Zoologist Elizabeth Morrison receives the Jamaican giant galliwasp from Mike Rutherford, a curator at the University of Glasgow, on April 22, 2024.
Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
Planting millions of trees in natural grassland is largely ineffective in the battle against global warming because it adds little or no additional carbon storage.
Though it is a fact that some enslaved people learned valuable skills, it’s a myth that they had the same path of upward mobility that white laborers enjoyed.
Plantations of exotic trees from the mid-19th century onwards devastated Indian ecosystems.
A Malaysian worker harvests palm fruits from a plantation in peninsular Malaysia, on Wednesday, March 6, 2019. Though labour issues have largely been ignored, the punishing effects of palm oil on the environment have been decried for years.
(AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
Palm oil is used in half the products sold in global supermarkets. Much of the oil comes from Indonesia where it is grown on plantations that are relatively inefficient, but occupy huge areas of land.
An illustration by Beatrix Potter from The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.
The Trustees of the British Museum
Beatrix Potter’s silence concerning her sources means the Brer Rabbit folktales that helped create her stories are passed over without acknowledgement or celebration.
By reflecting on sugar’s origins, we can trace the pathways that have made this commodity so abundant.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
By reflecting on the violent origins of the Canadian sugar industry, we can bring wider attention to the exploitation underpinning the history of Canadian cuisine.
A newspaper headline and photo show the arrival of the Molokans in Hawaii.
The Hawaiian Star via Library of Congress
Economic inequality during the Dutch East Indies era varied radically, depending on where you look. What made the income distribution different from one region to another?
Reconstructed slave cabins at James Madison’s Montpelier in Virginia.
Stephen P. Hanna
Once owned by James Madison, the Montpelier plantation remains a model for presenting a full depiction of the life of the former president as well as the lives of those he enslaved.
There is a long history shaping the recent pact between China and the Solomons- and it should jolt Australia into rethinking its relationships in the Pacific region.
Hundreds of plantation museums dot the South.
Amy Potter
Plantation museums could be ideal venues for students to learn about the nation’s history of race-based slavery, but only if they stop whitewashing the horrors of what took place on their grounds.
Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, approached by a Berber on camelback, from The Catalan Atlas, 1375.
Attributed to Abraham Cresques/Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Wikimedia Commons
Sugar has deep links with slavery in the US, but Black workers weren’t the only ones affected. In post-Civil War Louisiana, Chinese workers also toiled cutting and processing cane.
These statues of enslaved young boys are part of a modern-day depiction of southern plantation life at the Whitney Museum in Louisiana.
AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
The romanticized notions of Southern gentility are increasingly at odds with historical reality as the lives, culture and contributions of the enslaved are becoming integral on tours of plantations.
Annie, centre, with her children in the town of Halifax, circa 1910, forged a rich life in difficult circumstances.
Riots by proslavery forces raged for three days in the nation’s capital after the capture of a ship bearing fugitive enslaved people. The president, a slaveowner himself, tried to calm the city.