Cul de Sac

This lively microhistory of an eighteenth-century sugar plantation draws on remarkable archival finds to illuminate the lives of landowners and slaves in the most profitable of Europe s Caribbean colonies, Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). The immense open-air workhouse of Saint-Domingue generated phenomenal wealth for French planters, but was also a place notorious for violence, economic volatility, and social fragility. Examining newly discovered records and correspondence from the Ferron de la Ferronnays family, who owned a plantation on Saint-Domingue s Cul de Sac plain, Paul Cheney uncovers a fascinating circuit of relations that tied together Paris, France s western seaboard, and the French colonies. The Cul de Sac of this book s title also refers to the dead end of a peculiar facet of early modern capitalism. This is not, as many historians would expect, a providential story in which the dynamic forces of capitalism cleared the decks for more efficient technologies or organizational forms. Seen from the perspective of one family and its plantation property, French Saint-Domingue is revealed to have been less an example of capitalism s power than a case of degenerate persistence."