03522nam 22005775 450 991016495530332120230626232624.00-226-67925-X9780226079356978022641177410.7208/9780226411774(CKB)3710000001063985(MiAaPQ)EBC4805183(StDuBDS)EDZ0001741141(DE-B1597)523692(OCoLC)972734357(DE-B1597)9780226411774(EXLCZ)99371000000106398520191022d2017 fg engurcnu||||||||rdacontentrdamediardacarrierCul de Sac Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue /Paul CheneyChicago :University of Chicago Press,[2017]©20171 online resource (273 pages) illustrations, mapsPreviously issued in print: 2017.Includes bibliographical references and index.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 --IndexIn 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.Sugar plantationsHaitiCul-de-Sac PlainHistory18th centuryCapitalismHaitiHistory18th centuryPlantation ownersHaitiPlantation overseersHaitiHaitiEconomic conditions18th centuryHaitiHistoryTo 1791HaitiHistoryRevolution, 1791-1804Sugar plantationsHistoryCapitalismHistoryPlantation ownersPlantation overseers338.1/736109729452Cheney Paul887066DE-B1597DE-B1597BOOK9910164955303321Cul de Sac1980917UNINA