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Leaving a bittersweet taste : classifying, cultivating and consuming sugar in seventeenth and eighteenth century British West Indian visual culture

This thesis explores visual representations of British West Indian sugar in relation to the African slave trade practiced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, sugar played a vital role to the lives of both European and non-Europeans as it was a source of great wealth for many and became transformed into one of the most demanded and widely consumed commodity. From the earliest days of British colonization, the cultivation and production of sugar in the Caribbean has been inextricably linked with the trade in African slaves to provide free labor for plantation owners and planters. This thesis considers how European artists visually represented sugar in its various forms---as an object for botanical study, as landscape and as consumable commodity---and in so doing, constructed specific ideas about the African slave body and the use of African slave labor that reflected personal and imperial agendas and ideologies.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.112338
Date January 2007
CreatorsGobin, Anuradha.
PublisherMcGill University
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Formatapplication/pdf
CoverageMaster of Arts (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.)
RightsAll items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.
Relationalephsysno: 002711437, proquestno: AAIMR51376, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest.

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