Power on the Plantation Complex: Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics

This study examines how planters in Barbados, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, exercised three modes of power (sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality) in the management of those enslaved. The first part of this dissertation examines how the capture, incarceration, transportation, and sale of enslaved Africans and those subjugated under regimes of unfree labour, were carried out by Imperial agents, slave-traders, and planters, through the geo-economic/political ordering of sovereign power. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate how practices of surveillance, slave-labour, punishment, and resistance realized a shift in the dominant mode of power being exercised on the plantation from sovereignty to discipline. The third, and final part of this dissertation, reveals how planters initiated pro-natalist policies through the deployment of an incentive structure, and how physicians and slave managers coordinated this governmental strategy. Throughout this work I explore how the slave vessel, colonial marketplace, and institutions of confinement, connect the economic, juridical, and political dimensions of plantation slavery as a dispositif of capitalist exploitation. These zones of exchange exhibit how the organizational synergy of Barbadian plantations shaped them into a complex biopolitical and thanatopolitical regime of racism, punishment, and managerialism.