (Lisbon, Porto, Funchal, Ponta Delgada), S Tome, Angola (Lunbango, Namibe, Humpata), Italy (Rome, Foggia), Germany (Berlin), the US (Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii), Guyana (Georgetown) and Malaysia; (iii) fieldwork in contemporary-oriented tracks (Mauritius, Italy) and interviews in historical tracks (Hawaii/California; New England; Guyana/Toronto, Suriname); (iv) conferences, seminar series, symposia, panels, invited lectures and summer courses; (v) intense collaboration across research tracks; (vi) co-organization of actions addressed to wider audiences.
Important findings were achieved in each research track:
I: Madeirans were recruited to British Guiana plantations in the 1830s-50s through unclear legal frameworks and in circumstances of extreme social inequalities, crop failures, famines and debt. Once on Guiana plantations, Madeiran labourers experienced dire conditions and high mortality. They emerge in the sources as a distinct racial group, siding with Africans, North and South Indians. Some survived and carved a social niche in commerce, in tension with emancipated African-descendants, while benefiting in credit and other facilites from British settlers and bankers. Towards the late 19th century, a second wave of business-oriented Madeirans expanded the local community, which remained a distinct group in the racialized dynamics of Guiana (White, Black, Indian, Portuguese, Chinese and Amerindian). In the 1960s, many of the Portuguese-Guyanese migrated to the Toronto area.
II: The sponsored, mostly legal migration of Madeirans and Azoreans to Hawaii (as kingdom or U.S. annexed territory, resulted from a combination of racialist immigration policies promoted by planters and governments in Hawaii and the availability of Portuguese islanders to migrate as families, endure plantation work and move on to other socio-economic. They remained a distinct group as a result of the local dynamics of racialized differentiation.
III: The Azorean labor force in New England mills was subject to the dynamics of racialization of migrants and responded in multiple ways.
IV: S Tomé: There is a close relation between the racialized labour management practices of Brazilian coffee plantations and those of São Tomé since the 1850s, as enslaved and indentured workers from Angola experienced similar working conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. These practices were adapted to the production of cocoa since the 1880s and exported to Belgium Congo and German Cameroons. Plantation life, however, was not just about monocrop, and enslaved laborers explored some counterplantation productions (e.g. Cannabis). Angola: The connected study of Madeiran settlements in Angola and migrations to Hawaii in the 1880s suggests that both groups were recruited from the same pool and that the sponsored settlement of Huila was also a government's response to out-migration to Hawaii and British Guiana. Once in Angola, the positionality of Madeirans in the racialized system became sui generis, contrasting both to indigenous African groups and to upper class Pernambucan plantation owners settled in the lowlands of Moçamedes.
V: The persistence of racialized categories in contemporary Mauritius echoes colonial sediments and is reflected in the modern industry of domestic service for retirement housing and the hospitality sector.
VI: Contemporary structures of labour recruitment suggest a plantation/post plantation nexus in current agribusiness, although this may not be depicted as "plantation" proper.
VII: The angle of "mobilities" allows for an expanded understanding of labor; naval logs and whaling-related sources provide an interesting complement to the plantation-oriented focus.
VIII: Advancements in genetics changed the scientific understanding of “race” and “populations," yet, on many fronts, the plantation history of racial categories enters biomedical research, the clinic and public health knowledge.
We promoted partnerships with a variety of academic and non-academic interlocutors in most field sites, plus joint conferences in New England, Mauritius, and Madeira. We organised the advanced summer courses "Along and Against the Archival Grain" and "Plantation Europe." We published over 50 articles and chapters, 3 edited volumes, and 3 journal issues. More remain in preparation. We produced three documentaries, two videoclips and a board game.
