Every Planter Has Become an Enlightened Politician”

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8940569
AutoresNancy Christie (autor de correspondencia), Michael Gauvreau (0000-0002-7500-5127)
Año2024
Volumen47
Número1
Páginas1-38
Fecha de publicación2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00161071-10921812
OpenAlexW4392787579
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas66

Despite much scholarship on the plantation economy, little attention has been paid to planter political rhetoric in colonial Haiti. By analyzing planter petitions, several lawsuits, and the colonial doléances of 1788–89, this article shows how landed proprietors harnessed natural rights jurisprudence and, in particular, Lockian ideas regarding the sacred right of private property. They argued for a set of collective rights both for planters as a group and for the colony as a whole. This was done to undermine the notion that enslaved people, as human beings, constituted a special form of property and thus to assert planters' absolute sovereignty to manumit their slaves at will. This idea was transposed into a claim that only the colony, not the metropole, could determine the timing of slave emancipation. Planters articulated a concept of liberalism that stood at odds with the universalist claims of equality inspired by the French Revolution

Business · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · History · Political Theory and Influence