Paul Cheney. Cul de Sac

The return to the plantation effected in this “global microhistory” centered on Saint-Domingue in the boom years of the ancien régime foregrounds the transatlantic family relationships at the book’s heart. They are unveiled through the extensive correspondence between two families between 1773, when Jean-Baptiste Corbier left France for the Caribbean to manage the sugar plantation newly acquired by his employer, Étienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, and 1838, when Corbier’s daughter-in-law died amid ongoing public and private negotiations over the 150-million-franc indemnity demanded in recognition of Haitian independence. Paul Cheney’s work in unearthing and piecing together private family archives with existing state-held correspondence to create a narrative arc spanning six and a half of the most tumultuous decades in French and Atlantic World history makes Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue an important contribution to a burgeoning field that includes Jennifer L. Palmer’s recent Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (2016) and Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus’s The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (2016).

Capitalism · Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies