How Feeding Slaves Shaped the French Atlantic: Mercantilism and Food Provisioning in the Franco-Caribbean during the 17th and 18th centuries (original) (raw)
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A Colonial Cul de Sac: Plantation Life in Wartime Saint-Domingue, 1775-1783
Radical History Review, 2013
If, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot claimed, the Haitian Revolution used to be "unthinkable" and its history relegated to silence, over the last decade or so it has become almost unstoppably garrulous. 1 A number of recent studies have considerably enriched and revised C. L. R. James's seminal work, as Haiti has come to occupy a central place in increasingly internationalized accounts of the French Revolution. 2 From the dual perspective of the Haitian and French Revolutions, however, Haiti's international history only begins with the slave uprisings of August 1791, while Haiti's prehistory as French Saint-Domingue is relegated to the historical background, occupying the more restricted space of metropole-colony relations or -more narrowly still -the social history of plantation life in an isolated colonial backwater. But what if the plantation itself has an international history? The division of labor in the world economy during the eighteenth century established the broad economic framework that made Saint-Domingue a source of sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo, and profit for Europeans. The basic premise of this article -that the plantation economy of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue was simultaneously rich and fragile -is not new, but historians generally advance this position on the basis of aggregate trade statistics. The following study examines how planters, managers, and, to a lesser degree, slaves adapted to two principal sources of this instability, international warfare and fluctuating trade regimes in the region. A microlevel examination of Radical History Review
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal, 2017
This research will investigate the role flour and flour-based foodstuffs had in the Spanish Caribbean colonies, as they have been traditionally associated to Middle Eastern cereals which are not successfully harvested in the region. Thus, access to these products during the colonial period was limited to importation. Nonetheless, some institutions of power possessed privileged positions regarding the acquisition of exotic foodstuffs. Because of this, this study chose to focus on the militia by examining military and navy documents regarding provision supplying in the Spanish Caribbean militias. The quantity of mentions of flour-based provisions to non-flour ones was compared and the situations in which they were mentioned were analyzed. Flour-based provisions were found to be an important part of the militia diet, being the most mentioned with a ratio of 2 to 1 with respect to non-flour provisions. In addition, the situations in which they were mentioned indicated that they were considered valuable luxuries, rewards, and staples. This study aspires to contribute to discussions of how certain foodstuffs can possess both tangible and symbolic power in colonial situations.
"Slavery and the Haitian Reovlution"
Cambridge World History of Slavery, vol. 4, ed. David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher. New York: Cambridge University Press, . pp. 321-343, 2017
French Governors and Dutch Merchants
2022
Where most scholarship on the origins of the sugar revolution has focused on the English islands, this article draws on detailed research in Dutch and French archives to show how Dutch merchants were crucial actors in promoting the sugar revolution in the Lesser Antilles. Despite the fact that both English and French islands experienced similar developments, the relationship between these islands is barely known in English literature largely due to the language barrier. Illustrating the Dutch-French relationship allows us to develop a more regionally inclusive and trans-national perspective that shows how the early Caribbean economy, French and English, benefitted from a web of links forged by ambitious Dutch merchants between Europe, Brazil, and the Caribbean.