Patriots, Royalists, and Terrorists in the West Indies

In the past two decades, scholarship on the French Caribbean in the era of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) has highlighted the impact that events in the colonies had on France, most notably on the French National Convention’s decision to abolish slavery in 1794. William S. Cormack’s book reverses the polarity to examine instead the influence of the revolution in France on political transformations in Martinique and Guadeloupe, located in the Lesser Antilles. The keynote of Cormack’s account is ‘ambiguity’ (p. 9), as colonists struggled to reconcile their attraction to revolutionary declarations of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty with their desire to continue to live in racially hierarchical slave societies. Cormack identifies two main rivalries that animated revolutionary politics. First, he reveals the bitter opposition between slaveholding planters in the countryside and wealthy merchants in the port towns. Often heavily indebted to the merchant class, plantation owners resented mercantilist restrictions on

Ancient history · Ethnology · Geography · Martinique · West indies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies