Les maîtres de la Guadeloupe

This book is an enormously valuable overview of the continuities and shifts of French Caribbean slave society that will be of interest to a wide range of specialists of Caribbean, African diaspora, and Atlantic World histories.Frédéric Régent starts from the premise that in this historical subfield, "the dominated are more studied than the dominant" (p.8), and he seeks to explore the experience of slaveowners from the rise of slave society in Guadeloupe to its downfall.Drawing on extensive archival research, he tells this sweeping story in a way that retains a sense of granular detail, with an emphasis on demographic and economic data.He shows, for example, how the use of European engagé laborers persisted through the middle of the seventeenth century, with no real impetus to shift away from this model until the "sugar revolution" of the 1660s.African descended enslaved people went from 20 percent of the population to nearly 60 percent in the years from 1654 to 1671.Therefore, it was only well after this transition that a formal body of slave law was finally created, and somewhat later that the category of "blanc" was used at all.Régent makes a convincing case that the family should be seen as the crucial unit of analysis for understanding the economic and social evolution of the island, starting from the fact that most sugar plantation owners in 1796 had family roots going back to the seventeenth century.This landholding class became a rigid oligarchy due to a combination of challenges that played out over generations.On one hand, there was the need to keep the whole enslaved labor force and manufacturing elements together with a large piece of land rather than allowing them to be divided up among heirs from one generation to another.Two legal practices followed from this imperative.First, an extended debate established that enslaved people should be treated as immovables before the law, and therefore not be subject to seizure by creditors.At the same time, families practiced partage en valeurs, a legal innovation unknown in metropolitan France at the time, which meant that partial heirs could be paid for their portion of the estate in order to keep it intact.These practices led to high levels of debt held within the extended clan-Régent quotes a contemporary who described "inheritors of immense fortunes, to which they can neither have access nor even obtain the smallest portion" (p.231).He argues that these practices ultimately relied on massive levels of metropolitan credit, thereby highlighting the capitalistic nature of property relations compared to the metropole in the same period.On the other hand, owners of estates devoted to "secondary crops" such as cotton and tobacco were six times as numerous as the sugar plantation owners, owned more than half of the enslaved population

Art · Diaspora · Economic history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Humanities · Oligarchy · Political science · Population · Premise · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy