The Colonial Famine Plot: Slavery, Free Trade, and Empire in the French Atlantic, 1763–1791

Summary

Summary: This essay examines the use of famine-plot rhetoric in the course of disputes over free trade in the French Atlantic during the late eighteenth century. Seeking to discredit officially sanctioned trade monopolies, French plantation owners frequently suggested that the control exercised by metropolitan merchants over transatlantic commerce was responsible for food shortages among the enslaved population of the colonies. In reality, the planters themselves bore primary responsibility for malnutrition in the French Caribbean, thanks to their reliance on the slave trade and support for the expansion of plantation agriculture. While proponents of the colonial famine plot accepted that plantation slavery had made it impossible for the resources available in the colonies to sustain the growing enslaved population, they remained committed to the plantation system. In advocating expanded free trade as the best means to ensure the continued growth of the colonies, French planters anticipated a response to the environmental problems caused by colonial expansion that became increasingly prevalent among proponents of European imperialism during the nineteenth century.

On 29 August 1789 Nicholas-Robert de Cocherel warned his fellow deputies in the French National Assembly that the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, which he represented in the Assembly by virtue of his ownership of several lucrative sugar plantations, “is currently devastated by the most cruel of plagues, that of FAMINE”. According to Cocherel, the root cause of this famine was not the encouragement that he and his fellow planters had given to the Atlantic slave trade, which had transported more than a million enslaved Africans to the French colonies over the course of the eighteenth century.