A Colonial Cul de Sac: Plantation Life in Wartime Saint-Domingue, 1775-1783 (original) (raw)

2013, Radical History Review

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