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Diaries of nineteenth-century plantation managers are rare; diaries of French sugar planters are rarer still. Although such works as the diaries of Ella Gertrude Thomas and James Henry Hammond provide insight into the plantation societies of the antebellum South, virtually no contemporary source treats planter-slave relations as extensively, or presents a white planter's views on slave society in as much detail, as do the letters and diary of Pierre Dessalles. Now Elborg Forster and Robert Forster have translated and edited the most historically and socially significant portions of this unusual work. Previously available only in a four-volume French edition, these materials treat a wide range of topics, including the slave economy, management and socialization of the labor force, the role of free blacks in society, the lives led by the plantation owners, and, significantly, black-white relations before, during, and after emancipation.
From its founding, Martinique played an integral role in France's Atlantic empire. Established in the mid-seventeenth century as a colonial outpost against Spanish and English dominance in the Caribbean, the island was transformed by the increase in European demand for sugar, coffee, and indigo. Like other colonial subjects, Martinicans met the labor needs of cash-crop cultivation by establishing plantations worked by enslaved Africans and by adopting the rigidly hierarchical social structure that accompanied chattel slavery. After Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Martinique's economic importance to the French empire increased. At the same time, questions arose, both in France and on t...
Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.
This book is a deconstruction of the discourse of the journals of two white sl;ave owners in the Caribbean, Pierre Dessalles in the French colony of Martinique and William Lewis an absentee owner of two plantations in the British colony of Jamaica resident in the UK. The deconstruction focuses on the power relations between the white hegemonic elite and the enslaved non-whites, Africans and Mulattoes. The study reveals the expanse of power exercised by white hegemonic males especially over the enslaved, the resistance formulated and unleashed by the enslaved on a continuing basis and its impact upon the power of massa. What is ultimately reveal;ed is the white supremacist worldview which drives the white response to enslaved resistance and the singular contribution made by West Indian enslavement to the origin and evolution of white supremacist discourse in the North Atlantic.
“An important addition to the literature on Caribbean history and colonial societies in the 17th century.” —Choice Traditionally, the story of the Greater Caribbean has been dominated by the narrative of Iberian hegemony, British colonization, the plantation regime, and the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth century. Relatively little is known about the society and culture of this region—and particularly France’s role in them—in the two centuries prior to the rise of the plantation complex of the eighteenth century. Here, historian Philip P. Boucher offers the first comprehensive account of colonization and French society in the Caribbean. Boucher’s analysis contrasts the str...
This book focuses on why Europe became the dominant economic force in global trade between 1450 and 1750.
Placing slavery in the mainstream of modern history, the essays in this survey describe its transfer from the Old World, its role in forging the interdependence of the Atlantic economies, and its impact on Africa.