Today, a plantation is a place where people plant things, usually botanics. In the 17th century, the word meant active transfer of a colonising population, without concern for the indigenous people. This sense of plantation is more generally known today as a settlement or a colony.

Ireland

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The Plantations of Ireland were an instrument of retribution and colonisation after several Irish rebellions throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The largest settlement, the Plantation of Ulster followed the rebellion of Hugh Roe O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill in the Nine Years War (Ireland) 1594-1603. The plantations were seen as part of process that would Anglicise Ireland well as a means of maintaining British political control in Ireland. Lands were seized from the native landowners both as punishment for rebellion and as punishment for remaining Catholic and not conforming to the state's Protestnat religion and given to English (and later, Scottish) Protestant settlers who would be loyal to the Crown and keep the disloyal native Irish under control.

Scottish highlands

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During the Middle Ages the Scottish government planted Scots-speaking lowland merchant colonies in the Gaidhealtachd (the Gaelic-speaking part of Scotland), for example at Campbeltown and Cromarty.

New England

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The Plantations of New England were seen as occupying virgin land. European colonists regarded the land there as belonging to no-one (since the native Americans asserted no rights to it). The first English settlement, the Plymouth plantation, was to create a new beginning for English dissenters and so essentially utopian. Later plantations were more overtly entrepreneurial: European investors funded colonists in the expectation of good returns. Example include the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New Haven Colony, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (now New York) and the French Nouvelle Caledonie in Canada.

In the state of Maine, the old meaning has been preserved in the name of local government jurisdictions.

References

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• Albert Galloway Keller, 1908, Colonization: A Study of the Founding of New Societies, Boston: Ginn & Company