Robert D. Taber and Dr. Brett Rushforth, History

The last forty years have seen an unprecedented expansion in the study of African slavery and the impact this “peculiar institution” had on the creation of colonies throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the last twenty years, historians of North America have increasingly examined the development of colonies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as an “Atlantic” phenomenon—that is, as a result of influences from Africa, Europe, and Latin America rather than as a simple outgrowth of the “mother country.” This, in turn, has placed a new emphasis on the role of the Caribbean, where sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations served as the economic engine that drove this trans-Atlantic system. The history of the Caribbean, in many ways, is the history of labor, as owners of plantations did their best to maximize production and profits. Though dominant for the better part of two centuries, African slavery was not the only, or even the first, labor system used on European plantations. My research focused on the pivotal decades of the mid-1600s, when French masters switched from using primarily French-born indentured servants to relying on African slaves.

The poor French came over in much smaller numbers than the poor British did during this same time period. Historians, naturally, proffer several different reasons for this difference. Some historians of the French Empire such as James Pritchard suggest that the French crown discouraged migration to the Caribbean, but this flies in the face of a large body of laws intended to encourage such travel. Specialists of the French Caribbean point to these laws, label them “ineffective,” and then claim them as another example of the weakness of the French crown. A few point to other opportunities available to the down-and-out, including enlisting in the army and moving to Spain.

As the first part of my research, I examined the pro-migration laws. I soon discovered that the French crown was very concerned with increasing the number of white indentured servants living in the Caribbean. The crown intended these servants to form the bulk of the colonial militia in event of British attack or slave rebellion. In order to encourage the down-and-out to come, the royal administration gave servants legal protection against abuse, tried to lower the term of indenture (which was already the lowest in the Caribbean), and stipulated certain levels of food, clothing, and payment that masters had to provide to their servants. At the same time, the crown gave planters more and more power to discipline their slaves as they saw fit. Legally, masters could now exploit slaves more and servants less. Even if the local government only enforced these laws haphazardly, they were published widely enough in the colonies that planters would recognize that servants could be a troublesome investment.

I then traveled, with my advisor, to Martinique, where I examined the correspondence between the royal governors and the crown. From that, I found the concern for increasing immigration extremely prevalent, and that the governors felt that they had to crack down on abuses so as to encourage migration. Looking at the laws the crown passed and the rates of migration, it quickly became evident that these policies proved counter-productive rather than merely ineffective. The French crown, intensely interested in providing a racial balance to their Caribbean colonies, had speeded the shrinking of the white population vis-à-vis the African slaves.

In conjunction with my advisor, I had the opportunity to present this research and my conclusions at the annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society at La Rochelle, France, this past June. My research also qualified me to write the overview of indentured servitude for FactsOnFile’s new Encyclopedia of the Caribbean as well as three short biographical articles. My doctoral dissertation, whose working title is “White Trash in the Caribbean: Poor Whites in the World’s Richest Slave Colony,” expands this work to look at how poor whites interacted with the slave society of colonial Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

References

• James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730, (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18.
• Christian Huetz de Lemps, “Indentured Servants Bound for the French Antilles in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in “To Make America” European Emigration in the Early Modern Period, Ida Altman and James Horn, eds., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press), 172-203. Also, Philip Boucher, “The ‘Frontier Era’ of the French Caribbean, 1620s-1690s,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500-1820, Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy, eds. (New York: Rutledge, 2002).
• Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64, (Vancouver, British Columbia: UBC), 35.