Plantation

Farms are estates specializing in cash crops, usually mainly cultivating a main crop, with perhaps separate sections for produce for culinary use and so on. Plantations, centered on a manor, grow harvests including oil seeds. Economic safeguards and natural comparative advantage have occasionally contributed to determining where plantations are located.

In current terminology, the term usually refers exclusively to expansive estates. Before about 1860, it was the usual term for a field of any size in the southern parts of British North America, with, as the lexicographer noted, “farm” becoming the usual term from about the Mid-Atlantic to the north. The institution of slavery was the norm in the Mid-Atlantic and states to the south. The plantations there were coerced labor estates. The term “plantation” was used in most British colonies but very seldom in the British Isles itself in this sense. There it was used mainly for timber farms, areas artificially planted with trees, whether exclusively for timber production, or partly for ornamental effect in landscaped areas and parks, when it might also cover plantings of ornamental shrubs.

Among the initial examples of estates were the large estates of the Roman Empire, which produced substantial volumes of cereals, viniculture, and extra virgin olive oil for international trade. Commercial agriculture proliferated with the expansion in global trade and the development of a worldwide financial network that followed the expansion of European colonialism.