At its height in the later eighteenth century, the French colony of Saint Domingue (present‐day Haiti) was by far the wealthiest and most flourishing of the European slave colonies in the Atlantic world. It has unquestionably been depicted as the powerhouse driving the French colonial system, linking the colonial trades, the slave trade, and a host of derivative domestic industries in a network of interlocking forms of modern capitalist expansion. Paul Cheney's Cul de Sac takes a critical look at these long‐standing historiographical assertions of phenomenal and, implicitly, unending economic growth for both colony and metropolis. By tracing the history of one plantation, situated in the prosperous Cul de Sac plain of Saint Domingue's west province and owned by the wealthy Breton noble Étienne‐Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays, Cheney skilfully alternates between the microhistory of the Ferronnays plantation and the macroscopic framework of world markets and international finance in which, he argues, the primitive capitalism of the plantation complex, based on economic traditionalism and overarching values of patrimony, was actually in decline and heading toward collapse. In this remarkable study, the author refocuses attention on the aristocracy, particularly the military nobility, in Saint Domingue's plantation holdings, as well as the administration and defence of France's colonial possessions. His sources include a voluminous set of letters found among the Ferronays family papers written by the marquis's trusted plantation manager, Jean‐Baptiste Corbier, in addition to an impressive corpus of archival documents and secondary literature covering the transatlantic dimensions of the colonial plantation system.
The letters bring to light the density of the linkages between the Ferronnays and Corbier families and in themselves reveal as much about Saint Domingue society, its complex set of race and gender relations, slave conditions, plantation production, and organization, as they do about the mindset and conscience of the eighteenth‐century provincial elites. Cheney discusses in some depth the dual character of the plantation, which he likens to the closed world of the patrimonial household while at the same time being pulled into and, in its capacity for steady profits, constrained by the forces and fluctuations of the global market—not least of which concerned planter indebtedness. Given the realities of the sugar business, international competition, and constant pressures to reinvest, compounded by the unpredictable environment of Saint Domingue generally, Corbier counsels his employer on the value of a conservative approach toward the running and financing of his operations, and the necessity for planters to balance humanity and interest in the treatment of their slaves. But as Cheney explains, while Enlightenment thought stressed the importance of reason tempered by sentiment (sensibilité) to harmonize plantation life and humanize master–slave relations, planter interest also promoted implementation of scientific and technological advancements to increase output and further economic growth. Accelerating the pace of production, however, took a toll on the bodies of slaves, who, with slightly improved material conditions were merely pushed to work longer and produce more, which did nothing to reduce overall mortality rates. Reconciling humanity and interest meant prioritizing profits at the expense of slaves’ lives and ultimately eroded the paternalistic model meant to harmonize plantation life.
Cheney considers yet another important factor in the long‐term (non)profitability of the plantation system—the cost of empire. When military expenditures to protect and defend colonies are taken into account, compounded by the effects of warfare, intermittent ruptures in normal trade patterns, insufficient provisioning of basic goods, and their impact on the internal organization of the plantation, Cheney suggestively depicts empire as a losing business. Given the comparative weakness of the French navy to that of the British, the French plantation economy could ultimately only be as strong as the empire itself and the markets it promoted. The period of the 1780s was particularly acute. Although there was something of a sugar boom after the US war of independence, overworked slaves were either sick or dying off in incremental numbers. Rising prices for slave imports and other basic goods cut drastically into the profits of overcapitalized and debt‐ridden planters, increased their dependence on and subordination to metropolitan merchants, and exacerbated mutual recriminations and tension. While the Ferronnayses might weather the storm with good connections among their creditors in the big metropolitan merchant houses, any real possibility for expansion during the 1780s was tenuous at best.
Finally, the complex cultural, political, and economic dimensions of Ferronnays's scandal‐ridden marriage to Elisabeth Binau, a creole woman with considerable dowry and several plantations, reflect as much upon the creole–metropolitan divide generally as they do on the scarcely studied empowerment of white creole women using the juridical and legal spaces of the law to protect their own interests. Overall, the author's skilful handling of the Ferronnays papers in Cul de Sac provides challenging new insights into the composite worlds of late eighteenth‐century French and colonial/revolutionary Saint Domingue.
By Carolyn Fick
