Repurposed Metal Objects in the Political Economy of Jamaican Slavery

The development of iron technologies in mid–eighteenth Century Britain led to an explosion in the variety and scope of iron objects manufactured for the consumer market. One of the primary markets for iron goods was the Caribbean plantation complex. An astonishing amount of iron ware was shipped to Jamaica, where archaeological investigations at Marshalls Pen, a nineteenth-century coffee plantation, recovered a variety of iron tools and other metal objects from enslaved household contexts. A selection of these tools show evidence that the enslaved population of the plantation reshaped these tools for their own purposes.