1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910164955303321

Autore

Cheney Paul

Titolo

Cul de Sac : Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue / / Paul Cheney

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2017]

©2017

ISBN

0-226-67925-X

9780226079356

9780226411774

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (273 pages) : illustrations, maps

Disciplina

338.1/736109729452

Soggetti

Sugar plantations - Haiti - Cul-de-Sac Plain - History - 18th century

Capitalism - Haiti - History - 18th century

Plantation owners - Haiti

Plantation overseers - Haiti

Haiti Economic conditions 18th century

Haiti History To 1791

Haiti History Revolution, 1791-1804

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2017.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: The Colonial Cul de Sac -- 1. Province and Colony -- 2. Production and Investment -- 3. Humanity and Interest -- 4. War and Profit -- 5. Husband and Wife -- 6. Revolution and Cultivation -- 7. Evacuation and Indemnity -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Sources and Abbreviations -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, a family of Breton nobles, draws on remarkable archival finds to show that despite the wealth such plantations produced, they operated in a context of social, political, and environmental fragility that left them weak and crisis prone. Focusing on correspondence between the



Ferronnayses and their plantation managers, Cul de Sac proposes that the Caribbean plantation system, with its reliance on factory-like production processes and highly integrated markets, was a particularly modern expression of eighteenth-century capitalism. But it rested on a foundation of economic and political traditionalism that stymied growth and adaptation. The result was a system heading toward collapse as planters, facing a series of larger crises in the French empire, vainly attempted to rein in the inherent violence and instability of the slave society they had built. In recovering the lost world of the French Antillean plantation, Cul de Sac ultimately reveals how the capitalism of the plantation complex persisted not as a dynamic source of progress, but from the inertia of a degenerate system headed down an economic and ideological dead end.