INTRODUCTION

Broad historical patterns are often most visible, and frequently most active, in peripheries of social systems, which suggests that investigating cases of development in peripheries can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the forces structuring social systems. Caribbean frontiers are historic peripheries of the European economic and political sphere yet served as crucibles for processes stimulating the evolution of European expansion and political/economic domination in the New World. From c. 1600 through the mid 1800s the Caribbean was a microcosm of the socio-political transformations gripping competing imperial powers and the emerging global market. The islands were the scenes of capitalist and agro-industrial experimentation – critical arenas wherein the social relations of the modern world were forged. At the center of this tumultuous and momentous historical development was the colony of Nevis.

Archaeological research on this small yet surprisingly influential colony casts light on social dynamics in the periphery during the period of inchoate capitalism and nascent globalization. The internalization of capitalist consumer ideology can also be interpreted from archaeological remains of material culture, architecture, and use of space. The processes of socio-economic development playing out on Nevis, and subsequent landscape evolution, did so, not merely against the backdrop of capitalism's ascendancy but integrated and in resonance with its rise to dominance, perhaps contributing fundamentally to its ascendance.