18th century
A01=Paul Cheney
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Paul Cheney
automatic-update
breton
capitalism
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTS
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
colonialism
colony
conservation
COP=United States
cultivation
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
economics
empire
environmental destruction
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ferron de la ferronnayses
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
fragility
France
government
haiti
history
labor
Language_English
managers
markets
nobility
nonfiction
overseers
PA=Available
patrimony
planters
political instability
Price_€20 to €50
production
province
PS=Active
rebellion
revolution
saint domingue
slavery
slaves
social conditions
softlaunch
sugar plantation
violence
Product details
- ISBN 9780226679259
- Format: Paperback
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Aug 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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.
Paul Cheney is professor of history at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Revolutionary Commerce: Globalization and the French Monarchy.
