Plantation islands were key testing grounds for European colonisation. Drawn from the design of the landed estate, plantations structured new territory by combining the practical demands of farming and improvement with the villa's long and sophisticated aesthetic tradition. This same tradition then represented such landscapes in ways that addressed both the local eye of the planter and the eyes of those in power back home. The paper will comparatively analyse plantation paradigms from the British and French empires, drawing from untapped documentary sources and the physical landscapes that remain. Maps and drawings of Haiti’s Montagne de la Tranquilité canal-works, Jamaica’s Plantain Garden river valley and the transatlantic Westport estate will demonstrate how abrupt shifts from leisured elegance to hard labour were concealed or elided on the ground. Such landscapes, although substantially unknown, remain some of the 18th century's most significant, calculated and damning designed environments.

Finola O’Kane is professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD, and a specialist in the designed landscape history of Ireland and of the Atlantic world. Her publications include Ireland and the picturesque; design, landscape painting and tourism in Ireland 1700-1830 (2013), Landscape design and revolution in eighteenth-century Ireland and the United States, 1688-1815 (2023), and she is co-editor with Ciaran O’Neill of Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary perspectives (2023).

[Image: James Hakewill, ‘Holland Estate, St. Thomas in the East, Jamaica’ (1820-1), Yale Center for British Art]

This event will be both in-person in the Irish Studies Seminar Room and online via MS Teams.