Keeping a Tight Lid: The Architecture and Landscape Design of Coffee Plantations in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"Exploring the case of the São Fernando Plantation in the Paraíba Valley, this article discusses the ways in which material culture was actively manipulated to support and legitimize the rigid system of control and coercion sustaining large-scale coffee production in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, founded on slave labor. Embedded in the structural duality of slave-based society, the architecture and landscape of the plantations were built around the panoptic model of constant surveillance, enabling extreme forms of oppression. Far from being a merely urban phenomenon, the efficiency of Bentham's model deeply influenced the ideas of rural slave owners, turning it into an organizing principle that was likewise extended to Rio de Janeiro's coffee plantations."

Lima, Tania Andrade, "Keeping a Tight Lid: The Architecture and Landscape Design of Coffee Plantations in Nineteenth-Century Rio De Janeiro, Brazil," Review (Fernand Braudel Center) Vol 34, No 1/2 (2011): 193-215.