Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape (review)

Although it is commonplace for a recently minted Ph.D. to publish his or her dissertation soon after its completion, making of it the foundation for a scholarly reputation, cultural geographer John B. Rehder took a different approach. Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape is his dissertation revisited some thirty years after obtaining his doctorate. To be sure, in the interim he has used this research as the basis for a number of useful articles that describe key attributes of the sugar industry in southern Louisiana. But in this book, he tells the story of the sugar landscape in full, and, armed with insights that have been maturing for three decades, the account is much richer than any dissertation rushed into print ever could be. Previously Rehder has presented evidence of a relic landscape, describing the features that were imposed on the land during the period of initial occupancy and summarizing the sequence of tangible developments from the nineteenth century that were still visible in 1969. Engaging in what might be termed an exercise in aboveground archaeology, he developed formal typologies for sugar plantations that allowed him to distinguish between French and Anglo-American estates. He was able, for example, to show how linear plans developed first in the Caribbean were eventually deployed by French settlers along the banks of the Mississippi. Later Americans arriving from the Tidewater areas of Virginia and the Carolinas laid claim to the bayou territories where they developed estates that were arranged in a block form. Clarifying the settlement history for large expanses of Louisiana was an impressive achievement, but finally it was a task that was largely descrip-