The colony and the company : Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble / Malick W. Ghachem.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ghachem, Malick W. (Malick Walid), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Compagnie des Indes.

Haiti--History--To 1791.

Haiti.

Haiti--Economic conditions--18th century.

Mississippi Bubble, France, 1720.

Physical Description:

xi, 261 pages : illustrations (black and white), map ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"In the early eighteenth century, France turned to its New World colonies to help rescue the monarchy from the wartime debts of Louis XIV. This short-lived scheme ended in the first global stock market crash, known as the Mississippi Bubble. Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was indelibly marked by the crisis, given its centrality in the slave-trading monopoly controlled by the French East Indies Company. Rising prices for enslaved people and devaluation of the Spanish silver supply triggered a diffuse rebellion that broke the company's monopoly and paved the way for what planters conceived as 'free trade.' In The Colony and the Company, Malick Ghachem describes how the crisis that began in financial centers abroad reverberated throughout Haiti. Beginning on the margins of white society before spreading to wealthy planters, the revolt also created political openings for Jesuit missionaries and people of color. The resulting sugar revolution, Ghachem argues, gave rise to an increasingly violent, militarized planter state from which the colony, and later Haiti, would never recover. Ghachem shows that the wealthy planters who co-opted the rebellion were simultaneously locked in a showdown with maroon resistance. The conflict between the planters' militant defense of their prerogatives and maroon rebellion laid the foundations for a brutal history of marginalization and immiseration. Haiti became a full-fledged plantation colony held together by a ruthless form of white supremacy and enslavement, triggering a cycle of escalating violence that led to the Haitian Revolution. Tragically, Haiti's postrevolutionary future remained captive to the imperial sway of money and debt"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Company colony

Colonial system

"Women, negroes, and unknown, unimportant people"

Militant slavery

The company of Jesus

Maroons and the military-planter state.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Ghachem, Malick W. (Malick Walid). Colony and the company.

ISBN:

0691261466

9780691261461

OCLC:

1458997573

Publisher Number:

CIPO000244088