The Caribbean conjures up images of tropical beauty and pristine elegance in the Western imagination. Satchell’s historical study challenges exotic notions of landscape to show how human intervention has altered the Jamaican landscape and shaped the lives of its people over the past three centuries. Drawing on a wide array of maps, deeds, and other documentary sources, Satchell (history and archaeology, Univ. of West Indies) examines Hope Plantation, one of the largest and earliest sugar estates in Jamaica. This detailed study serves as a micro-history with broad implications for understanding human-environmental interconnectedness. The Hope landscape was witness to and a product of all of the major institutions in Jamaican history, including colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and national sovereignty. Each structural phase of socioeconomic organization altered the Hope landscape and transformed the meaning Jamaicans ascribed to their world. This is a thoughtful, thorough, and rigorous landscape study. It includes important information about the organization of labor on Hope Estate and sheds light on the lives of enslaved workers. The particular focus on the Hope landscape offers a prism through which to view the wider political, economic, and ideological processes shaping the way humans have engaged with their environment in the wider Caribbean. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. - -F.H. Smith, College of Williams and Mary