Dissertation Defense: Kate Steir
Candidate: Kate Steir
Major: History
Advisor: Alison F. Games, Ph.D.
Title: Provisions of Power: Food and Scarcity in Jamaica 1730-1790
Concerns about food scarcity are a consistent theme in many of the records from eighteenth century Jamaica. During moments of crises seemingly unrelated to food and provisioning these concerns became even more prominent in the sources. Each human being needs food to survive, and yet their choices about what kinds of food are tasty and appropriate are both individual and reflective of cultural and societal norms. In eighteenth-century Jamaica residents of the island, free and enslaved, made choices about what kinds of food they would consume and under what circumstances. Frequently these choices led to a scarcity or perceived scarcity of food.
These experiences of scarcity provide a common lens for understanding how people of different legal statuses reacted to the crises they encountered. Exploring what different groups of people chose to eat provides a new understanding of different approaches to military strategy during violent conflicts, as well as a means of contextualizing the responses that different residents of Jamaica had to natural disasters. The need for everyone to access food existed alongside planters’ economic choices to prioritize export crops over provisions. This tension between profit and survival allowed for food to become a tool of negotiation around which different Jamaican communities communicated. All these attributes make food scarcity a vital means of interpreting events on an island that was the economic hub of the growing eighteenth-century Atlantic world. This dissertation will therefore focus on three case studies, examining three different kinds of crises to see what impact these events had on how people fed themselves, as well as considering what choices they made when they were not faced to an acute local crisis.
Eighteenth-century Jamaica was a difficult place to survive in. Yet, those who did survive the brutal labor system, punishing disease environment, and frequent natural disasters participated in an exchange of sugar, wealth, and human beings that changed life for people across the globe. Understanding how these participants procured the food necessary for survival, and crucially, the barriers they created to doing so provides an unparalleled view of the cultural and social limits of the Jamaican imagination.