Cul de Sac

The title Cul de Sac has a dual meaning: it both refers to the plain of Cul de Sac in French Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where the Ferronays plantation that is the subject of this book was located, and to the dead end economic model it epitomised: far from being money-makers, Paul Cheney argues, the plantations of Saint-Domingue were plagued by inefficiencies and were already in crisis long before the onset of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). By linking this case study to larger trends in the Caribbean and France, he hopes to write a ‘global microhistory’ (p. 12). Cheney’s other goal was to eschew a political history of the Haitian slave revolt and to focus instead on the economic model that led to it. He overstates his case when he asserts that almost nothing has been published on white planters since the pioneering work of Gabriel Debien: one may cite Jeremy Popkin’s Facing Racial Revolution (2007), Jean-Louis Donnadieu’s Un grand seigneur (2009) and Jennifer Palmer’s Intimate Bonds (2016). But historians are reluctant to focus their efforts on the villains of the tale, and white planters have indeed been comparatively absent from the recent outpouring of scholarship on the Haitian Revolution

Art history · Capitalism · Economic history · Meaning (existential · Microhistory · Nothing · Political science · Politics · SAINT · Scholarship · White (mutation · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies