Sukkar · AT THE CORE OF COLONIAL PLANTATIONS: Exploring the Indigenous Roots of the Colonial Sugar Industry in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, 15th-16th C. [Sukkar]

The European colonisation of the Atlantic brought about land-use change at a continental scale. As colonists invaded new regions, they dispossessed Indigenous populations and took advantage of their farming areas to build cash-cropping plantations. However, pre-colonial fields and their infrastructure had been designed according to different ways of organising production and were ill-suited for commercial agriculture. Thus, settlers were forced to partly accommodate the productive criteria of colonised societies. How the adaptation of Indigenous farming areas took place and how it both made possible and conditioned the development of colonial agriculture in the Atlantic remain unexplored. Sukkar aims to decisively tackle this issue by conducting comparative interdisciplinary research in the Canary Islands and the Dominican Republic. By combining the analysis of archival sources with the study of farming spaces and practices–through field surveying and GIS-based spatial analysis–, I will be able to explore the deep connections that four sixteenth-century Canarian and Dominican sugar plantations have with pre-colonial agriculture. Analysing the design and management of these plantations from a comparative perspective will allow me to identify their Indigenous cores and ascertain how colonial agriculture mutated through its interaction with different systems for organising production. Sukkar will be the first research project on the development of the colonial sugar industry to focus on the contributions made by colonised populations on both sides of the Atlantic. The Action's engagement with local knowledge will also highlight the cultural and ecological value of the agricultural landscapes and traditional practices of rural communities in the Canary Islands and the Dominican Republic and expose the pressing need to protect and nurture them.