Paul Cheney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226079356
- eISBN:
- 9780226411774
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226411774.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This chapter uses the marriage between the French nobleman Etienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and his wife Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, the daughter of a creole (native born) planter as a ...
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This chapter uses the marriage between the French nobleman Etienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and his wife Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, the daughter of a creole (native born) planter as a window into conflict among the white elite of Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was settled and governed thanks to a collaboration between metropolitan and creole elites, but as the eighteenth century progressed, the creoles of Saint-Domingue became more self-confident and assertive. Shortly after their marriage, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau sought to regain control of her dowry and to live independently of a husband she believed had married her for mercenary purposes; the circumstances of their legal separation furnishes an example of how little-awed the white creole elite of Saint-Domingue was by the social and political power of the military nobility who administered France's colonial empire and who made fortunes investing in its plantation complex. It also exposes some of the fault lines that would emerge once the French Revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue, and would make it impossible to re-impose order on a fractured slave society.Less
This chapter uses the marriage between the French nobleman Etienne-Louis Ferron de la Ferronnays and his wife Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau, the daughter of a creole (native born) planter as a window into conflict among the white elite of Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was settled and governed thanks to a collaboration between metropolitan and creole elites, but as the eighteenth century progressed, the creoles of Saint-Domingue became more self-confident and assertive. Shortly after their marriage, Marie-Elisabeth Thimothée Binau sought to regain control of her dowry and to live independently of a husband she believed had married her for mercenary purposes; the circumstances of their legal separation furnishes an example of how little-awed the white creole elite of Saint-Domingue was by the social and political power of the military nobility who administered France's colonial empire and who made fortunes investing in its plantation complex. It also exposes some of the fault lines that would emerge once the French Revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue, and would make it impossible to re-impose order on a fractured slave society.
Paul Cheney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780226079356
- eISBN:
- 9780226411774
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226411774.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
This book is a micro-level study of one plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), situated on the Cul de Sac Plain, near Port au Prince. The sugar economy of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue ...
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This book is a micro-level study of one plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), situated on the Cul de Sac Plain, near Port au Prince. The sugar economy of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue produced profits for planters and merchants, but it was based upon social, political, ecological, and market foundations that rendered it weak and crisis-prone. Socially, it was based upon the importation of forced labor that was the source of profit, but that also limited the incentive for technical innovation and constantly posed the threat of violent revolt; politically, it was built upon a collaboration between metropolitan and creole elites that evinced many of the conflicts characteristic of old regime French society; ecologically, the sugar islands of the Antilles were rich places subject to declining soil fertility and periodic crises that ruined crops and weakened slave populations; and the markets that the plantations of Saint-Domingue served were frequently interrupted by warfare, which affected every aspect of plantation life, including the possibility of continuous investment and improvement. Planters and administrators were aware of these shortcomings but the demands of global markets, the politics of old regime states, and the patrimonial logic that guided the families who invested in these plantations excluded meaningful reform of the plantation complex, let alone the search for alternatives. Even beyond the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue, planters, administrators, and metropolitan politicians struggled to maintain the plantation complex for the production of tropical export commodities.Less
This book is a micro-level study of one plantation in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti), situated on the Cul de Sac Plain, near Port au Prince. The sugar economy of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue produced profits for planters and merchants, but it was based upon social, political, ecological, and market foundations that rendered it weak and crisis-prone. Socially, it was based upon the importation of forced labor that was the source of profit, but that also limited the incentive for technical innovation and constantly posed the threat of violent revolt; politically, it was built upon a collaboration between metropolitan and creole elites that evinced many of the conflicts characteristic of old regime French society; ecologically, the sugar islands of the Antilles were rich places subject to declining soil fertility and periodic crises that ruined crops and weakened slave populations; and the markets that the plantations of Saint-Domingue served were frequently interrupted by warfare, which affected every aspect of plantation life, including the possibility of continuous investment and improvement. Planters and administrators were aware of these shortcomings but the demands of global markets, the politics of old regime states, and the patrimonial logic that guided the families who invested in these plantations excluded meaningful reform of the plantation complex, let alone the search for alternatives. Even beyond the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue, planters, administrators, and metropolitan politicians struggled to maintain the plantation complex for the production of tropical export commodities.
