Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation [Hardcover]

Drawing on an unpublished planter's manuscript, this work discusses the origins, names, relationships, families, skills and health of a hundred slaves on an early sugar plantation. It shows how they founded an African-American community in a colonial outpost of the Caribbean and how they resisted slavery.Dibia was educated in Africa, stolen across the sea and sold into slavery. He spent the rest of his life on a sugar plantation, where he worked with Ago?ya, drank Abor?'s rum, married Izabelle and had a son named Paul. This book tells the story of the community he lived in with a hundred others in a colonial outpost of the Caribbean. It depicts the everyday life of enslaved Africans and Native Americans in remarkable detail, showing their names, relationships, skills, health and interactions, as they contended with and resisted their enslavement. Most studies of plantation life examine well-established colonies in the century before abolition. This work provides a counterpoint by depicting the founding population of an African-American community in the early years of the industrial sugar plantation complex. Drawing on a planter's manuscript, shipping records, missionary accounts and seventeenth-century scraps of paper,Dibia's Worldwill appeal to specialists as well as general readers interested in the early Atlantic world, Creole societies, slavery and African-American history.Introduction: Dibia

1. Jean Goupy and the R?mire Plantation

2. The Enslaved Community of R?mire

3. Origins

4. Marriages

5. Skills and Work

6. Daily Life

7. Culture

8. Freedom

9. Health, Punishment and Death

10. The Free Population

Conclusion: Dibia

Appendix: An English Translation of the Inventory

References

Index A tour de force of scholarship that gives us a rare portrait of an African slave community in the late seventeenth century.
Prof. Trevor Burnard, Director of the Wilberforce