World History Methods: Digital Methods for the Spatial Analysis of the Past
Project Proposal
My project for this course focused on the relationship between banana and sugar production in Jamaica in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. My initial goal for the project was to map the acreage of sugar and banana cultivation on a parish-by-parish basis between 1871 and 1911 using ArcGIS. I initially chose 1871 as the starting year because it was a census year and the banana trade did not develop to a significant degree until the late 1870s. This would provide me a baseline of the island's agricultural landscape prior to the development of the industry. I chose 1911 as my endpoint because it was the last year without a reported case of Panama Disease, which would mark the beginning of a new phase in the island's agricultural history. I also proposed to map each parish's population along with banana and sugar acreages to show the relationship between the two, but as I did not know how to do this at this stage in my DSAM career, I dropped the population element.
Obtaining My Data and Reducing Scope
The source I used to obtain the data on banana and sugar acreages was the Handbook of Jamaica. Published annually by the colonial government, the handbook provides information on, among many other aspects of life on the island, the amount of each crop produced on the island in a given year within each parish. However, the Handbook did not begin recording data on banana cultivation until the 1890s so while I was able to obtain information on sugar in the 1870s and 1880s, I was not able to do so for bananas. As a result, I decided to reduce the scope of my project to a 10 year period from 1896 to 1906 to look at the geography of these crops before and after the formation of the United Fruit Company in 1899.
Working With ArcGIS
After exploring the various mapping platforms as part of the course, I decided that ArcMap was the best platform for my project due to the ability to create choropleth maps. Although I had never used ArcMap to create this specific type of map, my previous experience working as part of a GIS project in my undergraduate years, combined with the two weeks of workshopping ArcMap in class, gave me confidence that I would be able to effectively use the program to explore the development of Jamaica’s banana and sugar industries.
Once I settled on my platform, I had to decide how to visualize the data. I decided to do this in two forms: comparing the acreage of sugar and bananas cultivated based on total acreage and by showing the percentage ratio of bananas produced compared to sugar. I chose these two different approaches as I was interested to see if each told a different story or whether it was consistent across the two.
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My final methodological decision was where to place the breaks in my data. ArcGIS allows you to classify your data manually, with a specified interval, an equal interval, using a quantile classification, or through Jenks natural breaks. The library’s GIS experts spoke in favor of using the Jenks Natural Breaks option in ArcMap, but my challenge then became how to use Jenks across a series of maps that all included different data. Had I used the Jenks breaks with each map separately, my breaks would have been different for each map, which would have skewed my findings. Instead, I merged all of my data into one column, created a shapefile with enough features to fit all of my data, and ran the Jenks model, providing with me with the natural breaks based upon all of my data. I feel that this method gave me the best opportunity to compare my findings across time and crops without arbitrarily assigning break points.
Project Output
Results Discussion
The maps reveal that the growth of the banana industry was a regional phenomenon in Jamaica, with the growth in acreage taking place almost entirely in the eastern portion of the island. The island’s sugar production, which was focused primarily in western Jamaica, remained relatively unchanged in the period from 1896-1906. This demonstrates that one cannot simply cite the rise of the banana industry and the United Fruit Company as the leading driver behind the decline of the island’s sugar industry. These findings pushed me to think more critically about the relationship between sugar and bananas, as the two crops have clearly different geographical centers, something I was unaware of prior to creating these maps (note that this was my first semester at Pitt).
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The spatial visualization of the banana and sugar industries also leads to new questions about the environments of the sugar and banana producing regions. What was it about the eastern portion of the island that was conducive to banana cultivation? Why was sugar much more common in western Jamaica? Being able to see where the industries were located and where they spread, such as the banana industry moving south to the parish of Saint Catherine between 1896 and 1906, led me to explore the environments of specific parishes to see what made those areas conducive to certain crops.