1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910493162403321

Autore

Palmer Jennifer L.

Titolo

Intimate Bonds : Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic / / Jennifer L. Palmer

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

0-8122-9306-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (281 pages) : illustrations

Collana

The Early Modern Americas

Disciplina

306.09729

Soggetti

Slavery - France

Gender - France

Electronic books.

France History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- List of Abbrevations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Proximity and Distance in Plantation Society -- Chapter 2. Legitimating Authority -- Chapter 3. Navigating Transatlantic Separations -- Chapter 4. Economies of Race and Gender -- Chapter 5. What’s in a Name? -- Chapter 6. Negotiating Patriarchy -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender. Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form



a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.