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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.

Sugar plantations --- Capitalism --- Plantation owners --- Plantation overseers --- Overseers, Plantation --- Plantation managers --- Supervisors --- Owners of plantations --- Planters (Persons) --- Landowners --- Slaveholders --- Market economy --- Economics --- Profit --- Capital --- Sugar beet plantations --- Sugarcane plantations --- Plantations --- History --- Haiti --- Ayiti --- Bohio --- Haichi --- Hayti --- Haytian Republic --- Quisqueya --- Repiblik Ayiti --- Repiblik d Ayiti --- Republic of Haiti --- République d'Haïti --- ハイチ --- هايتي --- Гаити --- Gaiti --- Saint-Domingue --- Economic conditions --- Plantations de canne à sucre --- Baie --- Condition économique --- XVIIIe s. -- 1701-1800 --- Haïti --- Guadeloupe --- Ferron de la Ferronnays. --- France. --- Haitian Revolution. --- Saint-Domingue. --- early modern capitalism. --- plantation complex. --- slavery. --- sugar.

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History

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Au XVIIIe siècle, la plaine du Cul-de-Sac à Saint-Domingue, aujourd'hui Haïti, est divisée en une multitude de plantations sucrières, dont l'une se trouve entre les mains de nobles bretons, les Ferron de la Ferronnays. En suivant l'ascension et la chute de cette famille de planteurs sur près de soixante ans, Paul Cheney redonne vie à un monde disparu, celui d'une aristocratie française oeuvrant à sa fortune par-delà les mers, de ses associés jouant de leurs relations et connaissance des lieux, d'esclaves africains sur le travail desquels repose l'ensemble d'un édifice finalement fragile. Car malgré les richesses produites, ces destinées s'inscrivent dans un contexte social, politique et environnemental incertain. Paul Cheney brosse ici un portrait inédit du capitalisme marchand dans le premier empire colonial, un système qui, loin d'être source de progrès, se maintint par une inertie qui devait le mener dans une impasse économique et idéologique.

Plantations de canne à sucre --- Esclavage --- Esclaves --- Conditions sociales --- Ferron de La Ferronnays (Famille) --- République dominicaine --- Sugar plantations --- Capitalism --- Plantation owners --- Plantation overseers --- History --- Haiti --- Economic conditions